About Liam McCurry
Liam McCurry, Author
Terminal Policy & The Raker Chronicles
by Dennis Taylor, Monterey Herald
A whole bunch of people get rubbed out in Terminal Policy, a thriller that blends insurance-industry corruption and international terrorism into an intoxicating 500-page cocktail of torture and death, intrigue and romance, and a few potent shots of Irish whiskey.
Why Liam McCurry waited almost 85 years to become a first-time novelist is a question with a simple explanation: he was busy! To mention only a few of his incarnations, McCurry has been a U.S. Marine, a psychologist, a land developer, a sportscaster (he was the voice of the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State football in the 1960s), a computer consultant, a classical pianist, a TV weatherman, and—he admits with some reluctance—an insurance salesman.
“We were selling insurance to ranchers in New Mexico, where there’s a lot of open land,” he says. “We told them they could make a lot of money by investing a little bit in the insurance game, and we took care of those investments. We never stepped across the line, legally, but I think we crowded it. So, yeah, I was one of the bad guys for a while, and I felt very guilty about it.”
The fact that insurance companies are in the headlines nowadays, suspected of valuing profit margins above the needs of their customers, is merely serendipity, McCurry says. In fact, one reason it took about 12 years to finish Terminal Policy, he explains, is that “reality kept interfering with my damn novel. History kept changing. People came into power and went out of power. Russia suddenly wasn’t the same Russia it was before. I had to keep re-doing and re-writing.”
Indeed, he claims his characters often did it for him. McCurry says he got to know the major players in his book so well that it often seemed like they were writing the story on their own. He was just the typist.
McCurry says he enjoyed researching various things for his novel—discovering, for example, what the weather probably would be at a certain time of year in a specific location—but he says he and his wife Margie have personally walked the streets of every exotic venue in the novel. Most of the restaurants, bars, hotels, shops and people in the book are based on real life, too.
“I’ve had to apologize to some people, saying, ‘You’re in my book, but your name’s different,’” he explains. “I changed all of the names to protect the guilty.”
McCurry was born in Denton, Texas, but says his upbringing was gypsy-like. He experienced city living and country living in equal parts, and spent much of his youth dreaming of becoming a United States Marine. He made that a reality on Aug. 14, 1942, enlisting at age 17. His military career took him to the battle of Guadalcanal during World War II, and he also saw action during the Korean War.
“The Marines shaped me about as much as I could handle,” he says with a laugh. “I never met a Drill Instructor I liked when I started, and I never met one I disliked by the time I got out. You know what DIs do? They keep you alive later.”
The Marine Corps bond paid dividends when a mutual friend facilitated an introduction to Maria Dennison, another former Marine who now is founder and president of Ashleigh Publishing in St. Mary’s, Kansas.
“His style of writing really intrigued me,” Dennison says, “but the bigger factor, I think, was the way he spoke to me. We had an instant rapport, and between that and the quality of his writing, I decided I was going to do whatever it took to make his dream a reality.” Dennison says she’ll anxiously await his second novel, tentatively entitled The Ulster Ultimatum which he’s already outlined, and his third one, which he says is in the planning stages.
To schedule a book signing with Liam McCurry, contact Thriller Publications by phone at 1-800-763-7851, or e-mail liamthriller@gmail.com
