THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION IN PRINT: THE LONDON LIBRARY ESSAY

Note: I wrote this essay for the current issue of The London Library magazine (number 22,Winter 2013), which is not generally available, so I offer it here, with some small changes. The original issue is available at londonlibrary.co.uk

THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AT FIFTY: STILL HAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

If you are of a certain age, you will remember. It was 50 years ago, 22 November 1963 and, with respect to Philip Larkin, a moment more influential than the Beatles’ first hit. We were sent home from school that Friday afternoon; President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been killed in Dallas. We watched Sunday’s live television news coverage as Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, was gunned down by Jack Ruby. Life magazine declared Oswald guilty, its cover showing him posed with rifle and Marxist pamphlets. JFK’s Camelot, the 1,000 days of the New Frontier, the ‘best and brightest’ in his service, the beautiful wife and children, had been struck down by a misfit would-be communist defector. Everything seemed open and shut.

 

The commission appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren endorsed that simple explanation. But rather than calming the nation, the Warren Report raised more questions than it answered. Over the past half-century, the debate has become a mire of investigation, speculation and disinformation, with more than a thousand books written on the subject, some utterly bizarre. Were shots fired from an umbrella? By a gunman from a nearby manhole? By a Secret Service agent? Are some of the crackpot theories published deliberately, to discredit serious research? In the movie JFK, the director Oliver Stone put Winston Churchill's words into the mouth Joe Pesci, playing David Ferrie, the bizarre pilot who was likely part of an assassination conspiracy: 'It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.'

 

The literature of the Kennedy assassination has appeared in three waves, each reflecting the tenor of its times. The first was a reaction to the Warren Report of 1964. The second was inspired by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigation, begun by the US House of Representatives in 1976.. The third was prompted by Stone's film, released in 1991. Now, the fiftieth anniversary of the killing has inevitably prompted more writing, including a great deal of material published electronically. Much of it is simply rehashing the work of others, sometimes indiscriminately; approach it with care.

The Library's collection of assassination material is limited, though the official version is well represented. The US government printing of the Subject Index to the Warren Report and hearings & exhibits (New York 1966) would be a difficult and frustrating place to start especially without Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact  (1967), which is not in the collection, but is based on her cataloguing the evidence buried, un-indexed, within the Report's 26-volume appendix. Meagher's title reflects the reaction of that first wave of books to the Warren Report, the two most important being Mark Lane's Rush To Judgment (1966) and Harold Weisberg's Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report (1965). Lane was a lawyer appalled by the Dallas investigation; he wrote an article about it and ended up being hired by Oswald's mother Marguerite to represent her dead son. Weisberg was a former Congressional researcher who kept chickens on his Maryland farm, and whenever his work was derided he would be called a 'chicken farmer'. A Haverford College professor, Josiah Thompson, spent so long analysing the forensic evidence for his groundbreaking Six Seconds In Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination (1967) that he gave up academe, and became a private detective.

The first researchers were described as 'critics' because they were really investigating the anomalies and questions left unanswered by the Warren Report, which seemed to be designed to validate the theory of the lone, crazed assassin, Oswald, firing three shots from the Texas School Book Depository. Testimony that didn't fit that scenario was dismissed, overlooked or discounted – from the dozens who rushed up the grassy knoll, from where they were convinced shots had been fired, to Texas Governor John Connally, seated in front of Kennedy, who insisted he and the President  were hit with separate bullets, which would invalidate the ‘magic-bullet' premise, of one shot that went through both Kennedy and Connolly and caused multiple wounds in both men, before the second, fatal bullet also fired by Oswald, from behind, though Kennedy's head was snapped backwards forcefully by its impact. Then there was the enigma of Oswald himself, the Marxist Marine with Intelligence training, who defected to the Soviet Union and returned with a Russian wife at the height of the cold war without attracting the negative attention of the US government. Oswald showed an uncanny ability to turn up in two places at once, and to agitate on behalf of communism and Cuba, as he did publicly in New Orleans, while surrounding himself with fervent anti-communists. The Warren Commission simply ignored the mafia, who had ample reason to want Kennedy dead; Jack Ruby’s mob connections, which went back to his childhood, were swept aside, and the possibility he knew Oswald before he assassinated him was yet another unexamined loose end. Ruby died in jail, before telling what he called the real story; in his two-volume work, Forgive My Grief (1966–7), Penn Jones, editor of a local paper outside Dallas, catalogued the unusual number of suspicious deaths of assassination witnesses. It was fertile ground for the roots of conspiracy.

The Warren Report was accepted immediately by the mainstream media; and when the word conspiracy is suggested, its proponents can be held to an impossible standard. Those who doubt Lee Harvey Oswald was the gunman, or acted alone, are first dismissed as crackpots, then expected to defend every crackpot theory of the assassination—and there are dozens of them—as well as every other conspiracy theory extant. The theorem appears to be, if any conspiracy can be shown to be absurd, all are invalid. Meanwhile, even as various 'official versions' of other major world events are proven one after the other to be lies, a long line which proceeds through real conspiracies such as Watergate to Iran-Contra to Saddam's WMDs to illegal surveillance, each is similarly dismissed as a well-intentioned mistake, an unfortunate coincidence, or an exaggerated misunderstanding, this requiring each next official version to be accepted at face value.

In what now seems an instinctive recognition of this burden of proof anomaly, early fictions approached Kennedy's murder metaphorically: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Loren Singer's The Parallax View (1970), and Winter Kills (1974) by Richard Condon, author of the The Manchurian Candidate (1959), whose stand-in for Kennedy is assassinated on the orders of his mob-connected father. In fact, the idea of a conspiracy was nothing new: a Kennedy-like President had been overthrown by a military coup in the 1962 novel Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. Ironically, the movie of the book was made with Kennedy's co-operation, overriding protests from the Pentagon; it would not be released until 1964.

The assassination has been examined in court only once, when New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison prosecuted a local businessman, Clay Shaw, director of the International Trade Mart, as part of a conspiracy to kill the President. Garrison got involved when he investigated Oswald's time in New Orleans.  His investigation received no co-operation from federal authorities and was undermined actively by some of them. His media portrayal was so negative he received, in a landmark court decision, a half-hour right of reply on national television. A similarly negative depiction, however, dominates novelist and playwright James Kirkwood's book American Grotesque (1970), which cast the trial as a persecution of Shaw because he was gay.

But Garrison did manage to show the Zapruder film in court. Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the assassination was purchased by Life magazine immediately after the killing, and just as promptly locked away. When Life printed stills from the film, frame 313, showing the impact of the fatal shot on Kennedy, was included out of sequence, making it appear that Kennedy's head was driven forward, not back, by the impact. A similar honest mistake occurred when the stills were reprinted in the Warren Report. To anyone viewing the film it is obvious that the fatal shot forced Kennedy's head backwards violently, and frame 313 shows the impact spray at the front of the head, while the supposed point of entry in the back remains untouched. The best early work on the Zapruder film was done by Robert Groden, whose two illustrated volumes, The Killing of A President (1993) and The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald (1995) remain valuable reference works.

By the early 1970s, despite polls already showing a majority of Americans doubted the Warren Report, conspiracy theories might well have been forgotten were it not for Richard Nixon (who was in Dallas himself on the day of the assassination) and the Watergate scandal. In the wake of this, three separate government investigations probed America’s intelligence services; one of them, the House of Representatives’ Pike Report, included the revelation, as shocking in 1975 as it was again this year, that the National Security Agency was spying unlawfully on the communications of American citizens. The House refused to issue this damning report; it was leaked to the reporter Daniel Schorr and published in The Village Voice. But rising distrust of government prompted Congress to form the HSCA, and a second wave of assassination literature, which studied conspiracy on a wider level, followed. Key books were Robert Sam Anson's They've Killed the President: The Search for the Murderers of John F. Kennedy (1975); Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate (1977); and Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from Dallas to Today (1976), a collection of essays edited by Harvey Yazijian and future Clinton aide Sid Blumenthal. An important later addition on the same theme was Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), which now suffers from the profligate use of the term 'deep state' by all sorts of crankpots for all sorts of reasons.

 

The HSCA concluded the 'likelihood' of a Kennedy conspiracy, but was notably reluctant to blame anyone but the Mafia, as detailed in The Plot to Kill the President (1981) by HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey and Life journalist Richard N. Billings, one of the men who had bought the Zapruder film. Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi detailed the derailing of other avenues of HSCA’s investigations, and of its original chief counsel, Richard A. Sprague, in The Last Investigation (1993); Fonzi attributed Sprague's removal to his insistence on establishing and investigating the involvement of the intelligence community in the assassination. The HSCA hearings prompted more suspicious deaths, most notably mobsters Sam Giancana, killed before he could testify, and  Johnny Roselli, found floating in an oil drum in Miami’s Dumfoundling Bay the day before he was due to make his second appearance before the committee.

 

Oswald’s interface with the intelligence community features in the two best novels written about the assassination. Often labelled 'the American Le Carré', Charles McCarry was a former spy, and his Tears of Autumn (1975) links the killing to the CIA-backed assassination of South Vietnam's President Diem, while Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) shows a typically obsessive DeLillo protagonist endlessly researching the ultimately unknowable:  “Think of two parallel lines … One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.”

The recently published new edition of Not In Your Lifetime (2013, originally 1998) by Anthony Summers, began life as Conspiracy, published in 1980. It was the best single-volume study to date, a compendium bolstered by prodigious original research, and has gone through five updates, including as: The Kennedy Conspiracy  (1989). Summers has streamlined his theories over the years, but still suggests that Kennedy's killers were a mix of the Mafia, disaffected CIA agents and Cuban exiles. All three groups had reasons to want Kennedy out of the way, interests which coalesced around Cuba, where the mob has lost its hugely profitable casinos and whorehouses, while the CIA and Cuban exiles wanting to eliminate the communist Castro felt betrayed by Kennedy in the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The official investigations in the 1970s revealed that the CIA and Mafia had indeed worked together, not least to assainate Castro. Even Lyndon Johnson had complained about the 'goddamn Murder Incorporated' the CIA was running in Latin America. Summers suggested that Murder Inc. had come home.

That view of conspiracy was somewhat at odds with those who suggested the assassination was, in effect, a coup sponsored by the military and the CIA. David Lifton's Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1981; updated 1988) examined JFK's autopsy, not carried out by forensic specialists at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, but by military doctors at Bethesda Naval Station, and concluded not only that evidence was faked, but that there were two separate coffins shipped from Dallas to Bethesda. The alleged motive, detailed best in John Newman's JFK and Vietnam (1992) and Oswald and the CIA (1995), was the military's fury at Kennedy's reluctance to pursue the Vietnam War and his willingness to sign a nuclear treaty with the Soviets. Such a conspiracy would have required organisation high up in the military command, though of course we cannot overlook many actions which might be attributable to the post-facto tendency of bureaucracies like the CIA and FBI to cover up rather than reveal their own mistakes or embarrassing secrets. The cover-up can often take the form of conspiracy itself.

Newman was an adviser to Oliver Stone on JFK, which sparked the third wave of assassination literature. Based on Garrison’s experiences, with Kevin Costner playing the DA and Garrison in an ironic cameo as Earl Warren, the movie began attracting mainstream denunciation even before filming was finished. Stone brought the two conspiracy strands together: on the ground the mix of oddballs, former spooks, Cuban exiles and mobsters suggested by earlier research, and behind the scenes the military coup which is revealed to Garrison by the mysterious 'Colonel X'. ‘X’ was based on Fletcher Prouty, a former Air Force intelligence liaison to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and author of two books, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World  (1973) and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (1992).  

 

Despite his dismissal by the media, JFK: The Book of the Film (1991) by Stone and Zachary Sklar is a remarkably balanced volume that refutes accusations of the filmmakers’ ignorance of history. There are many reasons to disagree with some of its theories, but the impact of the film forced the passage of the JFK Records Act (1992), which released a mass of previously classified documents to researchers, simultaneously providing a wealth of new information, and more layers of contradiction and confusion.

The Establishment response to the film was Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), a prosecutor's selective brief against Oswald and in defence of the Warren Report, which was highly publicised and generous praised in the mainstream, who ignored widespread criticisms of its flaws, most notably from the irascible Weisberg, who published Case Open the following year. Even Norman Mailer called Posner only 'intermittently reliable', but nonetheless used Case Closed as the basis for his biography Oswald's Tale (1995). For Mailer, Lee's unhappy marriage to the Russian beauty Marina saw him shoot Kennedy in a fit of frustrated jealous envy; the handsome President who had what Oswald was denied by his own wife. In 2007, former Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi published Reclaiming History, a 1,612-page work, with footnotes on CD, which recapitulated Case Closed  but also added frequent attacks on the more absurd conspiracy theories, as well as ad hominem denigrations of many of the more serious Warren critics. Bugliosi also produced a condensed version of his book, Four Days In November (2007) which gives his version of the assassination in narrative form, and served as the basis for the2013 film Parkland.

The most significant new fiction came from James Ellroy, chronicler of America's dark underbelly. Ellroy never sees America as innocent; looking at JFK’s presidency he said the 'real trinity of Camelot was look good, kick ass, get laid'. His conspiracy, as laid out in The Cold Six Thousand (2001), oozes with the sleazy reality of mobsters, ex-intelligence agents, Howard Hughes and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. A decade later, Stephen King's 11-22-63 (2012) dismissed doubters of the official verdict as being unable to accept Kennedy's death as an act of random absurdity. Like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, King sent a Maine schoolteacher back in time to stop Oswald. The time-travel story is better than the Oswald aspect, but he presents a brief but powerful imagining of the butterfly effect of Kennedy's survival in an alternate universe, where small acts have unforeseen consequences. King concludes: ‘It was almost certainly Oswald. You've heard of Occam's Razor, haven't you? … all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.'

But what is simple about Oswald? His portrait as detailed by Warren, Posner, Mailer, Bugliosi and King is itself the most convincing proof that he was uniquely qualified to become someone's perfect patsy. Ray and Mary LaFontaine's Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination (1996) makes a strong case for Oswald as a failed government informer, ripe for the set-up. And, in 2008, James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters put forward the strongest case yet for a conspiracy, including detailing an earlier, similar plot derailed only by the President having cancelled a trip to Chicago. Douglass's research in Dallas neatly marries conspiracies large and small. His 'unspeakable', in the end, is simply ‘The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, it is ourselves.’

Should the actual gunmen still be alive, and confess publicly to their crime, at this point it's unlikely they would be believed. Warren's defenders would dismiss them, and many conspiracy believers might conclude they were yet another late attempt at disinformation. But most of the protagonists of the story are dead, and 9/11 has become the ‘Crime Of the Century’ for new century, as Anthony Summers says, replacing the assassination as ‘a new milestone of national trauma.’ We may never know the truth. Meanwhile Oswald's ghost remains in death what he most likely was in life, a patsy who reminds us that history is not random, but it may be beyond our control. As Don DeLillo wrote, in an essay while researching Libra:

'The valuable work of theorists has shown us the dark possibilities, prodded us to admit to ourselves the difficult truth of the matter. No simple solution, no respite from mystery and chronic suspicion. Conspiracy is now the true faith.'

 

JFK ASSASSINATION LITERATURE: THE OPEN BOOK ESSAY

Last week my essay on the literature of the JFK assassination was broadcast on Open Book. It's still available on IPlayer here (about nine minutes in).Because of time limitations, portions of the essay we recorded had to be edited out, so what follows is the original script; what we intended to cram into six or seven minutes.

The bits that are gone are mainly toward the end--the establishing of Oswald as a patsy and, most sadly, the brilliant JFK And The Unspeakable, which not only makes the case for conspiracy, but places that conspiracy firmly into an ongoing context. You can read my original review of that book, written for the magazine Lobster, here.

Still, it's wonderful to be able to get ahead of the inevitable deluge that will engulf the 50th anniversary come November, and Open Book is, as always, a great listen...

THE LITERATURE OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Everybody remembers. I was in eighth grade art class when Mrs Hugins was called away. She came back to tell us President Kennedy had been shot and we were being sent home. Two days later I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Oswald dead. It was all open and shut.

So it seemed to this boy of 12. JFK's Camelot of a White House had been struck down by a Communist defector misfit. A year later, the Warren Commission endorsed that simple explanation, but instead of calming the nation, it raised more questions than it answered. The Warren Report spawned a minefield of debate and disinformation, which has spawned more than a thousand books. By the time I turned 16, it was open and shut no longer.

The best of the first wave wear their reaction in their titles: Mark Lane's Rush To Judgement, Harold Weisberg's Whitewash, and Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After The Fact which catalogues the evidence buried within the Report's 26 volume appendix. The early fictions, meanwhile, approached Kennedy's murder metaphorically: Thomas Pynchon's Crying Of Lot 49, Loren Singer's Parallax View, and Winter Kills, by Richard Condon (author of the Manchurian Candidate) where the president's assassination is ordered by his mob-connected father.

Stephen King's recent novel 11-22-63 is a throwback, dismissing doubters of the official verdict as those who can't accept Kennedy's death as an act of random absurdity. In his novel, a Maine school-teacher goes back in time to stop Oswald. It's a good time-travel story, powerfully imagining the butterfly effect of Kennedy's survival; much of King's work has always been revisiting a more innocent time. His picture of Oswald as lone crazed assassin fits his sense of American innocence betrayed.

He still had that prissy little smile on his face when he walked up to me. Arrogant and prissy, both at the same time. He's wearing that smile in just about every photograph anyone tried to take of him....basically, there's nothing more to see anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser waiting to be famous.

But in the end...it was almost certainly Oswald. You've heard of Occam's Razor, haven't you? ...'all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.'
- (reading from 11-22-63)

The collapse of trust in government in the Seventies wake of the Watergate scandal, saw a House of Representatives investigation conclude the likelihood of a Kennedy conspiracy, but also a reluctance to blame anyone but the Mafia. The derailing of the committee is detailed in Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation. British journalist Anthony Summers' Conspiracy, first published in 1980, became the crucial one-volume summary, but the real steps forward belonged to the two best Kennedy novels. Charles McCarry's Tears Of Autumn got him labelled the American John LeCarre,while Don DeLillo's Libra shows a typically obsessive DeLillo protagonist endlessly researching the ultimately unknowable.

“Think of two parallel lines...One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.

-(reading from Libra)

The third wave of JFK literature was sparked by the 1991 release of Oliver Stone's movie JFK—whose JFK: The Book Of The Film is itself worth reading. The establishment response was Gerald Posner's ballyhooed Case Closed, a prosecutor's selective brief against Oswald and for the Warren Report. Norman Mailer called Posner only intermittently reliable, but used him as the basis for Oswald's Tale, in which Lee's unhappy marriage to the Russian beauty Marina saw him shoot Kennedy in a fit of jealous envy. More telling was James Ellroy, who claims America's innocence disappeared on the first boats over, and said the 'real trinity of Camelot was look good, kick ass, get laid'. No idealist, his conspiracy, laid out in The Cold Six Thousand oozes with sleazy reality.

He got the basic stats: One suspect caught—a kid-- a sheep-dipped leftist. Guy Bannister dipped him. The kid killed a cop. Two cops were sent to kill him. Phase two went bad. The second cop botched his assignment.

Littell holstered up. Littell studied his ID....

The streets were dead. The windows zipped by. Ten thousand TVs glowed.

It was HIS show.

He developed the plan. Pete Bondurant helped. Carlos okayed it and went with Guy Bannister's crew. Guy embellished HIS plan. Guy revised it. Guy botched it. …

Littell counted windows. All tint-distorted. Smudges and blurs. His thoughts blew wide. His thoughts cohered:

Talk to Pete. Kill Oswald. Ensure a one-shooter consensus.
- (reading from The Cold Six Thousand)

The portrait of Oswald we get from Warren, Posner, Mailer, and King actually shows most convincingly that he was uniquely qualified to become someone's perfect patsy. Ray and Mary LaFontaine, in Oswald Talked, made a convincing case for Oswald as a failed government informer, ripe for the set-up. And in 2008, James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable put forward the strongest case yet for a conspiracy, including detailing an earlier, eerily similar plot derailed only by the President's cancelling a trip to Chicago. After nearly 50 years, Douglass showed there were still new approaches, with echoes right up to the present.

The Unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that became foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, it is ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the grounds for the government's 'plausible deniability'....by avoiding our responsibility for the escalating crimes of state done for our security, we who failed to confront the unspeakable opened the door to JFK's assassination and its coverup.
- (reading from JFK And The Unspeakable)

The problem is believers in conspiracy assume the burden of proof, not just to find who really did pull the trigger on Kennedy, which would be impossible now, but for every other conspiracy as well, whether the Royal Family are really lizards from space or Elvis is still alive. As the generation which remembers the event begins to die off, newer, more immediate plots may push Kennedy into history's background. Meanwhile Oswald's ghost remains a permanent patsy, there to persuade us violence and history really are random, beyond our control. Which is why as Don DeLillo, reminds us...

The valuable work of theorists has shown us the dark possibilities, prodded us to admit to ourselves the difficult truth of the matter. No simple solution, no respite from mystery and chronic suspicion. Conspiracy is now the true faith.
- (reading from De Lillo's 1983 essay 'American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK')

EASY IS BACK! WALTER MOSLEY'S LITTLE GREEN

Walter Mosley left Easy Rawlins for dead at the end of his last novel, but Little Green opens with Easy coming back from the dead, reviving from a coma and into the land of the living. It was Mouse who, prompted by the sixth sense of Mama Jo's juju, found and saved Easy, and now Mouse, the deadly Raymond Alexander, has something he wants Easy to do for him in return, namely locate a young boy named Evander who's gone missing on Sunset Strip, and whose mother is worried sick. But Timbale, the mother, despises Mouse, and would neither ask for nor accept his help. So Easy stumbles out of the sick bed and back into the land of the living, fuelled by Mama Jo's gator juice, a brew that appears to turn him into something like a super hero, at least for brief periods of time.

That's some set up, and this novel serves to remind readers like me, who may have drifted away from Mosley's work, feeling it had lost some of the urgency which made it so effective when Easy first came on the scene, of exactly how good Mosley can be when he is on. It's 1967, and Easy is in his mid-40s. Los Angeles has been hit by the counter-culture; Evander disappeared on a trip, taken almost on a dare, to see the hippies on Sunset Strip. This heralds a new age, of sorts, new attitudes whose depth remains to be challenged. Because this is also Los Angeles still feeling the aftermath of the Watts riots,and it here where Mosley is so good, because there are two different perspectives to the Sixties, black and white, and through Easy we are reminded of how they differ.

In that sense, Mosley often reminds me most of the documentary film maker Ken Burns, whose major projects, on the Civil War, on baseball, and on jazz, have all actually been about the centrality of race in the American experience, and that is Mosley's theme as well. The mystery at the heart of his first novel, Devil In A Blue Dress, whose backstory comes up in Little Green, was one of racial identity, and he revisits that powerfully here. What Easy has always done, for the reader, is to mix the values American society purports to cherish, especially those of family and education, and which Easy shares, with the reality of how hard it is to actually draw the benefits of such values in a racist society. Surviving in Easy's America means being part Easy and part Mouse, and even in the Sixties, with some attitudes changing, there are many more that are not. Indeed, you might argue that Mosley's best novels have all been concerned with sociological history, and in that sense he's probably closer to Ross MacDonald than any of the other great LA crime writers.

I like the way Mosley has taken his characters through post-war LA, like a much less apocalyptic Ellroy, or like Max Allen Collins' Nate Heller without the big events of history. In fact, Heller and Easy would make an interesting partnership around, say, the RFK assassination or the Hearst kidnapping and the SLA. Just a thought. He's also aware of his own place in detective fiction, at least by proxy. There's an interesting exposition on the importance of Chester Himes,and his being more important than Ralph Ellison, for the precise reason that he was more productive; Invisible Man, perhaps unfairly, gets seen as the book white literature accepted partly because it was a 'one-off'. You can't help but think Mosley is talking about himself when he talks about Himes.

Anyway, Evander's been given LSD by a friendly hippie, and he's become a literally unknowing accomplice to the rip-off of some big time drug dealers—the drug being pot in this case, underscoring the dark side beneath the groovy vibe of the Strip. As Easy returns to life, bit by bit with the help of Mama Jo's gator blood, he reassembles his family, and he even reunites with Bonnie, the love he thought lost forever. Which doesn't prevent his getting his first experience of the free love era. Free love would not faze a black man in Los Angeles, not as much as the lack of racial barrier. But barriers are starting to fall, which is something Mosley approaches with commendable caution. For Easy, it's simply good to have been 'recalled to life', as the phrase once went.

Little Green by Walter Mosley

Weidenfeld & Nicholson/Orion £18.99 ISBN 9780297870067

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

MAX ALLAN COLLINS' BYE BYE, BABY

In an appealling bit of synchronicity, the Guardian on Friday ran an interview with Martin Landau, who,asit happens, dated Marilyn Monroe in the Fifties when both were at the Actors' Studio. Landau was explaining how he felt neither James Dean nor Marilyn were suicidal, and their deaths have been remembered for all the wrong reasons. 'There's always a lot of conjecture about Marilyn's death,' Landau explained. 'It's still a mystery; no one seems to know exactly what happened. Yes, there were ongoing issues with Marilyn, but they did not support the idea of suicide in any way, shape or form.'

The quote struck me because I had literally just finished Max Allan Collins' Bye Bye Baby, his thirteenth Nate Heller historical true-crime novel, but the first to be published in nine years, and it deals with the death of Monroe, in 1962. I've written before about the Heller series, and what a crime it is, if you'll pardon the expression, that they have basically avoided publication in Britain. Perhaps British publishers thought that American crimes, like the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Black Dahlia murder, or the assassinations of Huey Long or Chicago's Mayor Cermak, wouldn't have any appeal to their audience. But Heller has also investigated Amelia Earhart's disappearance, the sighting of aliens at Roswell, and the murder of Sir Harry Oakes, which involves the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. And now Marilyn.

By the time the book opens, Heller is highly successful, the PI to the stars, and he has a close relationship with Monroe. She hires him to big her own house, and he discovers that she is already being spied upon, by multiple snoops. You should know the story by now—having been dumped by JFK and begun an affair with brother Bobby, she was also embroiled in a feud with Paramount over the filming of Something's Got To Give (remember the poolside photos?). Her death was suspicious in many ways—not least because the police were not called for hours afterwards, and the amount of barbituates in her system was so huge it's hard to imagine how she might've ingested them all.

Around this story Collins weaves a plot which draws Heller back into the orbits of many people he's worked for or encountered before—not just the Kennedys and their hangers-on, but Sam Giancana and the mob, Frank Sinatra, and Jimmy Hoffa. This is one of the strongest points about the Heller series—Collins has patiently been building the connections which amount to a dissection of at least part of the secret history of the United States. It's odd that he should be travelling in much the same circles as James Ellroy—I recall in an interview his explaining how much he liked Ellroy while at the same time being unable to read his books—but of course coming at the material from a very different style.

Heller the character veers between two points. He is a hard-boiled but soft-centered detective, which occasionally makes him a very appealling character in a sentimental sort of way. This is essential to Collins because the Heller books are told in the first person, with a real sense of nostalgia about them. As he himself has noted, they are not strictly speaking, period pieces, like Stuart Kaminsky's Toby Peters or Andrew Bergman's Jack LeVine, but to me they are often close in tone to Herman Wouk's Wind Of War, with Heller sometimes playing a Pug Henry type character, almost an observer, occasionally a catalyst for history.

What's interesting in Bye Bye Baby is how much the success of the novel depends on the depth of the characters—for example, his composite detective who's doing the bugging of Monroe's house, and his Dorothy Killgallen et al composite journalist are both key characters with whom Heller has to interact—and neither gets the time to be totally convincing. On the other hand, his historical figures are much more so—both Kennedys, John Roselli, Giancana, Joe DiMaggio, Peter Lawford and even Sinatra all fit the personalities we think we know, but have real and sometimes surprising depth. The lesser-known figures around Marilyn are likewise drawn well—though some of them, especially Dr Ralph Greenson, were sort of parodies of themselves already. I was curious to learn that James Hamilton, of the LAPD's Intelligence Division, was briefly head of security for the NFL; I've met a couple of his successors along the way.

The key, of course, is his Marilyn. There is an element of voyeurism to Heller's own relationship with her, as well as a couple of very touching moments. But where Collins gets it best is when he shows her trying to control her own life, particularly her business side, but being vulnerable because she can never control her emotional life. That insight, and the way it's expressed make the book work. And the 'solution' makes a certain amount of sense—it may well be the only way to draw all the anomalies of the case together.

For all the careful characterisation, there is also a moment of unintentional humour, which comes from the unavoidable need to sometimes be expository in the story-telling. Heller and some cops are talking to Eunice Murray, Marilyn's housekeeper, and one of the shadier people in the story, Heller notes that her story sounded prepared. 'Marilyn was “motionless” and “looked peculiar”...who talks like that?' he asks. When, later in the book, Heller discusses Marilyn's non-vindictive nature with Flo Kilgore, and brings up her feud with Joan Crawford. 'I remember that,' he says. 'But she expressed her disappointment and hurt over the affront,saying how much she'd always admired Crawford.' I made a quick note, asking 'who talks like THAT?'

But I also found it intriguing that, when Heller does his summing up, for our benefit, of what happened to the characters, his mentions that Roselli was found floating in an oil drum in Biscayne Bay. He doesn't mention that he was found just before he was scheduled to tesitify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Maybe that's because he's saving that bit info for the aftermath of his next Heller book, Target Lancer, due out in November, which will mark the 29^th anniverary of the first Heller novel (pubished in 1983) and the 49^th of the JFK assassination. As I said, Heller has already dealt with many of the key figures around the assassination—including (I've been working my way through his short stories too) one Jake Rubinstein, a Chicago hood Heller knew in his early days, who wound up owning a strip club in Dallas where he was better known as Jack Ruby. I'm looking forward to it already.

BYE BYE, BABY by Max Allan Collins

Forge Books (USA) $7.99 ISBN 9780765361462

ACE ATKINS' WHITE SHADOW: A Forgotten Friday entry

I'm not sure, as usual, that one could call White Shadow 'forgotten' but suffice it to say I'd missed it when it first came out in 2006, and just caught up with it now. It was Atkins' first non-series book, and it's a terrifically atmospheric novel set in Tampa and Havana, in1955, around the real-life murder of Charlie Wall, a retired racketeer. Atkins builds the historical context carefully--Batista, Santo Trafficante, George Raft, Meyer Lansky, and Fidel Castro all appear, but what he does even better is to build a sense of the era, and the ethos of crime and corruption that mark and connect those two cities.

Within this mix he places an obsessive cop, Ed Dodge, nursing his own demons which go back to childhood and rebound in his unhappy marriage, a tough gangster, 'Scarface' Johnny Rivera, who's lost Wall's journal and needs to get it back, and a young reporter, LB Turner, who's just a little too idealistic, especially for the girl of his dreams, a reporter on the bigger Tampa paper. Through the eyes and actions of these three, we see the workings of the old school, in which crime is part of the fabric of society, to a bigger extent than the term 'underworld' implies. Atkins balances these stories deftly, letting them connect as necessary, and in some cases tragically, but also using them to reflect each other, presenting similar actions from different perspectives.

It's part mystery--who killed Charlie Wall?--but more than that it's a story about changing times. In that sense, it's a little bit like Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy, set on the cusp between the eras, and Dodge in particular is the kind of flawed obsessive Ellroy made a speciality. But Atkins' prose is far more understated, at times even reporterly, and rather than getting caught in the flow he builds the story in layers, with resonance between those layers. In LB's hopeless romance with Eleanor Charles, Atkins fills in generations of American attitudes, reflecting how they play in marriage and in the world of hookers, bar-girls, and of course Havana.

That Atkins started his career as a reporter in Tampa is probably not coincidental, and it's easy seeing him doing what the best reporters do--staying up odd hours drinking and listening to people who have stories to tell, much as LB tries to do. You can almost hear his own wistfulness when he has Trafficante complain 'it's all changed...you can't be a man and conduct business any more...I'm not talking about Charlie Wall...I'm talking about the States. Everyone is out to get everybody.' This is a mob boss talking, in 1955, remember. It's a bravura piece of writing, and Atkins has nailed his world.

White Shadow by Ace Atkins
Berkeley, 2007, $7.99 ISBN 9780425214909