In his eight and a half years at “The Palm Beach Post,” Paul Reid was known as one of its most creative writers.

His loose portfolio took him around the county as the food critic, as well as around the world - to Iraq to cover Desert Storm, for example. The next stage of Reid’s life derived from a story he wrote for the “Post” - a reunion of William Manchester’s World War II buddies that evolved into a friendship with the author himself.

Out of that friendship grew something more - after rejecting more experienced, higher profile writers, Manchester delegated Reid with the job of helping him finish the final, long-awaited volume of his “Last Lion” biographical trilogy on Winston Churchill. By then, Manchester was playing out an increasingly short string, bedevilled first by writer’s block and what seems to have been undiagnosed depression, then by failing health. Months later, Manchester was dead.

In June 2004, Reid and his wife sold their house in West Palm Beach and moved to a small town in North Carolina to write the book.

“The Florida real estate market was so overheated we couldn’t make a lateral move,” remembers Reid. “Part of us wanted to go back to New England” - Reid is from Massachusetts - “but we had become spoiled by Florida weather. I’ve always loved the mountains, so we took two long drives throughout the region. The North Carolina mountains remind us of New Hampshire, without the horrific winters.”

As he settled into his mission, problems appeared. Reid had never written a book before, and Manchester had done little work on the third volume. Reid had to figure out how to complete one of the most widely read serial biographies of the post-war era, then do it, and it had to be done on the same level as the previous two volumes or it would all come crashing down.

It took eight years, but the book — “The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965” is finished, all 1,000-plus pages of it. The result has earned mainly laudatory reviews, and debuted at number 15 on “The New York Times” bestseller list.

The major problem came with a logistical plan on the part of Reid and publisher Little, Brown that could only be characterized as mutual hubris. Reid thought he could complete the book in two to three years, which might - might - have been possible for Manchester, if only because of his command of the documents. For an experienced historian burdened by a standing start, it would take five to six years, and for Reid, it took eight, which in turn meant that his advance fell far short of what he needed. As the years rolled by, Reid’s advance slowly disappeared, as did his personal cash cushion. At the moment, he’s deep in credit card debt.

“Around 2007,” says Reid, “I realized that if Manchester couldn’t finish it in 15 years, how could I finish it in two or three? Little, Brown was good, they were patient. We thought the advance, which was in the neighborhood of a couple of years salary at the ‘Post,’ would carry us through a couple of years. Then we sold our house, moved here, bought a less expensive house. So at that point we have a couple of years worth of money in the bank, a couple more years worth of money from equity in the house, and the 401-K is OK.

“At about year five or six, the money is going fast. It cost $18,000 a year for private health insurance for my wife and I, so we dropped the health insurance. Then the savings started going, and friends and relatives stepped up to the plate, and after a lifetime of not using credit cards, we’re using them now. After eight years, my family, including our grown kids - everyone has made a sacrifice. There were days I wondered if I could rightfully do this.”

To write his version of Churchill, Reid fell back on his years in journalism. “I had to think in terms of scenes, even though many of them took place simultaneously, or nearly so. The fall of Tobruk was a week after the battle of Midway. So I thought in terms of feature stories. Features have characters, scenes, sometimes they have desperation. They transition. That kept me from feeling overwhelmed. The technique was similar. I don’t want to say that the comparison with journalism ends there, but in both cases you want to tell a story and flesh out the characters. That was my saving grace.”

An ancillary problem was the profusion of other Churchill books that have been published in the 24 years since Manchester’s last volume.

“Manchester sold a lot of books because he was such a good storyteller,” says Reid. “The other books have compartmentalized Churchill’s life. Max Hastings wrote ‘Winston’s War,’ there was a recent book about his drinking, clothing and eating. Peter Clarke just wrote a book about his writing career. Carlo D’Este wrote a beautiful military biography. People are carving swaths out of the life. And my job was to encompass all that. The documents are all out there, and they’ve all been out there. The facts are just subject to different interpretations.”

After four years, Little Brown called in their retired senior editor William Phillips to guide the book home. “Bill Phillips is the perfect editor for just about any project,” says Geoff Shandler, editor in chief of Little, Brown. “He has decades of experience editing some of the most ambitious and important nonfiction ever published. And especially relevant in this case, he had the time to devote to such an ambitious, sensitive undertaking. He had been at Little, Brown when the earlier volumes were published, so had an institutional memory of their birth and creation, but much more than that, there was the recognition that this was going to be a monumental undertaking and that only a handful of editors in the world would be qualified.”

Phillips and Reid jointly decided not to attempt to mimic Manchester’s style, which could be grandly eloquent if you liked it, pompous if you didn’t. Reid’s book is written in a far more transparent manner than Manchester’s, in which the author doesn’t continually cue you about what to think and feel.

“Drawing back the style was a conscious decision, and it wasn’t made overnight,” says Reid. “Bill Manchester came out of the mid 20th century and those biographers and historians - Stephen Ambrose, Cornelius Ryan, Manchester - they saw things in black hats and white hats, and you knew whose side they were on. That style was popular a half-century ago. And at a certain point, Bill Phillips said, ‘We want a 21st century voice.’ What he meant was not to try those Manchesterian techniques. It’s funny to see a lay reviewer say that I’ve approached the Manchester technique, but that’s not what we were going for. My idea was, ‘Would it work around a campfire? Would it be a good story, well told?’”

Reid believes that Manchester was going to wrap up the trilogy with VE day. “He left very few notes, but I believe that his plan was to get to VE day, do a 10 or 15 page riff on the Iron Curtain speech, the second premiership, the beautiful valedictory speech, and finish it.”

But Little, Brown wanted to include the years to Churchill’s death in 1965. Reid thinks readers might very well have wanted it too, even though the last 20 years of Churchill’s life were often sad and almost clinically anti-climactic - how could they not be? “There was a sense of pathos in Churchill’s quest for summit meetings, and what he thought of mutually assured destruction. The old man was fading and going down, but he saw what Eisenhower and the Politburo didn’t see - that with hydrogen bombs, everybody loses. You couldn’t fight that war.”

Reid’s overview of his subject’s character shifted as he worked on the book.

“When you start working on him, the notions that you might have had are altered, and you realize your responsibility was to get it right. I thought of Churchill as the V for victory sign and the beautiful speeches, but once you get into the weeds, the tactics, the day to day, my job was to accurately convey all that to the reader. He was complex, he was sometimes not nice, he was impetuous, brilliant, stubborn. And conveying that was what Manchester did so well within his style, and what I’m trying to do in a different style.”

Just like an author, Reid is pleased by good reviews, displeased by less than good reviews. He seems more confused than angered by a strange article in “The New York Times Magazine” studded with quotes from Phillips that portrayed him as an editorial Moses leading Reid out of his wanderings in the biographical desert. Little Brown’s Shandler dismisses the internal wranglings. “The book’s rave reviews are proof that the partnership between Bill and Paul worked perfectly.”

Manchester’s first two volumes sold about 700,000 copies total, but that was a long time ago, in a far different era. The most recent volume of Robert Caro’s epic saga on the life of Lyndon Johnson has sold slightly more than 30,000 copies in hardcover - the achievement is titanic, but sales are cumulative rather than immediate. In its first week on sale, the new Churchill volume sold just over 4,000 copies. Earning out the advance paid to Reid, not to mention the monies paid to Manchester while he was alive, could take a long time.

For the future, the 63-year-old Reid has a vague idea for another book that has nothing to do with World War II or military history. As for the debts he’s incurred while waiting for the royalties to drift in, “I’d really like to teach at the undergraduate level. I’d enjoy that and that would allow me to think in terms of another book. And I don’t put myself forward as an editor, but I learned a lot from Bill Phillips.

“I’d like to stay in the business. But look at popular historians; they’re all associated with magazines, or colleges. But I couldn’t have done the book any other way than I did. I couldn’t have worked part time or handled two or three classes and done it. It had to be seven days a week for eight years.

“It took a toll. At the beginning, I told Bill Manchester, ‘I won’t let you down,’ I told Little, Brown ‘I won’t let you down,’ and I told myself I wouldn’t let Churchill down. And in the end I can say that all that came to pass.”