Customer Reviews

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin

5 star:		(89)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Yale-trained historian Hampton Sides hails from Memphis. His father had worked on the MLK trial as a lawyer. So it's no wonder that this fascinating book feels like a personal memoir, an intimate story from the writer. This book is the story of all the characters involved in the murder of Martin Luther King, their characteristics, their habits, their quirks. And, so typical of Hampton Sides, this book is thoroughly researched, well-written, and well-organized.

I was just a child in my single digits when MLK was assassinated. I read this book to learn more about the story. And what a story this is. Sides spoke with every witness, every neighbor of all the people in the book. He traveled thousands of miles to relive the towns and travel routes of the people in this book. He didn't leave anything to the imagination.

And, typical of Sides, chapters are short and ideal for quick readings. Personalities switch often: starting with Eric Galt (James Early Ray) and his penchant for Mexican whores and cheap photographs, to nemisis J Edgar Hoover, President Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace and the man MLK himself (who lived quite a shameful life behind curtains), this book is laden with historical passages never before revealed.

Although we all know how the killing of MLK transpired, Sides does not take sides with anyone. No character in this book is herofied. What the reader experiences is the rising backfrop to the actual focus of this book: the hunt for James Earl Ray. Out of the 400 pages of this book, the first 164 take place before the MLK assassination.

We learn about the distrust J Edgar Hoover had toward MLK. We read about James Earl Ray's shyness, Johnson's rudeness and George Wallace's resoluteness. The reader finally finishes this book not completely wanting to take just one side anymore, but none.

I highly recommend this book for history fans, people fascinated with FBI history and its people, social history of the 1960s and admirers of MLK. It's a hard book to put down once you get started, so happy reading. Your mind will thank you for the intellectual insight.

Hellhound on His Trail / Hampton Sides
Sides does it again, his book reads like a CSI mystery! In choosing the assignation of Martin Luther King, Sides had an incredible amount of historical documentation at his disposal. This massive body of evidence is the raw ingredients that Sides uses to fire-up a tight and fascinating thriller. Thanks to an unprecedented international investigation and the rich perspective of time, Sides stalks every move of Earl Ray and MLK. To this point, the title of Side's book holds a second meaning. Hellhound opens with Earl Ray's daring escape from prison a year before the assignation and it ends with Ray's last escape attempt several years after the murder. The story in between is pretty incredible. Culturally, Hellhound also delivers the colorful and turbulent 60's to our door. Through Side's craft, we relive the American era of southern segregating from both sides, black and white. What a book, 5 stars!

Hellhound on his Trail is an outstanding book. Sides writes about all that happened before and after the assasination of ML King In Memphis in 1968. His writing style is captivating at a minimum. Even though we know how it turns out, I couldn't put the book down. The reader learns what is going on inside the King organization prior to the killing and what is going on with the assassin, James Earl Ray. The author is from Memphis and his love and concern for the city shows in the way he invovles Memphis in the unfolding drama. The tension around the actual shooting, and the unbelievably thorough search for Ray were the best parts of the book for me. By the time the good guys have Ray under arrest, I felt like I had grown to actually know him. I would have liked to see the author wrtie a bit more about the trial and Ray's time in prison, but I guess the book had to have boundaries. A great, and fun read. Unqualified five star recommendation

I'm not sure what to call this type of writing. I don't think it qualifies as history when a choice is made to not use a person's real name throughout most of the book, or when there are several instances when the author writes something to the effect of "we can't be sure what happened during the next hour, but maybe it was this", or when Ray's words are used as the primary basis for describing his travels while acknowledging in "A Note on Sources" that Ray's stories changed frequently over the years. If this book had been a made for TV movie, it might have been labeled as a dramatization of actual events.

I don't mean to seem too negative about the book--I didn't dislike it, although I did feel it was overly long and filled with often irrelevant details. Does it matter to anyone that at the location where Ray abandoned his car, the children's slide lay on its side? On the other hand, I did learn that Ray stayed at the same hotel I've used in New Orleans. But while the subject matter was of five star interest to me because I have respect for Martin Luther King and his analysis of United States society, and remember 1968 with great sadness, I felt that the book fit firmly in the three star "It's OK" category.

The conceit of not using Ray's name just didn't work for me, especially because the name used during most of the book was Eric Galt. Every time I read it, a tiny piece of my brain would wonder, "Hmm, did Ray read Ayn Rand?" and in fact later in the book I learned that many people wondered that at the time. But we never get an answer, and that pattern is repeated with some other questions that occurred to me as I read--the issue's mentioned later on, but with no resolution. I'm not sure if no one knows the answers or if they're just not passed on to the reader.

My interest in the book picked up when it reached the stage of detailing the investigation and hunt for Ray, presumably because I knew less about that than about the events of King's life. After hundreds of pages of details, the wrap-up seemed rushed (Ray's legal issues, prison escape, and death are all dealt with in a ten page Epilogue primarily focused on the drama of the escape and recapture) but that is accurately reflected in the book's subtitle.

I did take note of several books mentioned in the pages about sources which I expect to read and will probably enjoy more than this one. That will likely be this book's most lasting effect on me, so for that benefit, I'm glad I read it.

Hampton Sides spins a gripping tale of the weeks and months leading up to and beyond the assassination of Martin Luther King that leaves the reader feeling let down. As a narrative history, it keeps your interest but the reader who wants to go back and find a reference will be disappointed to find there is no index. There is a tremendous bibliography but no footnotes, either. So for me, it didn't work. I enjoyed the read but came away frustrated. There is so much in this case one has to keep track of that an index becomes essential, in my view.
The casual reader will be pleased, I believe. But Mr. Sides' penchant for referring to Ray by his various aliases even beyond when it becomes simply an affectation on the author's part is somewhat cumbersome.
Overall, though, not bad.

I was impressed with "Hellhound On His Trail": despite knowing a bit about the MLK assassination, I found myself fascinated by its thorough examination of the months immediately before and after the assassination. Author Hampton Sides doesn't focus on spinning or debunking specific conspiracy theories; instead he focuses on James Earl Ray's actions during 1967-68. He begins with Ray's clever escape from a Missouri penitentiary: we see how Ray painstakingly planned and carried out a scheme whereby he hid in a large metal box used to carry bread made at the prison bakery. He then tracks Ray as he flees Missouri, crisscrossing the country to avoid detection, taking some legitimate jobs and creating fake identities as he goes. While Sides doesn't spend a lot of time going over various of the conspiracy theories out there -- many of which rely on complex and often nonsensical scenarios -- it's pretty clear that he believes Ray was, in fact, the actual shooter. (Having shown how Ray tracked King's movements, purchased the rifle and other equipment used in the actual shooting, was present at the scene and seen fleeing the scene immediately thereafter, and how there just isn't any concrete evidence of a shadowy named "Raoul" being the shooter instead, it's hard not to agree that Ray was the shooter.) He leaves open the possibility of whether Ray might have been trying to earn a "bounty" allegedly offered for King's death or that his brothers may have helped him before or after the fact. His detailed description of Ray himself, though, is the most damning evidence indicating Ray was the murderer, including Ray's criminal past, his work for the George Wallace campaign, his escapes from more than one penitentiary, and his careful culling of identities in Toronto to create travel documents for himself.

Overall, an interesting and detailed look at the historical record, and an absorbing read.

This is simply a mesmerizing book. Sides takes us first day by day, and then minute by minute, through how the two disparate paths of these men--one a common criminal and one a Nobel Peace Prize winner--start to intersect. The author leads us through James Earl Ray's numerous aliases, which was a useful device to see what falsehood he was perpetrating at the time and why. He came from a family in disorder, with a "hundred-year history of crime and squalor and hard luck." Great-grandpa was hanged for gunning down six men and beloved Uncle Earl (presumably a namesake) was a convicted rapist who threw carbolic acid in his wife's face. And as to his immediate family? Siblings John and Jerry were felons, Marjorie at age 6 burned herself alive while playing with matches, Max (who was mentally disabled) and Susie were given up for adoption after their father deserted the family, Buzzy and his girlfriend died when his car plunged into the Mississippi River, and Melba was a street prostitute who spent much of her time in mental hospitals. Mom Lucille died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 51 and dad became a recluse on a little farm in Missouri, only to spout racist views when journalists discovered him there after the murder.

MLK, Jr. comes off better, as he would have to, but he was smoking and drinking and eating badly and womanizing heavily right up to his premature end at age 39. He had been jailed 18 times, his house had been firebombed, he'd been stabbed by a deranged black woman, punched in the face by a Nazi, struck in the head with a rock, burned in effigy, and was constantly under surveillance by the FBI. "He'd marched all over the country in the face of tear gas, police dogs, cattle prods, and water cannons. He received death threats almost daily. His marriage was crumbling." Increasingly, he was being viewed as a leader past his prime, whose nonviolent approach was being challenged by black-power radicals like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. He presaged his own untimely death.

In any event, this book traces the movements of James Earl Ray (called by his alias Eric Galt throughout most of the narrative) so minutely, that the reader has a sense of almost being present. Conversations are repeated verbatim on both his side and King's, which conveys the same sense of immediacy. Such is Sides' meticulous research and attention to detail that he dispels any notion of a conspiracy, unless Ray had the occasional assistance of a brother or acquaintance in a peripheral role, which was never proven. Along the way, we are treated to revealing vignettes of Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Ramsey Clark, Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and the like. Coretta Scott King emerges as beatific in the face of almost unendurable hardship. These tasty cameos flesh out the story so that one can grasp the context in which events took place, making this account a single-stop history lesson.

An escaped prisoner at beginning of the book, Ray goes on the lam to Canada and Europe after the assassination. Crime lovers will relish the manhunt to get him back, with police and FBI agents laboring over clues (as in going over fingerprints one by one with a magnifying glass). They chase him down, he pleads guilty, he recants and bids for a trial that he never got, then he escapes again and gets caught again. He eventually dies at age 70 of Hepatitis C while still incarcerated. By any measure, this is a great true-crime story, writ large because of the players involved. I couldn't put it down.

This book is a fast easy read. The in retelling the events he alternates every few pages between what Martin Luther King was doing versus James Earl Ray. The book is 397 pages, the assassination takes place on page 166, from there the book alternates between the personalities in Kings entourage, the authorities investigating the murder, and James Earl Ray. The book is VERY well researched covering minute detail that had been reported by store clerks, motel owners, laundry mat workers, prison guards, FBI agents from low level to high level etc. This covered James Earl Ray escaping prison about 1 year before the assassination to the time he get captured about 2 months after the assassination.
One very interesting aspect of this story is how James Earl Ray did not plan out his escape from the MOMENT he pulls the trigger. But he still was on the run for about 65 days, gets to Canada, then England, then Portugal, then back to England!
However, there is a style the author used that did not embellish on important detail, but is a style to retell the story. Here is an example from page 138 (Galt is James Earl Ray):
"The desk clerk, Henrietta Hagermaster, put him in room 34. After paying the nightly rate in cash, Galt pulled his car through the narrow enteranceway and parked directly in front of his door. He inserted the key into the lock, turned it, and stepped inside."
There also is a fair amount of dialogue by all parties in the book.
I will repeat - there is a massive amount of detail in this book that I assume is correct - things like James Earl Ray `picked up a six-pack of Schlitz beer at a bait shop in Southhaven Mississippi.'

The reason I don't give the book 5 stars, is it is unclear where James Earl Ray got money while living for a year as an escapee from prison. It was barely touched upon, but I wanted more. Also, James Earl Ray was a racists clearly from the information given in the book - but no analysis on why a petty thief was motivated to commit a political assassination. However, I still highly recommend this book.

Hampton Sides does a masterful job assembling the record of newspaper articles, memoirs and other files to tell a compelling narrative of the stalking, assassination and search for the killer of Martin Luther King. Perhaps most compelling is the first sixty percent of the book in which King's and Ray's paths are tracked separately, back and forth, with interesting period details--giving excellent perspective on the historical context--as they head towards the terrible collision the reader knows is coming. Sides is a writer, and the narrative sometimes assumes or fills in a little more than a historian would be comfortable with, in terms of the thoughts, feelings and motivations of characters, but certainly not to a problematic degree and Sides' balanced presentation (no saints here) more than offsets this and leaves the truly heroic King legacy all the stronger for presenting the human being. The killer is also extremely interesting, a mixture of smart and stupid, with an unusual amount of access to an assassin's thinking.

Some additional observations: (i) Ray's turn from small-time drifter/cracker/crook enjoying his freedom, to King stalker committed to assassination is clearly marked but also completely unexplained. The record does not provide the reason, so the book doesn't either; (ii) much of Ray's thinking described in the book comes from King's killers own account, the net effect is to avoid demonization, but also to diminish the despicable horror of his actions; (iii) was Ray part of a conspiracy? The book left me thinking probably not, with a better understanding of how the answer could really be "no," but some (nongovernmental) "conspiracy" possibilities are also suggested; (iv) the FBI manhunt is also interesting, for the large and small techniques they used and in contrast to what they would do today, where fingerprint evidence and electronic searches would have led to a much more rapid identification and because how easily Ray could have gotten (further) away.

The book was "okay" as far as it goes. The research seems exhaustive, but you never really get a picture of the assassin. Perhaps, that is the point. Motivation is still missing. Where the money came from is not fully answered. There seemed to be something "missing"; but that may simply be part of the mystery of this assassination.