In Los Angeles, a white-faced, soft-featured man nobody remembers very clearly sits in his room and keeps avid track of the movements of Martin Luther King. Meanwhile, far away in South Carolina, the world's most renowned civil rights leader plans his next campaign: for a Poor People's Army to march on Washington, setting poverty alongside racism as imperatives for reform. And then Eric Starvo Galt packs his bags, quits LA, and begins a long, winding, brooding drive – to Alabama, Georgia, and Memphis, Tennessee, where, with a single shot from a flop-house bathroom window, he will assassinate King.
Hampton Sides's technique gives history a fictional sheen. He follows Shelby Foote in "employing the novelist's methods without his licence". Every incident in this compelling account of King's stalking and slaying during America's annus horribilis – 1968 – has a factual reference to back it up; every detail aspires to truth. Yet, Galt himself seems to inhabit the half-world of the best-selling paperback thriller. One of the books he leaves behind him on his travels is The 9th Directive, Adam Hall's Quiller tale of Bangkok political assassins. And though Sides takes his title from Robert Johnson – "There's a hellhound on my trail" – he might just as easily have called it The Day of the Demented Jackal.
Like Frederick Forsyth's Jackal, out to kill De Gaulle, Galt changes names from state to state and boarding house to boarding house. He could be Paul Bridgeman, John Willard, Harvey Lowmeyer, Ramon Sneyd, a gamut of aliases as he ducks and weaves. In fact, he's not even Galt, but James Earl Ray, a petty criminal escaped from the state penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri. Why Starvo? Perhaps because it's a riff on Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the demonic Bond villain. Why is he so infernally difficult to catch? Perhaps because he a master of disguise (and plastic surgery to boot).
Some big players in Sides's account have nothing remotely fictional about them. Not J Edgar Hoover, chomping in his FBI office against that "tom cat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges", Martin Luther King. Not King himself, a Nobel laureate feted by presidents and Hollywood, but now tired and fearful as the wilder men of black power seize influence and cast his doctrines of non-violence aside. Not Lyndon Johnson, beset by Vietnam and an America fracturing before him. But James Earl Ray – as Sides only begins to call him once his true identity is known – is, and remains, a mistier, profoundly ambiguous figure.
On the one hand, he's a simple bigot, working for George Wallace's election campaign in California, spilling racist bile over beers in the cat houses where he goes to buy sex. On the other hand, lying low, keeping way under Hoover's radar, escaping to London and Portugal and only trapped in the end at Heathrow because he's run out of alternative passports and money, he's a canny operator, the smartest son of a dirt-poor, utterly dysfunctional Missouri family. He reads, he ponders, he thinks. Maybe, then, like Forsyth's Jackal, he was not the loner that he seems? Maybe he was hired by one of the rich fanatics – Sides names names – who loathed Martin Luther King and wanted him gone, by any means?
But here's where history draws a line and the would-be novelist stops short. Fiction in Forsyth mode would typecast Ray as a paid assassin. After all, he had wads of mysterious cash. He often seems too shrewd to play random nut. He escapes from prison not once, but twice. Yet there's no conclusive evidence either way. Hamton Sides doesn't know Ray's final motivation and so must leave it blank.
That's a defect in some respects. We are told so much about him – what he drinks, where he travels, how he reacts under pressure – but the "why" of it all remains unanswered. What's clearer, and fascinating even at this distance, is the FBI hunt that tracks him down as soon as a snarling Hoover is ordered to find the killer of the freedom fighter he so manifestly despises.
A moment's tapping on a police computer keyboard might run Ray to earth today. Three decades back, even when the suspect list had been whittled down, it took 53,000 fingerprint examinations to identify the man who wasn't called Eric Galt after all. One thumbprint finally takes the FBI to Jefferson City penitentiary. Three thousand agents have to go hunting the slow way, interviewing, checking, pounding pavements in pursuit of every possible lead. It's a prodigious effort in time and cost ($2m spent). But at last Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler of the Yard picks up the trail as Ray tries to catch a plane to Brussels (and thence to Rhodesia, where he dreams of serving Ian Smith).
There are some problems with Sides's fact clad as fiction. Often we get aggregation, not investigation: too many meaningless details piled one on top of the other like an old Sunday Times "Insight" story run riot. Whole paragraphs are spent lugubriously pointing out where Sides thinks he may have extrapolated a tad too far. ("What Eric Galt did inside room 5B between five o'clock and a little before six is not precisely known... Perhaps he listened to the news on his Channel Master pocket radio or mashed a bead of Brylcreem onto his fingertips and worked the unguent through his freshly cut hair"). But, most of the time, the narrative races along, a deadly road trip heading to a disastrous conclusion.
You don't learn much that is fresh about the exhausted enigma of Martin Luther King here. He's a victim in waiting, not a central character. But you do get a good sense of those around him – loyal, plodding Ralph Abernathy; slick, scheming Jesse Jackson; Senator Georgia Davis, his Tennessee squeeze – and the sheer chaos of a brave cause losing focus. Above all, you get a great sense of a dislocated, flailing time in modern history when thousands cheered King's killing and made Ray their hero, of an America where rage and hate threatened to derail a nation.
Times past? You can debate that, perhaps, while the Tea Party serves Earl Grey and blueberry muffins. But, in a macabre way, James Earl Ray still shadows the stage. He makes no sense. We cannot explain him. And so we can't say that his jackal spirit is truly dead.
