Friday, March 23, 2018

Steve Berry on the world-changing must-haves for thrillers

The thought of attending an author’s book tour talk in a restaurant intrigued me. Add that the author was master thriller writer Steve Berry, speaking at one of my favorite Italian restaurants, and well, count me in. Berry’s specialty is thrillers with a historical hook, and his latest is The Bishop’s Pawn, a fictionalized analysis of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. 
It’s both the most immediately pertinent one, debuting in this 50th anniversary year of King’s murder, and the hardest for Berry to write, “because it’s history I remember.” 
Those elements of personal remembrance may have led Berry to alter his long-standing habit of writing books in the third person. For the first time ever, in The Bishop’s Pawn, long-time Berry sleuth Cotton Malone speaks in the first person, in his own right.
Each book, Berry told his audience this week at Maggiano’s restaurant in Dallas’s NorthPark Center, must possess his two “must-haves: an ‘ooh’ factor and a ‘so-what’ factor.” The “ooh” is the hook. The “so-what” is the way that historical event changed the world.
Berry & wife Elizabeth
The nugget of the story in The Bishop’s Pawn – the possibility of a botched coverup of the assassination due to the conflict between King and then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover -- had come to Berry about a decade ago and wouldn’t let him, Other layers accrued around the story during the 18 months – and the reading of the hundreds of books – that are Berry’s normal research schedule for each book. 
“I can’t make up (the history),” Berry said. “It has to be real.”
And the more he read – and watched and listened to the video of King’s last, iconic “I've been to the mountaintop” speech, given the night before his death, the more convinced he became that King had a presentiment of the end.
“Listen to it all,” Berry told his audience, noting that King had tried to avoid speaking because he was ill essentially collapsed after delivering one of his most famous addresses. “The speech is about mortality. Every word sounds like a man who knew he was about to die.
“I was very respectful of King and his message. (But) everything went wrong for him in the last year of his life,” Berry said, citing the apparent failure of the message of nonviolence in the face of the Vietnam War and increasing racial unrest, personal difficulties, and the ongoing Machiavellian presence of Hoover and his campaign of persecution against King.
Following King’s death, Hoover would make the decision that there had been no conspiracy, and that a drifter named James Earl Ray was the sole killer.
In the present day, when FBI directors seemingly serve only at the whim of a president, it becomes difficult to fathom the degree of power Hoover held. Originally appointed as director of the FBI’s predecessor organization in the 1920’s, Hoover helped found the FBI in the 1930’s and remained in control until his death in 1972. 
Although horrifying allegations against Hoover have surfaced since then, many can never be proven because Hoover’s private secretary destroyed his secret files after his death.
(Since Hoover’s death, law changes now limit the time an FBI director can serve.)
But to return to Berry’s conspiracy theory. Consider, Berry asked his audience, that James Earl Ray was not a trained killer, but supposedly managed with a single bullet fired from a rooming house window, managed to kill King. “What are the odds?”
In addition, the recovered bullet was too fragmented to be matched to Ray’s rifle. And uncertainty that he was even in the house from which the bullet was supposed to have been fired. And Ray’s own penchant for confessing and endlessly recanting that confession, “the perfect guy to (pin) a murder on, because you couldn’t believe anything he said.”
OK, an audience member asked, then who was involved in Berry’s supposed conspiracy against Martin Luther King?
“Can’t tell you,” Berry said with a smile, “because that would give away the book.”
(Later, I hope to provide a review of The Bishop’s Pawn – again, without spoilers – as well as another intriguing offer from Berry, and nuggets about his next book. And even the book after that . . . .)

No comments:

Post a Comment