American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill President Truman – and The Shoot-out That Stopped It
by Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge, Jr.

November 1, 1950 – an unseasonably hot afternoon in sleepy Washington, DC. At 2pm, at his temporary residence in Blair House, President Harry Truman takes a nap. At 2:30pm, two Puerto Rican natives approach from different directions. Oscar Collazo, a respected metal polisher and family man, and Griselio Torresola, an unemployed salesman, don’t look dangerous, not in their new suits and hats, not in their calm, purposeful demeanor, not in their slow, unexcited approach. What the three White House policemen and one Secret Service agent guarding the President cannot guess is that under each man’s coat is a 9mm German automatic pistol and in each head, a dream of assassin’s glory.

This is truly an overlooked gem in the Hunter portfolio. The webmaster was born in 1959, and was only vaguely aware of this historical event prior to reading Hunter’s book. And while it filled in the details for me, it was, more signficantly, just as fast and powerful a read as any of Hunter’s novels. Highly recommended.

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From the inside dust jacket:

Talk about a ride!

Woe unto him who crosses Bob Lee Swagger, especially when his daughter’s life is at stake. Forced off the road and into a crash that leaves her in a coma, clinging to life, reporter Nikki Swagger had begun to peel back the onion of a Southern-fried conspriacy bubbling with all the angst, resentment, and dysfunction that Dixie gangsters can muster. An ancient, violent crime clan, a possibly corrupt law enforcement structure, gunmen of all stripes and shapes, and deranged evangelicals rear their ugly heads and will live to rue the day they targeted the wrong man’s daughter. It’s what you call your big-time bad career move. All of it is set against the backdrop of excitement and insanity that only a weeklong NASCAR event can bring to the backwoods of a town as seemingly sleepy as Bristol, Tennessee.

A master at the top of his game, Hunter provides a host of thrilling new reasons to read as fast as we can. When Swagger picks up peeling where his daughter left off, and his swift sword of justice is let loose, we find a true American hero in his most stunning action to date. And – in the form of Brother Richard, a self-decreed “Sinnerman” out of the old fire-and-brimstone tradition – Hunter offers up his most diabiolical, engaging villain yet. A triumph of story, character , and style, Night of Thunder is Stephen Hunter at his very best.

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From the back cover of the Advance Readers Edition:

One afternoon Bob Lee Swagger gets a surprising visitor: a retired Japanese Colonel named Philip Yaho has researched the battles on Iwo Jima and believes Swagger’s father killed his on Mount Suribachi. He is also searching for the miitary sword his father used in the battle. Swagger manages to track it down and personally delivers it to Yano in Tokyo. When they examine it, it turns out to be not an old standard issue military weapon, but an ancient samurai sword, a national treasure. A few days later, the Yano family is murdered, their house burned to the ground, and the sword stolen. Compelled to solve the crime and recover the blade, Swagger enters not only Tokyo’s criminal underbelly, but also the violent, obsessive world of the Samurai.

Booklist is a magazine of book reviews published by the American Library Association. It is the holy grail of book reviews. The July 1 edition included a review of The 47th Samurai with a star, denoting “a work judged to be outstanding in its genre”:

This is the novel Hunter’s fans have been waiting for, the book that brings together his father-and-son protagonists: Earl Swagger, World War II hero and hard-nosed cop, and Bob Lee Swagger, Vietnam sniper and, like his father, the kind of guy who can’t say no to righteous violence. Until now, Earl and Bob have each starred in their own books, but this time, ingeniously, Hunter brings them together when Bob is contacted by a retired Japanese soldier, Philip Yano, who believes that his father’s samurai sword may have wound up in Earl’s hands after the war. Bob tracks down the sword, travels to Japan, and presents it to Yano—after which the Yano family is slaughtered. Bob could walk away, but, of course, he doesn’t.

Throwing himself into samurai culture, he learns swordsmanship from a master and sets off to avenge the Yanos—and, in a sense, his father. Sure, this sounds clichéd, but much of Hunter’s genius comes from his ability to manipulate archetypes—especially the classic western scenario of the lone avenger—drawing on the almost subconscious pull these themes exert on the reader but always infusing them with multiple layers of complexity. As Bob is drawn into the samurai world, and tension builds to the inevitable confrontation with his adversary—a modern samurai seduced by the dark side—Hunter simultaneously fuels our need for bloody resolution and reveals the horrors wrought by devotion to honor and duty. But this time he does it with parallel narratives—juxtaposing the story of Earl Swagger and Philip Yano’s father against the contemporary drama and playing off the same themes across generations.

This is probably Hunter’s most violent novel—and that’s saying something—but violence may have never been more integral to story than it is here. Hunter celebrates the samurai soldier while showing the appalling underside of the samurai way of life and the ideals that drive it.

— Bill Ott

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Book Description

Havana, the sultry spring of 1953: gambling is expensive, sex is cheap, and death is free.

A half-hour by air from Miami, it’s the world’s hottest — and most dangerous — city. From the plush mobster casinos in Centro to the backstreet brothels on Zanja Street, you can get anything you want, for a price. The city is the linchpin of many empires: the Mafia’s, the CIA’s, numerous American corporations’, El Presidente’s, and even the vice lords’ of Old Havana. It must be protected at all costs.

But now there’s a threat. A young lawyer, a kid named Castro, is giving speeches. He speaks of reform, of change, of self-determination. He speaks of…of revolution even.

This danger must be dealt with. So, into the steamy, sunny climate of corruption come two men, both unafraid, both skilled, both tough as ball bearings. They would be friends in a sane world, for they are so similar in their capabilities and experiences. But now they have to be enemies, because the Cold War is at its apogee: one is American, the other Russian.

The American is named Earl Swagger. A Medal of Honor winner on Iwo Jima, a toughened gunman from adventures in Hot Springs and the swamps of Mississippi, Earl has been conned by two young Old Boys of the CIA to become Our Gun in Havana.

The Russian, Speshnev, also a veteran of tough battles (from Spain in ‘36 to Berlin in ‘45, with a few stays in the gulag just for seasoning), has a similar assignment: he too is sent by strategic gamesters to pay attention to that same young orator. But his job is protection, not elimination.

Neither man’s assignment will be easy. For, like an orchid hot house, Havana’s climate grows spectacular specimens: the wise old mobster king Meyer Lansky, who runs the casinos for his nervous New York sponsors; the syndicate hitman Frankie Carbine, Frankie Horsekiller of the famed Times Square massacre; the secret police officer called Ojos Bellos — Beautiful Eyes — for his penchant to interrogate at scalpel point; the beautiful Filipina Jean-Marie Augustine, who knows so much; and even those crew-cut, cheery young CIA fellows on the embassy’s Third Floor, behind whose baby-blues and tender faces lurk all manner of deviousness. And everybody wants something.

In Havana, Stephen Hunter has produced a truly epic adventure story, shot-through with violence, eroticism, and the pressures of big money and big politics, set in a legendary time and place. His hero, Earl Swagger, fights his enemies, his superiors, and his own temptations and, in the end, has to decide what is worth killing for — and what is worth dying for. He knows only one thing for certain: that he’s a pawn in somebody else’s game. But a pawn with a Colt Super .38 in his shoulder holster and the skill and will to use it fast and well is a formidable man, indeed.

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Published in 2001 by Simon & Schuster

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In Pale Horse Coming the unforgettable Earl Swagger returns in a searing follow-up to Hot Springs, Stephen Hunter’s New York Times bestselling novel. It once again demonstrates why Hunter has been called “the only modern writer who can lay claim to being Dashiell Hammett’s immediate successor.”

It’s 1951, and the last place in America any sane man wishes to visit is Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored) in Thebes, Mississippi. Up a dark river, surrounded by swamps and impenetrable piney woods, it’s the Old South at its most brutal – a place of violence, racial terror, and even more horrific rumors. Of the few who make the journey, black or white, even fewer return.

But in that year, two men will come to Thebes. The first is Sam Vincent, the former prosecuting attorney Polk County, Arkansas. With great misgivings, Sam accepts a job from a smooth-talking Chicago lawyer to investigate a disappearance. Sam has heard of Thebes and knows that in the Negro culture he only imperfectly understands, the place has a special resonance of horror.

Sam is a careful man. Before he leaves on this dangerous trip, he confesses his fears to his former investigator Earl Swagger, a Marine hero on Iwo Jima, veteran of the mob wars in Hot Springs, and now a sergeant of the Arkansas State Police. Earl pledges that if Sam is not back by a certain time, he will come looking for him. Sam will bring his knowledge of the law, his compassion, and his sense of the rational to Thebes, but Earl will bring only his guns.

What they encounter there is something beyond their wildest imaginations for evil. The dying black town is ruled by white deputies on horseback who are more like an occupying army that a police force. Each citizen of the town is in debt to the Store, the one remaining civic institution, and the only escape is over the wild currents of the dark river that drowns as many people as it liberates.

But nothing in the town can prepare Earl for the prison itself where he becomes the first white inmate. It is a site of fear: run by an aging madman with insane theories of racial purity, it is administered by a brutally efficient Stalin of a guard sergeant known as Bigboy. The convicts call him The Whip Man – he can take a man’s soul with his nine feet of braided cat gut.

Both Sam and Earl will be challenged to the limits of their strength by this place and will struggle not only for their own survival, but with deeper questions: What does a man do when confronted with such evil? Can it be remedied? Can it be rectified, redirected, reformed?

Or must it just be destroyed? And if so, where would you find the men to destroy it?

Drawing on the oldest myths, classical and modern literature, popular culture at its most vigorous, and the Golden Age gun writers of the ’50s, Pale Horse Coming is a stunning story of violence and retribution, written with the same high velocity of Hunter’s classic thrillers Point of Impact, Dirty White Boys, Black Light and Time to Hunt.

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Hunter’s first book for Simon & Schuster.

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From the hardback dustjacket:

In the summer of 1946, the most wide-open town in America is Hot Springs, Arkansas, a city of ancient, legendary corruption. While the pilgrims take the cure in the mineral-rich 142-degree water that bubbles from the earth, the brothels and casinos are the true source of the town’s prosperity. It is run by an English-born gangster named Owney Maddox, who represents the New York syndicate and rules his empire like a Saxon lord while sporting an ascot and jodhpurs.But it is all about to be challenged. A newly elected county prosecutor wants to take on the big boys and save the city’s soul (he also wouldn’t mind being the next governor). He begins a war on the gambling interests and, knowing the war will be long and bloody, hires an ex-Marine sergeant, Earl Swagger, who won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima, to run it. Swagger knows how to fight with guns as well as any man in the world. But he is haunted: the savage fighting he just barely survived and the men he left behind in the Pacific still shadow his mind, leaving a terrible melancholy. There are even darker memories: a murdered father who beat him mercilessly and drove a younger brother to suicide. And he’s torn by his own impending fatherhood, as his wife, Junie nears term. It isn’t that Earl Swagger is afraid of dying; more scary still, it’s possible that he yearns for it.

The gangsters fight back, setting up a campaign of ambush and counter ambush in the brothels, casinos and alleys of the City of the Vapors. Raids erupt into full-out combat amid screaming prostitutes and fleeing johns. The body count mounts. Meanwhile, the politics behind the war are shifting: Will the prosecuting attorney stick with his raiders or sell them out to curry favor with the state’s political machine? Will Owney Maddox defeat the raiders but lose a personal battle against a cunning rival from the West who foresees a Hot Springs in the Nevada desert as the future franchise city of organized crime? But most important, will Earl Swagger survive yet another hard war, not merely with his body but also with his soul intact?

Packed with page-turning action, sex, sin and crime, Stephen Hunter’s Hot Springs is at once a relentlessly violent and deeply touching story.

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The third Bob Lee Swagger book

During the latter days of the Vietnam War, deep in-country, a young idealistic Marine named Donny Fenn was cut down by a sniper’s bullet as he set out on patrol with Swagger, who himself received a grievous wound. Years later Swagger married Donny’s widow, Julie, and together they raise their daughter, Nikki, on a ranch in the isolated Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. Although he struggles with the painful legacy of Vietnam, Swagger’s greatest wish–to leave his violent past behind and live quietly with his family–seems to have come true.Then one idyllic day, a man, a woman, and a girl set out from the ranch on horseback. High on a ridge above a mountain pass, a thousand yards distant, a calm, cold-eyed shooter, one of the world’s greatest marksmen, peers through a telescopic sight at the three approaching figures.

Out of his tortured past, a mortal enemy has once again found Bob the Nailer. Time to Hunt proves anew why so many consider Stephen Hunter to be our best living thriller writer. With a plot that sweeps from the killing fields of Vietnam to the corridors of power in Washington to the shadowy plots of the new world order, Hunter delivers all the complex, stay-up-all-night action his fans demand in a masterful tale of family heartbreak and international intrigue–and shows why, for Bob Lee Swagger, it’s once again time to hunt.

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The second Bob Lee Swagger book, and last book published by Bantam. From the hardcover dustjacket:

Bob Lee Swagger has seen — and delivered — dozens of deaths. As a United States Marine sniper in Vietnam, his astonishing accuracy with a rifle earned him the nickname “Bob the Nailer;” twenty years later he was forced to kill again to unravel a brutal conspiracy. Now happily secluded with his wife and young daughter in the Arizona desert, Bob believes all the killing is behind him. Until a young writer, Russ Pewtie, arrives at his door with troubling questions about the past.Forty years earlier, Swagger’s father, a dedicated state trooper, was gunned down by two robbers in a sensational shoot-out just outside of Blue Eye, Arkansas. Faced with Russ’ persistence and a desire to make peace with a father he never really knew, Swagger decides to discover what really happened that night long ago in Arkansas. But as soon becomes clear, powerful people don’t want the truth uncovered — and Swagger must use all his combat skills and ruthless cunning to survive.

Like the infrared “black light” that exposes a sniper’s target in the dead of night, Swagger homes in on the shadowy figures desperate to keep the secret of his father’s murder buried. And with the relentless you-must-turn-the-page pace that is Stephen Hunter’s trademark, Black Light accelerates to its exhilarating climax — an explosion of gunfire that blasts open the secrets of two generations.

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Literary Guild Featured Selection

A Bob Lee Swagger book – sort of.

They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary–three escaped convicts going to ground in a world unprepared for anything like them….Lamar Pye is prince of the Dirty White Boys. With a lion in his soul, he roars–for he is the meanest, deadliest animal on the loose…. Odell is Lamar’s cousin, a hulking manchild with unfeeling eyes. He lives for daddy Lamar. Surely he will die for him….Richard’s survival hangs on a sketch: a crude drawing of a lion and a half-naked woman. For this Lamar has let Richard live…

Armed to the teeth, Lamar and his boys have cut a path of terror across the Southwest, and pushed one good cop into a crisis of honor and conscience. Trooper Bud Pewtie should have died once at Lamar’s hands. Now they’re about to meet again. And this time, only one of them will walk away….

Armed to the teeth, Lamar and his boys have cut a path of terror across the Southwest, and pushed one good cop into a crisis of honor and conscience. Trooper Bud Pewtie should have died once at Lamar’s hands. Now they’re about to meet again. And this time, only one of them will walk away….

Stephen Hunter on Dirty White Boys:I had a hunger – literally, a taste in my mouth – for a work that would be starker, more driven, than my earlier books. I knew also that I wanted it ‘American’ somehow. I wanted a plot that gripped like a vise, expressed in a voice of lyric plainness. I wanted lots of violence, gunfights so incandescent they felt like fever dreams and left you sweaty. And when someone died, I wanted you to feel the pain.What I saw was a modern Western lawman, a state trooper; I saw boots and Berettas; I saw his family and his struggle to be a decent man at war with his impulses to be a satisfied one. I knew his name would be Bud. And I knew he’d be hunting an escaped convict.

And I saw that man, too – Lamar Pye. He was everything other men secretly admire: He was as without fear as he was without remorse. In a kinder world, he’d have been a great soldier, an athlete. In the world into which he was born, he’d become a criminal, a bad, bad boy who would know only one thing about life: what to do next.

With these two men – competing priests in the cult of manhood – the book took off and wrote itself. I wasn’t its author but its recording secretary.

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