Lewis Perdue's Blog, page 3

Hellhound: Multi-generational saga of racial injustice & redemption wrapped around a true-science thriller

The Core

A multi-generational saga of racial injustice and redemption wrapped in a partly autobiographical action thriller that delves into the personal choices that lead to good and evil.

Now at Amazon Kindle Unlimited and in paperback.

The thriller wrapped around the core

UCLA neurosurgeon Brad Stone believes he had long ago escaped his Faulknerian heritage as the disinherited scion of Mississippi plantation owners and powerful, racist politicians.

But when a civil rights lawyer, asks his help to save the life of a racist convicted of killing a Black man, a dark legacy of hideous human medical experiments emerges. Events hurl him into the diabolical web of Xantaeus, a secret military drug that turns soldiers into bloodthirsty killers capable of creating a level of inhuman battlefield slaughter never before seen.

Stone’s efforts to stop Xantaeus deployment on U.S. troops make him the target of a right-wing billionaire presidential contender who owns the company producing the drug. Stone must also confront his ancestry’s unvanquished racial demons. and introspection into why good people do bad things.

Dedication

For the enormous contributions they have made – and are continuing to make for social justice and education, Hellhound is dedicated to The Mississippi Center for Justice (web link), and the Sunflower County Freedom Project (web link).

Also, to my African-American cousins at the George Family Facebook Group who diligently search for their roots that lead from slaves at Cotesworth, a Mississippi plantation once owned by supreme racist U.S. Senator James Zachariah George (my great-great-great-grandfather).

A key architect of Jim Crow segregation, George devised the poll tax and literacy test and had them included in the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 (still the supreme law of that state). As Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, George played a key role in preventing Black citizens from voting.

I am profoundly distressed to see George Family members struggle to document their own family trees. This is in large part because slaves didn’t get birth certificates, and plantation records are mostly incomplete.

I believe they will succeed.

”In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage – to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.” — Alex Haley, author of Roots (web link).

Epigraphs

”May your choices reflect your hopes not your fears.” – Nelson Mandela

 “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”— Søren Kierkegaard

Some Relevant Links To Supplemental MaterialHellhound’s Two Intertwined PlotsAuthor’s NoteWhy Did I Write Hellhound? (End Paper #1)Write what you know (End Paper #2)The accidental 3-book novel (End Paper #3)Hellhound on Amazon

Both versions contain the 1/3 of Perfect Killer that was deleted by the original publisher. Plus thousands of supplemental material.

Kindle Unlimited – Free for Kindle users … with hardware device or free app.

Softcover – 455 pages

Hellhound’s Two Intertwined Plots

The Core

A multi-generational saga of racial injustice and redemption wrapped in a partly autobiographical action thriller that delves into the personal choices that lead to good and evil.

Now at Amazon Kindle Unlimited and in paperback.

The thriller wrapped around the core

UCLA neurosurgeon Brad Stone believes he had long ago escaped his Faulknerian heritage as the disinherited scion of Mississippi plantation owners and powerful, racist politicians.

But when a civil rights lawyer, asks his help to save the life of a racist convicted of killing a Black man, a dark legacy of hideous human medical experiments emerges. Events hurl him into the diabolical web of Xantaeus, a secret military drug that turns soldiers into bloodthirsty killers capable of creating a level of inhuman battlefield slaughter never before seen.

Stone’s efforts to stop Xantaeus deployment on U.S. troops make him the target of a right-wing billionaire presidential contender who owns the company producing the drug. Stone must also confront his ancestry’s unvanquished racial demons. and introspection into why good people do bad things.

Dedication

For the enormous contributions they have made – and are continuing to make for social justice and education, Hellhound is dedicated to The Mississippi Center for Justice (web link), and the Sunflower County Freedom Project (web link).

Also, to my African-American cousins at the George Family Facebook Group who diligently search for their roots that lead from slaves at Cotesworth, a Mississippi plantation once owned by supreme racist U.S. Senator James Zachariah George (my great-great-great-grandfather).

A key architect of Jim Crow segregation, George devised the poll tax and literacy test and had them included in the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 (still the supreme law of that state). As Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, George played a key role in preventing Black citizens from voting.

I am profoundly distressed to see George Family members struggle to document their own family trees. This is in large part because slaves didn’t get birth certificates, and plantation records are mostly incomplete.

I believe they will succeed.

”In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage – to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.” — Alex Haley, author of Roots (web link).

Epigraphs

”May your choices reflect your hopes not your fears.” – Nelson Mandela

 “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”— Søren Kierkegaard

The Townhouse Operation Exposed

Breaking the Townhouse Operation meant that I had to sue the Watergate Special Prosecutor. The legal bills were all min=e Because Congressional News Service was my own company I founded. The bills were in the high tens of thousands of dollars and, if I had not been successful, it would have meant bankruptcy. The now-deceased attorney, Len Terr, was a friend of mine from Cornell.

Right-click image to view a larger version. Click large link below to read entire article.

See the entire page here: http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn88074101/1978-05-19/ed-1/seq-6/

 

The Times They Were A-Changin’ — book review

The Times They Were a-Changin': 1964, the Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn by Robert S McElvaine Hardcover $28.99 – ISBN13: 9781950994106Book to be released June 7, 2022

This is a highly original and deeply insightful analysis of events from 1964 and their direct connections to the present day’s brutal political divisions.

McElvaine makes a solid case that the Trump movement’s extreme right-wing activities are solidly rooted in an attempt to overturn the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the subsequent gains of African Americans, women, and the LGBTQ community.

As a world-renowned historian, McElvaine’s masterful, highly readable (and frequently humorous) interpretation of events solidly makes the connections between the violence of The Proud Boys and the KKK.

Also well-drawn are parallels between the white nationalist forces of the late 1890s that overthrew Reconstruction and essentially re-enslaved African Americans through the pseudo-legal fraud known as Jim Crow Segregation.

McElvaine offers an important and credible origin of the decline of confidence by Americans and their government: A steady stream of lies and misinformation by President Lyndon Johnson and his successors.

“Most of the issues facing and dividing Americans in the 2020s can be reduced to the question: Should we return to what 1964 was all about, or should we seek to bury the accomplishments that began to be achieved then and make the United States again the sort of ‘white man’s country’ it still was in the 1950s and early 1960s?”

The book comes alive with mini-bios of the key players in the major events of the 1960s.

To McElvaine’s credit, his deft use of music from the era to make many of his points leavens what could have been a slow slog through 456 pages.

The contradicting meaning to freedom…throughout

This book was both introspection and revelation for me. It rekindled old memories and constructed an interpretive scaffolding of perspective and a and deeper understanding of the time

I was a high school sophomore in Jackson Mississippi and was deeply affected by he deaths of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney at the hands of a gang of subhuman Neshoba County racists.  Those obscene deaths began my inadequate involvement with the civil rights movement, and my ultimately successful determination to attend Cornell University where Schwerner had been a student.

I found The Times They Were A-Changin’, a bitter reminder of the fragility of progress and the ever-present need to remain actively vigilante against primitive retrograde attempts to de-humanize those considered different.

 

wage growth

Hellhound End Paper #3 – The accidental 3-book novel

To be fair to the publisher of Hellhound, they contracted for a single book and I accidentally wrote three. The size of the average novel varies widely, but is generally considered to be 50,000 to 70,000 words.  On the other hand, Hellhound is 174,110 words at last count.

It’s important to recognize that a publisher’s costs go up with the length: more paper, more printing expense and even with an ebook, there are even more more costs with editing, proofreading and other production costs.

Complicating the situation was the fact that my relationship with the publisher was strained (eventually to the breaking point) by my public revelations that author Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code plagiarized an earlier novel of mine: Daughter of God. I made the controversy very public, and learned that the publishing industry does not like people who make waves, even if it is “good trouble.”

I never actually intended to write three novels. It just sort of happened.

I began Hellhound the same way I had with my other thrillers: A core of solid, factual non-fiction surrounded by plausible “what if” speculations to drive the characters and action.

But the fact that the incredible true part concerned a drug that could rob individuals of their ability to make moral decisions about killing other human beings, raised much larger issues than my previous books.

The horrible consequences of using that drug ultimately shaped the creation of characters, settings, and action. It also sparked the exploration of my own personal experience as the white, privileged offspring of prominent ancestors who had made historical decisions enabling them to have a direct and lasting hand in the oppression of African Americans. See “End Note: The Personal Decisions, Choices & Consequences That Lead Me Write Hellhound“ <>at the back of this book.

Three intertwined books

Hellhound is actually three books woven together and based on investigative reporting of a frighteningly true story:

1. A thriller where an unstable ego maniac billionaire businessman bent on the Presidency must be stopped from perverting the military for his own ultimately disastrous ends.

2. A Southern novel that included real-life and fictional Faulknerian characters, unrequited forbidden love and autobiographical echoes of my ancestors.

3. A nearly non- fiction, fact-filled look at the hardware and software of consciousness and free will connected to the need and ability to make choices.

In the beginning: A frightening true story

Hellhound started with the true story of a  powerful  psychoactive drug developed by the military to induce a merciless  bloodlust that can turn American troops into amoral, merciless, and unstoppable killing machines. The drug relieves the anxiety of killing or being killed in order to create wildly effective psychotic slaughter troops. Notable the drug is actually a variation of the anti-anxiety drug Busprione. It works by deadening to the innate human reluctance to kill other human beings and eliminates the ability to make conscious decisions.

After reading a snippet about this in an obscure military journal, I eventually located Freedom of Information Act documents  of just such a pharmaceutical drug developed by the Walter Reed Research Institute.

The significance of the FOIA documents was verified by Dr. Richard A. Gabriel, professor at the U.S. Army War College, a retired Army Colonel and former intelligence officer, the author of more than 30 books and former consultant to the Department of Combat Psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He believes the secret pharmaceutical program at the heart of Perfect Killer could bring death and casualties on an unprecedented scale.

After reading my first draft, Dr. Gabriel verified the accuracy of my writing about the drug, and even wrote an Afterword to Perfect Killer in which he  says (in part):

“The search to improve the military potential of the human being will further press the limits of humanity itself.

“Such “human potential engineering” is already a partial reality and the necessary technical knowledge increases every day.

“Faceless, if well-meaning, military medical researchers press the limits of their discipline with little or no regard for the consequences.

“We may be rushing headlong into a long, dark chemical night from which there is no return unless the American public, the press, and opinion makers are made aware of the problem and decide to stop it.

“Lewis Perdue’s, The Perfect Killer, is one way in which large numbers of the American people can be made aware of the problem.”

 

Hellhound End Paper #2: Write what you know

“What did I know best that I had not written about and lost?

“What did I know about truly and care for the most?

“Ask those questions of yourself, then write whatever story comes to mind.” — Ernest Hemingway:

To the best of my ability, I have written what I know and truly care for into Hellhound. Below, some of the mechanics of that.

Settings

It’s not enough to research and describe a setting. One must capture the ghosts that haunt the characters.

I selected Mississippi as the main setting because I was born there and grew up in with family members, ancestors and other people who had created, perpetuated, and continued to do bad things and I believe they were fundamentally good people.

I’m also on a first name basis with the ghosts. That’s why the hero echos my own thoughts when he says, “I’m tired of having my life run by dead men.”

I also chose Mississippi because a drug that can force good people to do bad things made me think of so-called “good people” of the state who accepted the malignancy of institutional racism. Had my ancestors been storied German Prussians, I might have selected Bavaria and Dachau — its most notorious death camp.

Indeed, after a cold December visit to that evil place in 1978 sparked a novel about why good people did evil things — or did nothing. The working title of the first draft of my first bestseller — The Delphi Betrayal — was initially titled, “The Dachau Notes.”

In any event, the imperative of “write what you know” must rule. So, about a quarter of a century after Dachau, came Hellhound which was set in Mississippi, California and Washington — all of which I have lived in long enough to have developed a first-hand relationships with their ghosts.

Write who you know.

Characters have to be created with a number of relevant, and logical characteristics. Those characters and settings must qualify for their positions by virtue of their physical, educational, intellectual, and ethical qualities. Also vital are demonstrated talent, motivations, and life experience. Those and settings must also be relevant to the plot and believable in all situations.

When describing how the choices made by the characters I had created and the environments in which they were compelled to live, I began to wonder for the first time what choices and environmental forces led me to write it.

Like my characters, many choices were set out for me by life, existence, necessity, and reality. I came to deeply understand that at any given moment we are exactly the sum of every decision we have made.

In some ways, my introspection reminds me of plays by Nobel Prize-winning (1934) Italian writer Luigi Pirandello whose works explore (and blur) the  relationships among individual identity, reality, and sanity. Specifically, I’m reminded of his play —  Six Characters in Search of an Author — in which characters in a play come to life and confront the author they believe imperfectly and incompletely created them.

I’m still haunted by my conviction that I could have, should have done a better job with my own characters.

The Hero

Protagonist Brad Stone’s family heritage is mine. I am also fortunate to know and be related to, courageous, exceptionally capable people in the military..

To carry the intertwined narratives about the psychoactive drug Xantaeus, and how it affects the wetware (brain), as well as the software (learned abilities to make choices), I created Stone, a UCLA neurosurgeon, and former military veteran.

Stone is fascinated (as I am) by how physical gray matter can produce the near-magical properties of consciousness — and the dark sides of why and how ordinary “good people” can reconcile doing bad things — “good” Germans and Dachau, “decent” white Southerners and lynchings.

Write what you know: I’m a scientist. Currently, I’m a biomedical researcher, currently affiliated with the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. I’ve also studied consciousness intensively as well as the organic and experiential factors that affect decision making.

Heroine/Love Interest

The heroine, Jasmine Thomas, is the daughter whose mother — Vanessa Thomas — represents a fictional narrative of what might have become of my unfulfilled high school crush on a Black student. Vanessa’s character founded The Advocacy Foundation for Mississippi Justice, similar to the Mississippi Center for Justice which was founded by my high school classmate Martha Bergmark.

Vanessa sets off the action when she contacts Stone and asks her help to save the life of a convicted racist who is condemned to death for the murder of a Black man in Itta Bena, Mississippi. At a point when Stone thinks that his high school crush on Vanessa may actually play out in real life, she is assassinated and dies in his arms. Vanessa’s daughter Jasmine layer plays a key complicated role in the plot and Stone’s life and presents him with another tough “do the right thing” decision.

Villains

The right villain to “own” the drug underlying the plot must have a direct, kinetic connection as well as the authority to carry the plot to its disastrous conclusion.

In this case, the drug –Xantaeus — is manufactured and controlled by Clark Braxton, an egotistically bombastic billionaire who is a shoe-in to be elected President of the United States. He intends to use the military for his own personal agenda. Check out Braxton’s 2008 Presidential Campaign web site.

Braxton,  a Vietnam-era veteran, is the product of unethical human medical experimentation that enabled him to recover from a disastrous head wound that left him a hero warrior capable of functioning in public life but without any moral respect for others.

Xantaeus pharmaceutically supercharges a soldier’s physical abilities, but also robs them of compassion, of their sense of humanity. It was developed in a secret and unethical series of military human experiments aimed at pharmaceutically emulating the ultra-warrior aspects that Braxton developed.

Xantaeus aims to remove all motivational and ethical compulsions which military research confirms prevents a substantial number of soldiers from killing enemy soldiers in combat. It’s also vital to keep in mind that a lack of compassion is the main ingredient that allows individuals to find lynchings, racism, and genocide acceptable.

See Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command for the definitive military examination of the issue.

In the book, Braxton owns Defense Therapeutics a pharmaceutical empire owned by politically ambitious billionaire with his sights trained on the White House. He also owns a massive estate in Napa Valley — Castello da Vinci. His prize wine is proudly named Xantaeus.

I finished the manuscript of Hellhound in 2004, but it seems to me that Braxton was a forerunner doppleganger of Donald Trump.

I don’t personally know someone like General Braxton. However, I studied individuals like him after first reading about Phineas Gage whose head injury turned a kind, gentle, intelligent man into a profane, violent borderline criminal.

I do not know anyone like Darryl Talmadge, but he is an archetype of a racist killer — some of whom (like him) have head injuries, but most of whom have damaged souls.

I’ve also never known a medical researcher like Dr. Frank Harper whose judgement was twisted by personal ambition and denial. However, have I studied individuals like him when doing historical research on German and Japanese human medical experimentation atrocities for my thriller Slatewiper.  Standalone book site here. NOTE TO CHRISTIAN …. First link to books should go to Amazon. Then to standalone book site.

Most deeply, Hellhound looks at how people make choices & decisions.

What experiences and people cumulatively led up to a decision. Equally important are the enormous differences among peoples’ abilities to make decisions: billions of conscious and unconscious, unrecognized choices along with the social, genetic, and biological forces that must be overcome to live a kind and ethical life.

Not everyone is physically or psychologically capable of making make good decisions.

Brain damage from physical blows, illness, genetic defects, emotional and psychological abuse all affect how any given person will respond to external events. Those individual differences are most profound in a crisis, especially those with life and death consequences.

I wanted readers to understand the why and how of a character’s decision, not just that they made a given choice.

It’s all about choices

The choice of “Hellhound” as a title was inspired by blues titan and Mississippi guitarist Robert Johnson who allegedly met the devil at the crossroads and chose to sell his soul for the gift of hus virtuoso guitar skills. Too many people stumble through life’s successions of crossroads, barely aware of the choices they make which lead to more fateful intersections.

Write what you know: Main Character Autobiographical elements

Hellhound is an exploration of my own inner journey to understanding. I have long pondered why good white Mississippians did evil things and calmly accepted those and the misdeeds of others as “the way things are supposed to be.”

Like the main character, Brad Stone, I was born into a privileged and genealogically prominent, plantation-owning family with a direct line to a U.S. Senator whose statue is in the U.S. Capitol and is credited as a prime creator of Jim Crow Segregation.

Like Stone, I’ve always been a scientist since I was about 10. I’m still hands-on, focusing now on environmental chemicals: Stealth Syndromes Human Study, The Stealth Syndromes Project, and the Center for Research on Environmental Chemicals in Humans. I’ve been in charge of a published human research study associated with the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. I have met parts of Brad Stone in the process.

 

 

Hellhound End Paper #1: The personal decisions, people, and life events that led me to I write Hellhound

Why did I write Hellhound?

What follows here is a some what rambling, chronological rendering of the reality-event-decision chain that made it inevitable that I would write this book.

Hellhound is vastly different from any of my other 20+ published books. I never thought about why I wrote it. I just started writing.

The act of writing the “Author’s Edit” at the beginning of this first published edition of Hellhound, set me to thinking. The imperative to “write what you know,” < got the ball rolling. That prompted me to think about why I had been compelled this precise book at the time I did.

I was born and grew up in a scandalously fractured family in which my mother and father married and divorced each other three times before marrying different people the fourth time.

The family was also fractured by genealogical fault lines. My mother’s side (Bradford in actual life) owned two plantations in the Mississippi Delta — Mossy Island near Morgan City and Saints Rest, not far from B.B. King’s home town of Indianola.

In Hellhound, substitute “Stone” with “Bradford” and you’ll get a pretty accurate image of my background. The book’s protagonist, Brad Stone, pretty much charts my own divergent path from my family.

Obviously, Stone’s military background is far more exalted than mine — which consisted of Naval ROTC and an appointment to the Naval Academy which was rejected because my near-sighted eyes were worse than 20/200 without glasses. No radial keratotomy vision correction back then.

That academy appointment was arranged by family friend and raging racist U. S. Senator James O. Eastland.

Eastland was a close ally of my maternal grandfather — Jack Wester Bradford — who was a Democratic Party kingmaker in the 1920s and ’30s back when he and other cotton aristocrats (and Delta pseudo-slave holders) ruled Mississippi.

Bradford was nicknamed “The Judge” even though he never held a formal judicial office. Family papers passed down to me by my mother include correspondence between The Judge and Governor Hugh White in which my grandfather issued instructions that the governor agreed to follow.

For the Judge, politicians existed as errand boys to do his bidding.

Significantly, that conflicted with my father’s family which included my great-great-great grandfather former U.S. Senator J. Z. George whose statue, I have publicly and repeatedly urged, be removed from its pace of honor in the U.S. capitol’s statuary hall. Various other Congressmen and Confederate generals filled out the family constellation of rogue stars.

Because of my parents’ fractured marriages, I spent most of my formative early childhood in Itta Bena, a small Mississippi Delta town about 12 miles from my birthplace in Greenwood.

When I lived in Itta Bena, my grandmother’s full-time household staff included two African-Americans: cook/housekeeper Lena Gray and chauffeur/butler Al Thomas who had been originally hired by the Judge and who catered to my mother until she married my father in 1933.

In times of marital strife, my mother fled to that privileged environment. She did it so often that my grandmother added a complete two-bedroom apartment on to the main house for her.

As a consequence of having servants to handle household affairs, my mother never learned to cook or adopt any sense of household duties. Family photos show many images of me as an infant being cared for by young Black women in crisp white uniforms.

None of those photos included my playmates who included the Black children of the women who cared for me. One of them taught be how to ride a bicycle. Shortly before I entered first grade, that playmate disappeared. My mother told me, “that’s the way things have to be. It’s just like birds. You never see bluebirds flocking with cardinals.” I missed that little boy and cried for him a long time.

As I grew older, the only consistent, stable adult man in my life amid all the marital strife that oscillated between Itta Bena and Jackson was a wise Black man, Al Thomas. I spent many hours with Al as he carried out his household duties including the times he spent bartending illegal liquor (Mississippi was still a “dry” state) at the veterans club on the Itta Bena square near the Roebuck Lake bridge.

Like Brad Stone in Hellhound, I learned much about growing up and becoming a man from Al Thomas. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude for how I grew up. He also saved my life once when I was a small child. That incident is described in Hellhound.

Years later in Jackson, my family pulled political strings that allowed me — at age 13 in 1962 — to become the youngest page to serve in the State House of Representatives. This was during a special midnight session designed to block James Meredith from becoming the first Black student at the University of Mississippi — Ole Miss.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand the significance of events , but I do remember feeling uncomfortable (for reasons I did not understand then) the racist glee that accompanied the attempt to bar Meredith. That was the beginning of an awakening.

That attempt to bar Meredith failed. The resulting riots by white people ensued in Oxford, the home town of Ole Miss where my great-grandfather had been Chancellor, and my grandfather a professor of chemistry following his Ph.D. from Princeton.

That early experience continued to nag at me. As I grew older, the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers shocked me and made me angry that his killer was lionized by many white people who expressed the opinion that “he got what was coming to him.”

Years later I would work as a top aide to Mississippi Governor Bill Waller who — as Hinds County District Attorney — had prosecuted Evers’ assassin against the will of the Democratic Party powers and despite death threats and fire bombings from the “good” white people.

But long before my work with Gov. Waller, I began to hang around the fringes of the civil rights movement in high school. At first, I was a minor player, more curious then than active. My “gateway drug” to activism led me to help fill out the ranks of supporters who lined the streets for protest marches. I was a grain of salt in a sea of pepper.

After that I began passing out flyers that other wrote.

My first step to useful action began when I started buying carloads of groceries and delivered them to the worst-hit Black neighborhoods. When getting to a ramshackle house, that often required walking on wooden planks over a ditch of raw sewage that ran along the side of the unpaved road.

In 1966, a close friend and I stood with the crowds lining Highway 51 in Madison County, between Canton and Jackson to support James Meredith’s March Against Fear. It was an extremely hot day, and a car in the procession carrying a group of school teachers from Ohio had overheated on the side of the road.

My friend and I offered to get water for the radiator. But when we were filling up the bucket from the faucet on a roadside house, the owner came out with a shotgun. We sprinted to my car but were quickly pursued by the home owner and another man.

After a long car chase over gravel and unpaved roads, we lost them courtesy of my reckless driving and the powerful V-8 in my Plymouth Satellite which my mother had given me for my birthday that year.

That event pretty well crystallized my support of the Civil Rights movement.

I had made my choice and taken the leap of faith needed to set me on a course different from many of my friends.

However, I continued to keep my increasing involvement and interest in civil rights away from my family and most friends.

Keeping this secret was easy because I explained that my absences from school were occasioned by my intense interest in science and science fairs. That was often true when I visited a lab that Millsaps College had let me use for my high-energy particle experiments.

In May 1966, I won a number of prizes at that year’s International Science and Engineering Fair for a novel form of ion-based space propulsion that the front-page newspaper articles dubbed, “The Cosmic Engine.” Ion engines were just in the development stages as NASA at the time and were notorious for low thrust. To fix that, I built an ion engine like the ones that NASA was using, then gave it an electrical “afterburner” by interfacing it with a linear particle accelerator I built. Given enough time, that could create a velocity approaching the speed of light.

During this time, I also played high-school football and began to be more vocal about racial equality. And despite the cold shoulder that most students gave the token Black students, I learned their names and greeted them in the in the hallways between class changes, and in the classes they shared with them. I also had a secret adolescent crush on one of the girls. That crush was never fulfilled, but the fantasy is amplified by Brad Stone and plays out as a key part of the Hellhound plot.

All this resulted in a vigorous whispering campaign when I ran for student body president against: “Don’t vote for Perdue because all the N*****s are voting for him.”

The fact that I won that election, gave me a deep feeling of hope for the future and my fellow classmates of every hue.

After graduating in 1967, I grudgingly enrolled at the family university: Ole Miss. I had been accepted at MIT, but my father (true to the genealogical imperative of Southern ancestor worship) refused to allow me, and vowed not to pay a cent toward college unless I went to Ole Miss.

So, I went to Ole Miss, promptly got involved in a small civil rights protest in my first semester, and instantly got kicked out.

I fled to Elmira New York where Westinghouse had given me a nuclear technology and satellite instrument internship the previous summer.

In addition, after getting kicked out of Ole Miss, I became instantly financially self-supporting. And while my sweet Westinghouse technology position in Elmira was no longer available, the company gave me a tech position in their color picture tube factory and encouraged me to get back to school. I did that at the State University of New York, Corning where I earned an an  Associates degree in math and science, also becoming the first student in school history to graduate with a perfect 4.0.

Cornell recruited me and I got a Bachelors of Science “With Distinction” in my studies that included chemistry, biology and communications.

Having found a talent for journalism as editor of the Corning student newspaper, I paid my way through Corning and Cornell by working almost full-time for the Elmira Star Gazette and the Ithaca Journal.

I honed my skills as an investigative reporter at the Journal, something I later advanced with Jack Anderson, The Washington Post, Dow-Jones and other national outlets.

I never lost my interest in racial justice and continued to follow events in my home state where there seemed to be a breath of fresh air in what national media called “The New South.” I later found that my hopes were far too high, and that the old ways were just waiting for a surge worse than anything COVID did to the state.

In 1973, while serving as a faculty member at Cornell, I wrote a widely read article for The Nation:  “Mississippi: A Giant Step to Moderation” which almost immediately led to my being hired by Gov. Waller.

In 1974, I went to work as press secretary to Congressman (and later U.S. Senator) Thad Cochran who had been elected in 1972 as a prominent part of the “New South.”. Thad was a member of a now-extinct breed of political dinosaurs: Social liberal, economic conservative Republicans in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY), John Anderson (R-Illinois), Pete McCloskey (R-California) and Lowell Weicker (R-Connecticut).

It’s important to remember that at the time Thad was elected with a surge of Black voters, the Mississippi Democratic party — while rattled by insurgents of the Freedom Democrats — was still under the iron hand of old-time hide-bound segregationists exemplified by Senators James Eastland and John Stennis.

Thad was the first congressman of any party since Reconstruction to hire Black staffers for major positions. But Thad grew increasingly frustrated with the other Mississippi fresh face — Congressman Trent Lott — as well as the bulk of Congressional Republicans who were trending toward the right.

Pathetically, the U.S. Senator from Mississippi (elected to Thad’s post after his illness and death) is a Trump enthusiast, extremist right-wing Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith. Seen here while visiting the  posing with Confederate artifacts while visiting the Biloxi home of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis. In a now deleted Facebook post, Hyde-Smith wrote of Davis’s estate, which is now a historic site. “Mississippi history at its best!”

Hyde-Smith and the rest of the state’s return to Jim Crow politics came years after I had felt Thad’s frustration with increasingly extreme politics. So, in 1977 I felt that I had done for him all that I could and returned to the media, when the opportunity came write an investigative book about Congressional corruption.

That experience resulted in the exposure of what became the “Koreagate” scandal involving South Korean CIA payoffs to member of Congress. I was able to invent a method for piecing together shredded documents from the office of the main perpetrator, Tongsun Park.

With the help of a quartet of former Jack Anderson interns — freelancers Ken Cummins, Jim Mintz, Wendy Kramer and Richard Sokolow — we pieced together an incredible array of smoking guns.

Ironically, the propcess I developed, taught a bunch of Iranian thugs how to reconstitute the shredded documents they found after looting the American Embassy in Tehran. See: “What The Argo Movie Got Wrong About Shredded Documents.”

I also had a great, fun time teaming up with Jack Anderson who paired me with James (Six Days of the Condor) Grady. Jim, and I — along with Ken Cummings — had a rollicking good time including busting up a gambling ring that was operated out of an office of the Capitol Police Force

I later freelanced for The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Monthly, Washingtonian and many other media outlets. As an investigative reporter for States News Service, and a Dow-Jones chain of daily newspapers, I covered the White House, Congress, Supreme Court and federal agencies and regulatory bodies.

I always looked at investigative journalism as a way to expose corruption — including racism.

Along the way, I won a Freedom of Information Lawsuit against the Watergate Special prosecutor and was able to nail a former illegal campaign fund raiser for President Nixon as well as expose Robert Conkling, a top White House aide who, (with the help of friends in high places), had hidden his conviction on 18 counts of rape, sodomy and assault with a deadly weapon.

At the time, the pace was intense; life was intoxicating and the venues and articles were a journalist’s dream.

But then I quit that abruptly in 1978 when I was offered the opportunity to help run a Congressional campaign in Hartford Connecticut for Ben Andrews, “The GOP’s Great Black Hope.” Ben was a businessman and former head of the state NAACP.

I was astounded that the Republican party would get behind a Black candidate, but I was ever hopeful (incorrectly) that the party might turn away from “white is right” racism. I knew that Ben’s chances of winning were a long shot, but I saw this as a chance to try and make a difference. We nearly won, but Hartford — especially the suburbs — was simply too white.

That was disheartening and posed yet another life choice.

I deferred an immediate decision to go back into the media. Instead, I bought a Eurail pass and took a long sabbatical visiting 12 countries in three weeks. When I returned to my apartment in Washington D.C., I found offers from a number of media outlets. Fortunate, but I’d been there, done that and was sick of D.C. and tired of politics.

Then the decision was made for me: an offer to teach journalism at UCLA. Another opportunity to give back.

In addition to teaching journalism classes as part of the regular faculty, I served as advisor to the Daily Bruin and to the “special interest” publications including those serving African -American, Latinx, Pacific Islander, Jewish, LGBTQ+, and other non-WASP constituencies.

I enjoyed it all very deeply and was jazzed that I got a chance to ramp up my own commitment to social justice causes by helping minority journalists while also opening eyes among the mostly white Daily Bruin staffers to social justice issues.

I also taught those student journalists and the ones in my regular academic classes, the need for investigative journalism and well-sourced articles. I also fought to update all the publications from typewriters to electronic publishing.

That — along with the more aggressive reporting from the student newspapers — brought me into conflict with the administration. Toward the middle of 1983, I demanded that students get the modern publishing tools they needed for a proper education, or I’d resign.

This became a public controversy in the wider Los Angeles community.

The administration called my “bluff, ” and I made another life decision: I resigned.

Suddenly, university bureaucrats announced they would provide an electronic system and started taking bids.

Job done.

The making this decision, was an easy one thanks to the love and support of my wife and life partner Megan Mills. In addition to a titanium backbone, Megan had also be a successful stage manager for live theater in Los Angeles and had substantial experience with the foibles of creative people like me. After 40+ years of marriage, Megan remains the string to my kite. Without her, the kite fliews crazy and crashes.

After punting UCLA, I was unemployed less than a week when a job offer came in that launched me into the hyperspeed world of Silicon Valley where I could use my experience in, and love of, science and technology.

That took me along a 15-year path of startups, steep learning curves, and building my own companies including two wine publications, writing technology columns for high-tech publications, and as a founding columnist for TheStreet.Com,

Along the way, I also founded PocketPass — a financial technology company that was the first ever to roll out online payments. Sadly, that was 2001 before there was much of anything to buy online and the era of the smart phone was still six years in the future. Can you say “bleeding edge?” PocketPass never made it thanks mostly to severe management issues.

However, sometime in 2002, I got an email from an innovative educational operation in Sunflower County Mississippi that eventually became the crystallizing event that resulted in my writing Hellhound.

The email was from the Sunflower County Freedom Project (SCFP) that asked me if I could buy copies of Fahrenheit 451 for their reading program.

I did some research and found that SCFP was an astounding success, conceived and executed by veterans of the Teach For America project. SCFP was taking Black youngsters from one of the most impoverished areas in America,, providing them with a learning environment and equipping then with an educational mentoring and personal development program that was successfully sending them on to major colleges and universities.

So I bought those books and, over the following months, a lot more including their first WiFi system. For a while, I also served as a board member.

The experience re-awakened my desire to do something for my home state, for people whose ancestors had been exploited by my own ancestors.

This was particularly significant because SCFP was located in The Mississippi Delta, near Indianola and not far from the historical Saints Rest Plantation. SCFP was 18 miles from Itta Bena and 25 miles from Greenwood. Both of those areas play prominent roles in Hellhound

That struck a loud chord because Saints Rest plantation had been owned by my grandfather “Judge” Bradford. What’s more, that plantation had been part of my inheritance. When the Judge died, it had been passed along to my grandmother who, in turn, had passed along a portion to me and other grandkids. Because I was a minor, that inheritance was administered by my mother and her sister. My piece of Saints Rest disappeared the instant I got kicked out of Ole Miss for my role in the protest. It was a dead-weight to the past and I was glad to see it gone.

More importantly, my first visit to SCFP, suddenly re-rooted me in my past. My eyes were re-opened and my memory refreshed from childhood.

Because of that awakening, I wrote Hellhound.

Postscript

After I finished Hellhound — editorially gutted and renamed “Perfect Killer” — I resolved to see if I could make a contribution to the Delta and its people that played such key roles in the book. I felt that helping to organize a continuing, self-sustaining monetary effort to support better education would be the best plan of action.

To do that, I organized Books ‘n Blues in an effort to create a fun, entertaining fundraiser that could bring together authors and musicians. My goal was to build an event that could be repeated year after year.

In addition, I wanted to expand the base of charitable donors. I felt that a new source was needed because the same limited number of people in Mississippi continually get asked to contribute to worthy causes. But while there may be no limits to their depth of goodwill, the reality is that there is a limit to the depth of people’s pockets.

Rather than competing for a slice of the existing charity pie, Books ‘n Blues intended to bake an entirely new pie to allow people to enjoy entertainment that had a charitable beneficiary.

My model was to seed fund a wine and food event with silent and live auction, music and food. This sort of function is repeated by many organizations all over California.

As one example, the 300-student school in Sonoma that both of my children attended, netted more than $100,000 in April 2005 with its annual fundraiser. My goal was to adapt that sort of event to offer an entertainment benefit, open to and priced for people of all means and adapted to Mississippi tastes, culture and lifestyle.

I spent about $20,000 to cover the initial organization cost. In  addition, my sister-in-law and one of her good friends bought a cool$12,000 top-of-the-line silent auction software program and spent their own money to go to Greenwood and train local volunteers on its use.

Our opinion was that the money was well-spent because it would be amortized by the proceeds from future fundraisers.

As the event took shape, it looked promising. The Chairwoman of the event was Myrna Colley-Lee  — Morgan Freeman’s wife at the time.

Viking Range — which is headquartered in Greenwood opened their arms and threw open their entire facility as the anchor venue for the event — auditorium, meeting rooms, cooking educational facility — thing whole thing.

We had a great set of volunteers. Some of the most prominent and expensive California wines were donated. Outstanding authors donated their time and travel expenses as did blues musicians.

But even during the organization efforts, signs of trouble developed. African-American women — especially from the black sororities — were the energy backbone.

On the other hand, wealthy white women from the wealthy Grand Avenue side of the Yalobusha River and plantations beyond were less enthusiastic, less helpful and less willing to work alongside Black women. I did overhear one aging white Delta Belle complain that she was not brought up to do “hard labor” such as learning auction software.

Despite that, the silent action raised more than $15,000.

Sadly, without “outside agitators” to ramrod the next year’s event, the racial and socioeconomic divisions resulted in a mediocre event. It was the last one.

But that was not my only Delta disappointment. Sometime in the 2003-2004 time frame, the management of SCFP underwent a change. By that time, I was no longer on the board, but still wanted to support them. However, communications trailed off, something that has continued in recent years even as their web site has grown slick but lacks the outreach and details it once had that encouraged donations and participation.

After the ultimate failure of Books ‘n Blues, and the radio silence from SCFP, I pretty well disconnected from the Delta and Mississippi as a whole. I followed Thad Cochran’s abuse at the hands of Tea Party (and narrow re-election thanks to the Black vote).

Thad’s death severed one of the last things that had kept me connected to the state. Along with that disconnection, deaths in the family have left me with just one close relative in Mississippi whom I have promised to visit.

I also grew disconnected from book writing and publishing, given  my tangle with The Da Vinci Code’s blatant plagiarism of my book, Daughter of God. I fought that one-sided battle to a draw  and was vindicated by a major 2005 investigative article in Vanity Fair magazine — The Da Vinci Clone? That article documented how I had been out-lawyered, and falsely smeared by a sleazy PR campaign from the expensive flacks hired by Sony/Random House.

But the controversy had taken its toll. I had lost my long-time publisher, and was seen by other publishers as a troublemaker to be avoided. This also came about when the publishing industry was being disrupted by Amazon.

Pressed financially, many publishers sought shelter by being acquired by larger whales. Cost-cutting resulting from those mergers and layoffs meant that publishers cut marketing budgets and expected authors to do all that work themselves. Back in the 1980s I had been a managing director at MSLGROUP/Publicis — one of the largest PR and marketing firms in the world. However, I am a journalist at heart and never really loved PR: which is why I left it. As a result, I despaired at jumping back into that as my only client.

While I was burned out with publishers, I finally jumped into Amazon’s lap in 2006. First I reclaimed the rights to most of my previous books. With the super work of Christian Lane — a multi-talented publishing assistant — we published the books on Amazon.

At that time, I was busy with technology consulting gigs, but finally got around to writing a new original work: Die By Wire.

I’ve found other activities (starting and running Wine Industry Insight, and inventing the Clans recommendation algorithm) that are more appealing to me than book marketing. I should do the marketing, but just can’t summon the enthusiasm, so far.

I know I have to do it, but can’t quite make that decision because of other more-compelling uses of my time. Science is a big one. Since 2013 I’ve been researching the health effects of environmental chemicals — especially those from plastic.

That effort started with The Stealth Syndromes Project, and segued to Stealth Syndromes Human Study then to The Center for Research on Environmental Chemicals in Humans, and most recently, a published scientific paper.

The scientific efforts are not just a matter of curiosity and aptitude, but also a way to give back. Significantly, the health of poor and people of color are disproportionately affected by the chemicals I study.

A blizzard of decisions directed every one of those decisions that increasingly separated me from Mississippi and social justice issues.

But as life continues, the next social justice chapter may have its roots that began in 2013 when SuperShay Shay (Facebook handle) an administrator for the private George Family Facebook group asked me to become the only white member of a family connected to J.Z. George. These are people who are my relatives because their ancestors had been slaves at George’s estate, Cotesworth. I am jazzed to know these members of my family who have become my new and meaningful connection to Mississippi. Because slaves and their offspring don’t have birth certificates or other official registries of births and parentage, I’m actively trying to help the George Family members to use DNA forensics and technology to trace their ancestry.

You can track my previous writing about Perfect Killer and the Mississippi Delta at the Perfect Killer website and at  my author site, Lewis Perdue and at my Amazon author page.

A resume of sorts, focusing on work, can be found at at: Ideaworx and at LinkedIn.

 

Author’s Note (Front of Book) — minor edit, Feb. 4, 2022

Author’s Note (Front of Book)

 

In 2005, two-thirds of this book was published in hardcover by Macmillan/Forge  titled Perfect Killer. This edition — Hellhound — incorporates the missing third, along with all of the words in the previously published  version.

Please see “The accidental 3-book novel” in the End Papers for more details.

The drastic cuts dismayed me because they contained the essence of what I wanted to explore as  the contrary offspring of long line of Faulknerian decadent Southern aristocracy. Specifically, I’m the disinherited scion of a Mississippi Delta plantation and a direct descendant of a U.S. Senator who played a foundational role in creating Jim Crow segregation.

This restored edition restores the heart of a personal exploration: Why do good people do evil things? How and why do they make choices that determine the paths they take? My characters consider these questions as they struggle to survive evil and prevail over it. They reflect my deep desire to explore the science of consciousness, free will, nature versus nurture and the genetic and physical brain injuries that can can turn moral people evil. My protagonist — a neurosurgeon — also wrestles with current quantum theories underpinning consciousness.

Fundamentally this is also an exploration of my own personal choices and forces that made me different, and resulted in alienation from my family, and ancestry.

Why did I write Hellhound?

Please see End Paper #1: “Personal Decisions, Choices & Consequences.”

How did I create a fictional thriller based on fact?

Please see End Paper #2: “Write what you know.”

 

 

Author’s Note (Front of Book)

Author’s Note (Front of Book)

 

In 2005, two-thirds of this book was published in hardcover by Macmillan/Forge  titled Perfect Killer. This edition — Hellhound — incorporates the missing third, along with all of the words in the previously published  version.

Please see “The accidental 3-book novel” in the End Papers for more details.

The drastic cuts dismayed me because they contained the essence of what I wanted to explore as  the contrary offspring of long line of Faulknerian decadent Southern aristocracy. Specifically, I’m the disinherited scion of a Mississippi Delta plantation and a direct descendant of a U.S. Senator who played a foundational role in creating Jim Crow segregation.

This restored edition restores the heart of a personal exploration: Why do good people do evil things? How and why do they make choices that determine the paths they take? I also wanted to explore the science of consciousness along with the genetic and physical brain injuries that can can turn moral people evil.

Fundamentally this is also an exploration of my own personal choices and forces that made me different, and resulted in alienation from my family, and ancestry.

Why did I write Hellhound?

Please see End Paper #1: “Personal Decisions, Choices & Consequences.”

How did I create a fictional thriller based on fact?

Please see End Paper #2: “Write what you know.”