There’s a tricky and special type of book out there that I don’t often completely trust; a certain type of nonfiction, the kind that recounts real-life events with a little too much zeal.  It’s a fine line to walk, that one between historical fiction and dramatic nonfiction, and I guess that makes me skeptical of ‘nonfiction’ that reads as smoothly as a novel.  It makes me sound curmudgeonly but I must be honest – when it comes to certain subjects, I am reluctant to give nonfiction authors much creative license.

And so when Hellhound on His Trail came out, I was excited but also a bit nervous, because all I heard about was how easy it was to read, and how it read just like a novel, and all the rest of it.  That nervousness, however, was tempered by the fact that Hampton Sides has written two highly acclaimed works of nonfiction before: Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers.  So I focused on that and bought the book and was pleased to note the reassuring tone in Sides’s note to readers:

“The first writer I ever met, the great Memphis historian Shelby Foote, once said of his Civil War trilogy that he had ’employed the novelists’s methods without his license,’ and that’s a good rule of thumb for what I’ve attempted here.  Thought I’ve tried to make the narrative as fluidly readable as possible, this is a work of nonfiction.”

And sure enough, it DOES read fluidly. Sides’s chronicling of how James Earl Ray (a.k.a. Eric Galt) escaped prison, lived his life down in Mexico for a while, drifted up to L.A., the whole time dreaming of how one day he’d be a director of porn films – it’s fascinating, and well-written, and, most importantly for this reader, not overdone.  I haven’t yet encountered language that made me feel uneasy about this being classed as ‘nonfiction’.

James Earl Ray aside, however, perhaps the most interesting thing to me about Hellhound on His Trail is reading about the absolute hatred J. Edgar Hoover had for Martin Luther King, and the resulting relationship the FBI had with him – both before and after his death.

Here’s an interesting article about how, with the help of history buff Vince Hughes, Sides researched much of this book.

Susie

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