Perfect Killer: More Threads Than The Average Thriller

The Publisher's Weekly review got me to thinking that the average book reviewer was likely to miss some of the elements in Perfect Killer. Obviously different readers will see different things in a book so I thought I'd try to list a few things that I had intended the book to be.

The Military Investigative Story
I set out to write fiction book about a drug to turn the average soldier into the equivalent of special forces, but as I got into it, I realized that there was a lot of fact to the story. As a former investigative reporter in Washington (Gannett, Dow Jones, Jack Anderson) it's ironic that this fictional account may have led me to the most important story yet.

The military's program is continuing and aims to create the "holy grail" of combat pharmacology: a class of drugs called a "nondepleting neurotrop."

The non-fiction Afterword written by Dr. Richard A. Gabriel makes it clear that the implications for warfare are awesome and could result in the most incredible escalation of bloodshed in military History. He and others believe that a form of this drug was tested on soldiers in the first Gulf War and may be responsible for one form of Gulf War syndrome.

Dr. Gabriel's Afterword indicates that he thinks I have treated the issue accurately and framed the consequences appropriately.

In brief: throughout history, a battle has been won or lost when one side either surrenders or breaks and runs. Either way, many lives are saved, bloodshed avoided and human capital preserved. But with both sides wired on the nondepleting neurotrop, the battle will be a slaughter that lasts until one side is so completely decimated that no one is left to pull the trigger. The death and destruction will be horrendous.

Indeed, this is the single most serious strategy and technology issue facing the military today and yet there is no public debate whatsoever.

This Question and Answer Page has more about the real-life military issues.

NEXT POST: The Southern/Civil Rights Story

What's This About Waiting for Your Mother to Die?

My mother was one of the last of
the “Steel Magnolias,” born on one of her her father’s two cotton
plantations in the Mississippi Delta and an anachronistic believer in
the white planter culture that reigned for so many years. I, on the
other hand, got kicked out of Ole Miss for leading a march in 1967.

I needed to wait for her to die because Perfect Killer has some unkind
observations about this culture. As much as I disagreed with her views
about the culture and her father (“The Judge” in Perfect Killer) I
loved her too much to break her heart by writing this book while she
was alive. She, the Judge and the history and culture in which they
lived are described in as accurate and contextual way I could muster.
There is no fiction there.

My mother's name was Anabel (born Anabel Bradford) just like the hero's mother in Perfect Killer, and she was buried in the Itta Bena cemetery on just the sort of winter day described. The hero, Bradford Stone, remembers many things that I went through. Although I have taken some liberties with my personal history, I have been as accurate as memory allows with my mother and her father, Judge John Wester Bradford.

I am grateful that the real Bradford Stone allowed me to imbue his character with my own life and memories.

I will no doubt upset many of my living relatives with the straight-forward confrontation of this past. My cousin Billy Bradford still owns Mossy Island Plantation, but has no day-to-day operational involvement. He is an entomologist who still lives in Mississippi. I have tried to look him up, but have been unsuccessful so far in locating him. I am likewise estranged from my other cousins as well. Time, distance, politics, attitudes, all play a role in this, I suppose.

Perfect Killer is the first novel I have ever written in the first
person. I did this because it was the only way I could bring out the
intensity of emotions the book requires. The hero, Bradford Stone, is
largely autobiographical, at least through the character’s adolescence.
Some names have been changed, but very few liberties have been taken.

For similar reasons, this book contains many characters who are real.
The legal “vetting” of this manuscript was lengthy and intense as I
scrambled to obtain legal releases giving formal written permission for
the names to be used.

One of the names that has been changed is that of Al Thomas. The character in Perfect Killer named Al Thomas is a faithful rendition of him including the attempted hanging and cotton gin incidents and the VFW hut experiences, all of which happened. I do owe my life to Al. There is a street named after him in Itta Bena. The street's on the map, but I have been unable to locate it on the ground. There is an irony running around there somewhere.

There are many other ironies as well. The Judge's house is now owned by an African-American man. The house on Mossy Lake which my uncle William (Wish) Bradford and his wife Elodie used to live has been torn down. I vividly remember many wonderful days playing there with cousins Billy, Peggy and Juanita, but especially Billy who gave me my first shotgun, a single-shot .410.

There was a barn there and a country story and a dusty road among the cotton rows punctuated by the ramshackle wood-and-tin shacks surrounded by poor black people that I was taught not to see. I am thankful that teaching was eventually unsuccessful.

One of the newer and nicer houses there is owned by the man who now farms the plantation for my cousin Billy. It also houses a great outdoors outfitter, Mossy Island Outfitters, which I highly recommend, especially to those who'd like to go duck hunting in the area.

Good Publisher's Weekly Review -- But They Didn't Quite GET The Whole Idea

From Publishers Weekly:

Not many thrillers end with a bibliography of several dozen actual nonfiction books, but Perdue's prodigious and intriguing new novel (after 2004's Slatewiper) has one—plus appendixes that are probably fiction because they include quotes from the novel's star players.

"Dr. Bradford Stone, 'legendary Marine recon operative turned healer and scientist,' makes it his business to find out who's behind a massive secret plan to turn the drug Xantaeus loose on a reduced but much more effective army in places like Iraq — especially after the love of his life, a black activist in the Mississippi Delta country, is killed by a female sniper involved in the conspiracy.

"Stone and the murdered activist's daughter are credible characters; the plot's premise stands up to scrutiny; and Perdue brings the Delta geography to vivid life. Even though the writing occasionally slips into some awkward phrasing ("Gabriel had paid scant attention and given no real thought to those critics, preferring to believe the day of the nondepleting neurotrop would never come"), this is an exciting novel." -- Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am very grateful for good reviews. And I'll admit that this is a very complicated novel, what with a Southern novel wrapped up in a thriller, a LOT of fact wrapped inside the fiction, a highly autobiographical hero, threads about the biological origins of consciousness, and a set of characters all looking for redemption through the exercise of free will ... which ties back to the consciousness issue.

I needed to wait for my Mother to die before I could write this book about my native Mississippi Delta ... the book says unkind things about the plantation culture she was born into ... and tries to grapple with the WHY of racism, and HOW people acted the way they did ... and to do this without the usual quick and trite excuses, demonization.

Yeah, and this is all wrapped up in the thriller part -- a fiction-based-on-fact account of a secret military program (verified as fact) to develop a drug that can turn the average soldier into the equivalent of special forces.

As a book reviewer myself (for Barron's) I understand the time demands the PW reviewer faced ... and reviewers as a whole for that matter. That's why I started this blog ... in hopes that I can elaborate more on the different parts of Perfect Killer and how they all fit together into a novel that's very different from anything I have ever written before.