I’m surprised…
Having one current and three former presidents all in one place, NYC, at the same time, perhaps made good PR for the two candidates among them—Mr. Biden, Clinton, and Obama raked in $26 million at the Radio City Music Hall for Mr. Biden’s campaign, more than Mr. Trump made in an entire month (he’s busy trying to stay out of jail, of course); but everyone knew the Donald was trying to wreck the three Dems’ show by attending the wake for an NYPD officer effectively slain by the NYC Council’s malfeasance (an overzealous bail reform the root cause), having nothing to do with Mr. Biden, of course, so what did Mr. Trump gain? (He’s been diagnosed as a psychotic sociopath by a slew of qualified mental health professionals, so its natural that he only worries about himself after all and not Officer Diller!) But I’m surprised at the Secret Service’s allowing this strange event of modern politics to occur! (After all, the Secret Service didn’t allow the Donald to march to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a long-planned coup and a much more violent event.)
Because of the strict security surrounding past and current presidents, the US has rarely suffered from a presidential assassination like other countries have. (To be sure, many of those are more than welcomed by lovers of democracy everywhere when an autocracy’s citizens finally come to their senses, if only briefly, and depose their dictator.) The last assassination in the US was JFK, of course, but Reagan came close. Who knows how world history would have evolved if JFK or Abe Lincoln had survived, or Reagan had been killed?
Due to the rarity of such events in the US, I’ve not often considered assassination plots in my fiction. True, the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series began with a failed plot to assassinate Mr. Obama (never mentioned by name, by the way), one of the four presidents listed above, in The Midas Bomb. And, after one attempt on presidential candidate Sheila Remington’s life (The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan), that fictional US president was assassinated later on my fictional and futuristic timeline, an event that led into the first novel of the “Clones and Mutants” series (Full Medical, my very first mystery/thriller novel published in 2006).
Royalty gets better treatment on that fictional timeline: Major members of Europe’s royal families escape death and play roles of heroes in Aristocrats and Assassins (fourth novel in the “Chen and Castilblanco” series); only minor royal functionaries suffer. A king on a planet outside ITUIP (the “Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”) is assassinated, but his son leads a rebellion against the Iranian-syle theocracy that took over afterwards; the son gets his revenge (Rogue Planet). And, because I tried to keep my fictional but parallel timeline ahead of our real one, Queen Elizabeth’s passing on my fictional one was announced a bit ahead of time in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series and the “Inspector Steve Morgan” trilogy.. (My apologies to the royal family. They have a lot of problems now, not the least of which is the British media.)
That’s about it, unless you want to count Putin’s ousting of Yeltsin, hardly a fair fight considering Putin and his evil oligarchs’ devilish plot to kill any chance for democracy in Russia, at least for the time being. Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth seem rather tame compared to the current rulers of the Kremlin.
But don’t fret. My fiction has plenty of villains: Some flash-in-the pans; others, like Vladimir Kalinin, who also takes down a few of Putin’s oligarchs out of revenge. What are good mysteries and thrillers without some really evil villains? (You can meet Kalinin early on in The Midas Bomb, but he has a starring role as villain all the way to Soldiers of God,)
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The Midas Bomb. This first novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series has some historical significance in my writing career. The first edition (from the old POD, Infinity, no longer in business) shows that initially I saw the NYPD homicide detectives’ cases as standard third-person mystery/thriller tales. Then I wrote a few more novels in the series, decided to rewrite the first novel in first person as Castilblanco that alternates with the standard third-person to match the subsequent novels in the series. (As mostly a self-published author, I’m free to experiment a bit. In The Last Humans, the first title in the “Last Humans” trilogy, everything was first-person; the second two, A New Dawn and Menace from Moscow, alternated between first and third person. In A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, I even alternated between the two heroes in first person!) Does this experimentation sell any more books? I doubt it; but I have more fun writing them. And hopefully, dear reader, you’ll have at least as much fun reading them. The Midas Bomb is a good place to start.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
