Book review: Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides, on James Earl Ray and the Martin Luther King assassination

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      Published by Doubleday, 480 pp, $34, hardcover

      Lone individuals rarely change the course of history. But a drifting, faceless man named James Earl Ray did, with a single bullet.

      On the evening of April 4, 1968, Ray braced himself in a window of a Memphis flophouse and fired a high-powered hunting rifle at Martin Luther King Jr., who stood joking with colleagues on a motel balcony 200 feet away. It was a shattering instant that not only took the life of the revered civil-rights leader but permanently wounded an era-defining movement. Fittingly, it appears at the dead centre of Hampton Sides’s mesmerizing new book Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin.

      Sides, a Memphis native, has a gift for period atmosphere, using research based on personal interviews and official reports to summon the American South and the rolling violence of the 1960s. As he recounts the months before and after the murder, he switches effortlessly from one main player to another, among them FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, and King himself, struggling mightily with the direction of the faltering civil-rights campaign.

      Lurking throughout the book is the solitary, shadowy presence of the 40-year-old Ray, an aspiring bartender, pornographer, and locksmith, as well as a lifelong racist and criminal. For most of Hellhound on His Trail, Sides makes an ingenious point of referring to him only by aliases. At first Ray is simply #416-J, the prisoner number he was assigned by the Missouri state penitentiary where he served seven years for armed robbery, and from which he escaped just a year before shooting King. Then he’s “Eric S. Galt” and, later on, “Ramon George Sneyd”, identities he stole for the purposes of planning the assassination and fleeing the two-month-long manhunt—the largest investigation of its kind in U.S. history, and one that tracked the killer through Toronto, Lisbon, and London.

      This blurring pries Ray loose from common reality, isolates him in the illusions he created for himself, which included the idea that he’d be widely praised for shooting King. At the same time, it reveals facets of the cunning, jittery man behind the masks—that “null set of stewing ambition”, as Sides calls him, who was “strangely forgettable” despite the fussily slicked-back hair, fake alligator loafers, and crisp suits that made him an oddity in the dive bars he frequented, where he’d sit silently fidgeting.

      Ray’s obsessive racism didn’t arise in a vacuum. It gathered during the long civil-rights battles of the preceding years, and was stoked by the segregationist rhetoric of former Alabama governor George Wallace’s 1968 run for president. Like most people, Ray was a creature of his society and times. Yet he made himself a cipher, as bloodless as a police sketch. We’re left to piece him together from scraps and glimpses, just as the thousands of investigators who chased him had to assemble an image of their suspect from smeared prints, split-second sightings, laundry tags, and store receipts. Sides’s portrait twitches with the energy of a bad dream, and is as hard to shake.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      James Lewis

      Jul 1, 2010 at 8:32am

      I see American Hampton Sides gets his "Hellhound On His Trail" reviewed in the Straight, but award winning BC author Peter Trower does not get his "Hellhound On His Trail" reviewed. Why is that?