***
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,” he told his audience.
That element of personal remembrance 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 his own right, in first person.
But Berry’s switch from third-person to first-person narration
didn’t alter his two must-haves for writing historical thrillers: an “ooh”
factor and a “so-what” factor. The “ooh” factor is the book’s hook, its defining
historical event. The “so-what” factor is the way that historical event changed
the world.
The crux 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 – occurred
to Berry about a decade ago. Other layers accrued around the story during the
18 months – and the reading of 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.”
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 Berry became that King had a presentiment of the end.
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| Steve Berry & wife Elizabeth |
“Listen to it all,” Berry said, noting that King had initially
tried to avoid speaking because he was ill, essentially having collapsed after
delivering address. “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 King’s message of nonviolence in the face of the Vietnam
War, and the increasing racial unrest, personal difficulties, and Hoover’s
ongoing campaign of persecution.
Following King’s death, Hoover would announce 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’s difficult to fathom the power Hoover held.
Originally appointed as director of the FBI’s predecessor organization in the
1920’s, Hoover helped found the FBI in the following decade. He remained in
control of the organization until his death in 1972.
Horrifying allegations against Hoover have surfaced since, many
rendered unprovable due to his private secretary’s destruction of Hoover’s secret
files.
(Since Hoover’s death, law changes now limit the time an FBI
director may serve.)
But to return to Berry’s conspiracy theory. Consider, he said,
that James Earl Ray, although untrained, supposedly managed to kill King with a
single bullet fired from a rooming house window. “What are the odds?”
Added to the improbable display of marksmanship is the inability
to match the badly-fragmented bullet to Ray’s rifle, as well as uncertainty
that he was even in the house from which the bullet was supposedly fired. And then
there’s Ray’s penchant for both confessing to the killing and endlessly
recanting that confession, making him “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 King?
“Can’t tell you,” Berry said with a smile, “because that would
give away the book.”
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