Before settling into his current career as an author and private equity entrepreneur, Stephen "Steve" Hillard was a teacher at Rikers Island Prison, a welder, a carpenter, and a practicing lawyer. Publication of his first book in 2011, Mirkwood: A Novel About JRR Tolkien, resulted in controversy when the Tolkien Estate sought to ban the book, to which the author responded with a lawsuit in federal court. After the dispute received international attention and the case was later settled, the book went on to become an Amazon Fantasy Best Seller, recipient of a national IPPY Award, and was published world-wide in Spanish by an imprint of Planeta. An epic spin-out of the book's main fantasy character led to another series that is in development as a TV project by The Ovation Network.
Stephen's latest novel is KNOLL: The Last JFK Conspiracist, which follows a young protégé of Edward Snowden who flees the NSA after she learns that her project (KNOLL) is designed to detect and destroy any person with new facts about the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. The project’s latest target: a small-town attorney, son of a mysteriously murdered cop, who has just discovered his family’s involvement with deceased Mafia Kingpin Carlos Marcello, and the events that day in Dallas. All paths lead to a small Louisiana town that still hides its secrets, and converge on the doorstep of Marcello’s still-active savant of assassins. He is unstoppable. His creed: Omerta Is Forever.
Stephen stops by In Reference to Murder today to chat about writing and researching the book:
As the author, let me first confess: I am among the majority of Americans who believe that JFK was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy.
From that public view have flowed somewhere between 4,000 and 40,000 books, movies, TV shows, comics, songs, websites and, of course, questions. The topic has incredible legs. Most, if not all, of the perspectives in those sources tend to look backwards.
In writing KNOLL, I wanted to explore things looking forward, but with a sense that time is running short. As the subtitle, The Last JFK Conspiracist, suggests, I wanted to explore the subtext of whether this ultimate murder mystery is now becoming The Ultimate Cold Case, forever unresolved and therefore forever disquieting, or whether it could still be solved.
How might such a solution happen? After researching the non-fiction sources, the videos, the movies. and the really great but limited number of novels covering the assassination, as well as archives and transcripts of oral histories of people involved, I interviewed cold-case forensic experts. Not surprisingly, their common view was that a solution would most likely happen in one, or both, of two ways: the proverbial “lucky break” and/or the application of new technology.
I had known for years where the story would take place — a very closed Mafia world circa 1963 that was off the beaten path of JFK conspiracists. I had a wealth of information. In 1963, my brother was playing in the house band at the nightclub owned by Mafia Kingpin Carlos Marcello in Bossier City, Louisiana. Bossier City was the notorious “Sin City of the South” that catered to the secret vices of Dallas. Marcello was friendly with the band and my brother saw and heard a lot. Elvis, dressed down, also showed up at that nightclub one rainy night. At the same time, my father was the night manager at the main downtown Shreveport hotel across the Red River where vice and Mob connections were part of room service. One of my boyhood friends in Bossier City was the son of a made Mafia guy. This town, secretive and a key getaway for the Louisiana Mob, became the locus for the logistics of the “shooting” part of the conspiracy in the book.
I also grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado, boyhood home of blacklisted, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo penned and largely produced Executive Action (1973), the first movie to portray the assassination to murder JFK. Trumbo was convinced that there was a conspiracy. My affinity for Trumbo and his work led me to include him as a character
Finally, as a lawyer, I had the professional experience of spending a lot of time in Washington, D.C. lobbying on the Hill. This included working closely with senior Senators on intelligence and defense committees. With the right access, it doesn’t take long to recognize how things work.
Given the location and this milieu of place and time and certain key events, I needed characters. I didn’t really create them — they walked up to me in my head and introduced themselves. Of the two protagonists, each personified a solution path. One was caught up in the dilemma of discovering that his family just might have been involved in the assassination. The other is a fugitive NSA analyst who discovers that her project (KNOLL) was designed not to uncover the truth about the murder, but to finally bury it, to eliminate any last sources of evidence, human or otherwise. She updates the JFK dialogue and brings it into the present, with the almost unfathomable capabilities of modern intelligence gathering. Those capabilities are currently missing from the world of JFK conspiracists research.
I then allowed each character to develop their own sets of passions, foibles, flaws and history. That, of course, is the interesting part in writing fiction. How does someone react react when they discover that their father (himself the victim of an unsolved murder) was part of a murder conspiracy, particularly one in which the President was assassinated? How does one decide to flee the NSA and the country, Edward Snowden-like, with a cache of information and insights about the purge of clues and witnesses (and, secretly, with ongoing access to the main NSA computer system)? And what forces are still out there, inexorably moving to destroy each of these protagonists?
These, along with a myriad set of true facts that begin to fit together in new ways, were the key writer’s ingredients. I hope the book stirs reflection on the basic question: might this case still be solved, or are we the last real JFK conspiracists?
You can read more about Stephen Hillard and the book via his website, LinkedIn profile, or his Amazon profile or book page.
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