Today, in remembrance, Hartford Books Examiner reviews Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (Doubleday, $28.95) by Hampton Sides.

Released in paperback last March from Anchor Books (with the amended subtitle The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History), Sides’ work is a sweeping account of Martin Luther King’s assassination and its aftermath.  The book’s opening chapters alternate between the stories of escaped convict James Earl Ray (who is initially referred to by prison identification number and then his aliases of the moment) and Civil Rights crusader King, two disparate beings whose lives were destined to intertwine in Memphis, Tennessee.  As their paths converge, so does the book’s focus.

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In April of 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. found himself returning to Memphis, where he hoped to stage a peaceful march on behalf of mistreated African American garbage workers after a prior attempt had failed, resulting in an outbreak of violence – a personal humiliation that flew in the face of King’s philosophies.  By this time, death threats were an everyday occurrence, and King was plagued by illness and exhaustion, governmental harassment, and an apparent crisis of faith.  It was only in the days immediately preceding his death that he seemed to find peace, perhaps intuiting that he was not long for the world.

James Earl Ray’s road to Memphis was paved with petty crimes, prison breaks, and a variety of false names and identities.  A failed pornographer who came from a family of poverty-stricken criminals, Ray was a supporter of presidential hopeful George Wallace, a segregationist, and viewed King’s crusade as a threat to Wallace’s campaign.  Consequently, he began following King’s movements – which allegedly resulted in that fateful shot fired from the bathroom window of a boarding house across the street from the Lorraine Motel.  He then drove out of town in his Mustang, leading authorities on a three-month chase across two continents.  

Sides’ depiction of the two, then, is both enlightening and multi-dimensional.  For instance, he gives King due credit for his accomplishments but doesn’t shy away from the fact that he was as fallible a human being as you or I.  (He bolsters the assertion that King had several mistresses located around the country – and that one of them, Kentucky state senator Georgia Davis, was staying at the Lorraine when King was shot.)  And Ray, though rather bumbling and never fully able to inhabit any of his chosen identities, is also shown to be calculating and enterprising.  After all, he very nearly got away with King’s murder and then managed to escape from one of the country’s most secure facilities (before being discovered high atop a mountain several days later).

While King and Ray are the author’s chief subjects, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI is a strong supporting character in the book, and Sides conducts his account of the exhaustive international investigation into the assassination like a procedural, astutely highlighting the techniques used to hone in on Ray – fingerprint identification, handwriting analysis, ballistics testing, etc.  He also makes a compelling case as to why Hoover’s extreme dislike of King, which resulted in the FBI’s antagonistic tactics, all but ensured the bureau’s most efficient, competent, and imaginative response to his death in an effort to staunch suspicions of agency complicity.  (Inevitably, conspiracy theories still abound, and the author doesn’t dispel the possibility that Ray had confederates.)   

Hellhound On His Trail is a breathtaking account of a racially divided America that reads like the best of fiction but boasts the kind of historical sustenance that can only be attributed to reality – and to meticulous and painstaking research.  Not only does Sides succeed in presenting King and his assassin as conflicted, fully-dimensional beings but he assuredly captures the backdrop of time and place, firmly establishing the significance of this tragedy in the greater landscape of 1960’s America (and beyond).  Though the story’s conclusion may be foregone, the reading is no less immediate…