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 |
“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