I found my way to this novel the long way around after watching old television episodes on Youtube of "What's My Line?" from the 1960s. The most stellar member of the panel was Dorothy Kilgallen, a journalist. Wikipedia describes the unusual circumstances of her death: a healthy woman who did not appear to be suffering from depression swallows an lethal mix of pills and booze after having expressed skepticism about the JFK assassination in print and interviewing Jack Ruby. Perhaps there's nothing suspicious in that, or perhaps there is. Next I went seeking any books about Miss Kilgallen or that might feature her, and came up with this fictional thriller. Dorothy appears here as "Flo Kilgore", which would normally suggest he's taken liberal freedoms with her character. Flo, however, began as an amalgamation of more than one historical personage in one of his prior Heller novels. In this one, she is all Dorothy.

Max Collins is a marvel at establishing his period and setting. The number of historical figures and places he's able to integrate is astonishing, given how smoothly it's done; you might well believe he's simply making everything up, but the high degree of detail gives away his secret. Nearly everyone and everywhere, right down to the hotels his character stays at, you can google or read Wikipedia entries for. Apparently the whole series is like this (this is book 15, so I've obviously missed a few). The degree of incorporated historicity is incredible, so overwhelming that it actually gets in the way of the story. The degree of detail to which Collins makes links and connections creates a vast, complicated web far stranger than what normal fiction would weave, too much to keep track of without taking notes. Sometimes there's a shift out of easy thriller fiction into what feels like a complicated, conspiracy-unravelling morass of non-fiction that is more difficult to follow.

The KGB are shut out of the picture Collins draws, but Lyndon Johnson is heavily implicated as are Cuban exiles, the CIA and the mob. Jack Ruby in this telling knew everybody and anybody, including Oswald. The number of folks on the periphery who knew significant bits and pieces of the whole but were silenced or kept just quiet enough without blowing the lid off is the least likely aspect, but still almost believable for how it might have been managed. Of course Detective Heller cannot bring the assassins to justice - what reader would believe that? - but there's a satisfying conclusion to his own side of the story. ( )

Pass on this one if you're looking for a hard-boiled PI investigation. This time around Nathan Heller is playing second fiddle to Flo Kilgore a reporter seeking to shed light on the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. Only in the last pages of the book is there real 'Heller' action. ( )

Excellent. I thought at the time that Johnson had a lot to answer for ( )

The best of the Nathan Heller series is a series of three books that Heller has written about President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, including: (1) Bye Bye Baby about the last days of Ms. Monroe's life and the mysterious things about her tragic end, which seemed to also involve connections to the Mob and to the Kennedy brothers; (2) Target Lancer about an attempted JFK assassination in Chicago weeks before the Dallas tragedy and the links to anti-Castro groups and Jack Ruby and others; and (3) the lastest Nathan Heller masterpiece: Ask Not, which is about the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

Yes, there have already been a few other books written about the Kennedy assassination and one or two of them are actually worth reading, but none will take the reader deep into the mysteries surrounding the assassination as this one does. It begins by setting the time period. The Beatles are playing and Heller is providing security and manages to get his teenage son Harrison's autograph on
a napkin that the son clutches until the two walk outside and are almost run down by a car. It was dark out and it could have been accidental except that Heller thinks that one of the people in the car was one of the Cuban assassins he encountered in Chicago in Target Lancer. Someone might be trying to tie up some loose ends and Heller thinks he's one. Heller sets about putting out the word that he is not a loose end and that his son is off limits.

Meanwhile, Heller has a client in Texas whose husband has been part of a series of strange suicides. Somehow they don't appear to be suicides to him and they are all linked somehow to witnesses to the Dallas shooting. Heller isn't planning to investigate the Kennedy assassination. The Warren Commission is taking care of that. But, he finds himself dragged deeper and deeper into it as he, along with a famous reporter, interview people who knew Ruby in the clubs and, if there was a conspiracy, loose ends are being tied off. There's a theory here about the shooting and it doesn't involve any magic bullet.

This is an incredible book that is worth reading from cover to cover. If you have any curiousity about what happened in that book depository and on that grassy knoll, read this. You won't regret it. ( )

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Chicago, September 1964. Beatlemania sweeps the nation, the Vietnam War looms, and the Warren Commission prepares to blame a “lone-nut” assassin for the killing of President John F. Kennedy. But as the post-Camelot era begins, a suspicious outbreak of suicides, accidental deaths, and outright murders decimates assassination witnesses. When Nathan Heller and his son are nearly run down on a city street, the private detective wonders if he himself might be a loose end...

Soon a faked suicide linked to President Johnson’s corrupt cronies takes Heller to Texas, where celebrity columnist Flo Kilgore implores him to explore that growing list of dead witnesses. With the blessing of Bobby Kennedy—former US attorney general, now running for Senator from New York—Heller and Flo investigate the increasing wave of violence that seems to emanate from the notorious Mac Wallace, rumored to be LBJ’s personal hatchet man.

Fifty years after JFK’s tragic death, Collins’s rigorous research for Ask Not raises new questions about the most controversial assassination of our time.

My Review: I am a big believer in Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost always the correct one. In the case of the JFK assassination, the simplest explanation isn't the Warren Report one, it's the conspiracy theory. I suspect we'll all be dead before the truth comes out, and even then it most likely won't be the whole truth, but eventually the zombies of the facts will rise and stink up the Body Politic. Usually I think conspiracy theories are silly, for one major reason: The Gummint can't keep secrets it *wants* to keep very well. So all the leaks and the murders and deaths surrounding the assassination, in my mind, make it more not less likely that they're still trying to keep a lid on whatever really happened.

Okay, so that's out of the way. This novel is the third by Max Allan Collins, an incredibly prolific writer, dealing with JFK's assassination. (As a side note, it's extremely weird to me that the publisher AND Amazon do not make it easy to find the other two titles, and not one database groups the titles in a convenient, easy-to-reference way.) It's amazing to me that Nate Heller, Collins' Forrest-Gump-esque PI character of what, thirteen or fourteen novels so far, who is at every single important crime anywhere ever, isn't the star of a movie serial franchise a la Bond or TV series by now. In a world that gobbles up Mad Men it would seem to me to be a no-brainer.

Go know from this.

As I read along, I realized that I was being fed an angled view of the motivations and purposes of the assassins, a slant on the facts that brought certain facets and shapes into sharper relief than the Official Version would have us look at. As any actor can tell you, lighting matters. The same face, the same lumps and bumps, look very different seen from an angle and spotlit as opposed to head-on and strobed. I kept looking stuff up. I mean to tell you, my Google history is causing fantods at the NSA data farm even as we speak. I am amazed at the sheer breadth of Collins' scope. I am impressed at his precise eye for which piece of what conspiracy theory to use in weaving his tale. This is some intricate construction, folks, and deserves its own round of applause separate from any other praise merited by the book.

Does the book itself merit some praise? Yes. It's a given that Nate Heller will be a self-deprecating wisecracking noir hero. You like that trope or you don't, and I do. What's not a given is the way that the fictional exploits of Nate Heller enhance and augment the historical record of the day and time under discussion. Collins does that job very well.

The book is a beaut. The story is one central to our country's image of itself. The long, long tail of conspiracy theories proves that. And now, fifty years after that hideous, agonizing day, the perspective of a people who went through Watergate, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the sheer passage of time provide us with a new angle from which we can view the idea that our government can lie, cheat, steal, and kill in our names while pursuing selfish, disgusting, wrong, and venal aims.

Will Nate Heller bring to mind Edward Snowden or Pope Francis? No, more likely he'll bring to mind Bond and company. He's got a lot of knowledge about stuff that scares powerful people. He's willing to trade silence for comfort (his and ours). But that's not a surprise. This isn't a character whose morals we're in doubt about at this late date in the series. But he's our eyes and ears on the scene, and he's invaluable to us as readers because he's got no illusions at all. So he blows our comfy little illusions all to hell.

Where they belong, and where clinging to them will lead us. Go on this trip. Collins takes us to the heart of one of the most important moments in twentieth-century US history very very plausibly.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ( )