ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I consider myself as a historian by education – UC Berkeley and Princeton, and a filmmaker by intention – San Francisco State and USC School of Cinema. Along the way, I’ve taught U.S. Colonial History to University freshmen, worked as a film editor, cinematographer and as a screenwriter and then later as a writer-producer for Television and movie projects. Over the years, one writing project in particular kept my attention and provided the inspiration and jumping off point for this novel. ‘So, what’s the difference between writing screenplays and writing novels,’ you might ask? ‘Novels, if you aim to ‘get ‘em right’ are a hell of a lot harder. And thanks for asking.
WHY THIS STORY? I have always been interested in characters who live outside the law – Japanese Ronin, Robin Hood, even outlaws and gangsters – These seem to me to be fallen heroes or men who are a law unto their own right – Marshalls of the old West, riding the fence line out on the far plains, their authority conveyed by the strength of character – And by the Colt .45 resting on their hip. In writing this novel, I was drawn to the years following WW2 – An interim, when it seemed to me, that the older black & white notions of good and evil started to morph into shades of grey. Honesty and truth shifting toward the cynical construct of plausible deniability. By the time the Korean war erupted in the early 1950’s, this shift had also occurred within men who had previously fought with the OSS, behind the lines in Europe or Asia. Brave men – and women – who saw what needed to be done and had then gone out and done it. Dangerous endeavors, but worth the sacrifice. Then it all changed. As the OSS was transformed to become the newly created Central Intelligence Agency, the mission for the men inside the Agency changed as well. The Fascist and Nazis had been defeated. But now there was a new enemy at the gates – The worldwide communist menace. Combating this new menace brought with it a new variant of home grown propaganda to influence – and sometimes frighten – a public whose chief concern was making sure they got a piece of the post-war prosperity all for themselves. The Russians, The Bomb, Commies in government, in the movie business, or under the bed were red-meat issues used by new breed of rabble rousing politicians to make sure America was pushed in the right direction. It had been the thinking of the Agency’s Far East Boys that as long as we were faced with the inevitable confrontation between our God-given democracy and the godless commies, why wait? The US of A had enough Atomic weapons to bomb China back to the stone age and plenty left over for our old pal Joe Stalin in the Soviet Union. This is the context in which the story takes place – And the most frightening part, most of what happened was true.
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