Ever heard the phrase, “Write what you know?” My guest today epitomizes that philosophy. Author Martin Roy Hills returns as my guest on Help From My Friends Friday. Interview with Author Martin Roy Hill | Author Donnell Ann Bell
Martin has been an invaluable resource on Crimescenewriter. He’s also a popular instructor for online classes such as Search and Rescue for major writing organizations. Whether he’s writing standalone thrillers or series, his novels are painstakingly accurate and outstanding. You might say he’s been there. Please welcome Martin Roy Hill. ~ Donnell
The Day I Crossed a Bridge and Changed My Life
By: Martin Roy Hill
Author Martin Roy Hill
Martin Roy Hill during active duty
Fifty years ago this month, I crossed a short bridge and forever changed my life.
The bridge led across an estuary onto an island in San Francisco Bay then known as Government Island and the U.S. Coast Guard’s West Coast recruit training center. Three months later, I left the island a newly minted seaman apprentice not realizing it would be the beginning of a 27-year career in three branches of the military reserves in which I would go from seaman recruit to army major, and which would have a substantial impact on my writing career.
Within a few months of completing boot camp, I would be standing watch on the flying bridge of a Coast Guard cutter sailing the North Atlantic and witnessing my first sunrise at sea—a sight that would cement my love of the ocean and ships, a topic I repeatedly return to in my writing.
It was also the beginning of numerous adventures. In that one patrol alone, we shadowed a Soviet spy ship, encountered heavy seas that nearly tossed me overboard, and avoided a disastrous mid-ocean collision when, in heavy fog, I detected the sound of an approaching ship our malfunctioning radar didn’t see and alerted the bridge in time to take evasive action.
I served 13 years on reserve crews in the Coast Guard in two separate stints separated by a stint in the Naval Reserve and 
several years of nonservice. On another Coast Guard ship, I took part in chasing smugglers off the U.S. northwest coast and the rescue of a storm-damaged cargo ship threatening to sink. I commanded a rescue boat in the Great Lakes and experienced the vicious storms from the north the same year one of those storms sank the SS Edmund Fitzgerald with all hands, a tragedy memorialized in Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad of the same name.
In the ‘90s, I took part in anti-smuggling operations along the U.S.-Mexico maritime boundary, small boat search-and-rescue (SAR) missions, and maritime homeland security operations in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Over those 13 years, I took part in hundreds of small boat rescues, medical rescues, and was credited in assisting in saving four lives.
One of the greatest impacts the Coast Guard had on my life was training me as an emergency medical technician. That training eventually led me to become a medic with the local sheriff’s wilderness SAR team and a federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team. After my short stint of active duty after 9/11, I left my career in journalism to become a Navy research analyst in combat casualty care. That led to a commission in the California Guard as a medical service corps officer training 68W combat medics, from which I eventually retired as a major.
When I began writing short stories and novels, I turned to my Coast Guard experience and the love of the sea and all things nautical it gave me. “Something Far Away,” a short story originally published by Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, was inspired in part by my experience when, as Navy reservist, I was attached to a Coast Guard patrol cutter as a liaison radioman during war games and became involved in the capture of the Oregon Beaver, a fishing trawler carrying 50 tons of illegal drugs—one of the largest drug busts in history up to that time.
I originally created my character NCIS Special Agent Linus Schag for a short story called “Destroyer Turns,” which was also published by Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine in the mid-1990s. I created the character to combine two interests, my love of ships and boats and my love of mysteries.
Inspiration for the first Schag novel, The Killing Depths—a murder mystery set aboard a submarine on a covert mission—came from what I witnessed as the Coast Guard integrated women aboard its ships.
A key scene in my second Schag novel, The Butcher’s Bill, in which Schag has to escape from an oil supertanker before it explodes, was inspired by my memories of, as a Coastguardsman, walking among the ruins of the SS Sansinena, an oil tanker that blew up in Los Angeles Harbor in the 1970s.
The third Schag novel, Upriver, in which Schag experiences the horrors of war traveling up Iraq’s Tigris River in a Navy riverine warfare patrol boat, was inspired by war games I took part in while serving in a Naval Reserve counter-insurgency unit.
The inspiration behind my novels Polar Melt and Chimera Island, which feature a special Coast Guard team whose mission is to investigate maritime events of “high strangeness” is obvious. From that first sunrise at sea, I have continued to marvel at and revel in the mysteries of the sea, a part of the Earth we know less about than we know about the surface of the moon and Mars. It is, after all, the most mysterious place on Earth. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “Would you learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers, comprehend its mystery!”
The Day I Crossed A Bridge and Forever Changed my Life originally ran on MARTIN ROY HILL
About the Book:
Codename Parsifal (now available for preorder) Amazon.com: Codename Parsifal: A WWII Thriller eBook : Hill, Martin Roy: Kindle Store
The Spear of Destiny. The Roman Legionnaire’s lance that pierced Christ’s body as he hung on the cross.
Legend claims whomever possesses it will become a great conqueror. But if they lose it, they will lose everything—including their lives.
Shortly before WWII, Hitler stole the spear from a museum in Vienna. In the last weeks of the European war, he lost it. General George Patton orders an American OSS team to find the spear and recover it. Unknown to the Americans, both the Russians and the Germans have also sent commando teams to retrieve it.
In the dying embers of Europe’s largest conflagration, the three teams are on a collision course that will lead them to one of the evilest places on earth—the ideological heart of the Nazi SS.
Inspired by historical events.
About the Author:
Martin Roy Hill is the author of the Linus Schag, NCIS, thrillers, the Peter Brandt thrillers, DUTY: Suspense and Mystery Stories from the Cold War and Beyond, Polar Melt: A Novel, and EDEN: A Sci-Fi Novella. His latest Linus Schag thriller, The Butcher’s Bill, received the Best Mystery/Suspense Novel of 2017 from the Best Independent Book Awards, the Clue Award for Best Suspense Thriller, the Silver Medal for Thrillers from the Readers Favorite Book Awards, and the award for Adult Fiction from the California Author Project. His latest Peter Brandt mystery, The Fourth Rising, was named Best Mystery of 2020 by the Best Independent Books Awards, 2020 Best Crime Thriller by the American Fiction Awards, and the 2020 Clue Award for Best Suspense Thriller by the Chanticleer International Book Awards.
All books are available in print editions from all popular book retailers.
Martin, thank you for being my guest again, and sharing this story with readers. When I think of you, I think of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. What opportunities you received in the USCG!
Thank you, Donnell, for the opportunity to talk to your readers.
Loved the interview! Just bought The Fourth Rising. 🙂
You will love it, thought provoking as well!
I hope you enjoy it, Patricia!
Great post! I didn’t need a new author to read, but I’m hooked. Going to look for some of your books.
Exciting and informative, Pat. Thanks for stopping by!
Thank you! I hope you enjoy them!
From the Coast Guard through your other experiences shaped a life of adventure and learning. I’m looking forward to becoming one of your readers. Donnell, thanks for bringing Martin to your audience.
Martin, first, thank you for your service to our country. Your comment that crossing a bridge changed your life was simultaneously metaphorical and literal. Thanks for sharing your successful and interesting career. Bailey Herrington