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Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides: review
Tom Horan reads a forensic investigation into the assassination of Martin Luther King, Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides
By Tom Horan
5:00AM BST 09 Jun 2010
Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of a lawyer, Hampton Sides was a child when Martin Luther King was murdered in his city. The fear he witnessed sweeping the United States that night in 1968 inspired him to write this account of the assassination, one that uses the techniques of the novel to inject life into a mountain of research and detail. While King is depicted with empathy and precision, he is dead by page 167 of 400. Sides focuses his story on James Earl Ray, the man who pulled the trigger, and the labyrinthine manhunt that led to his capture in London.
Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides
When he shot King, Ray was already on the run, having escaped prison in a bakery truck, hidden under loaves of bread. Throughout Hellhound on His Trail, Sides's fifth book and already a bestseller in the US, the author stitches together these and thousands of other facts, and the narrative often has a forensic feel. His title refers to bluesman Robert Johnson's song Hellhound on My Trail, but here the pursuer is the FBI, which devoted more money and men to the King case than to any in its history. In his own relentless accretion of information, Sides often mirrors the Bureau: "The bullet struck King's face at a velocity of 2,670ft per second."
If his book were a car with Sides at the wheel, it would be a Lincoln Continental, and the ride would go: quickly up through the gears to fifth; engage cruise control at 65; pass familiar landmarks; reach destination; that's it. That is to say that the ground is covered with efficiency and some style, but there is a shortage of dynamism and variety of tone. I was compelled to keep reading, but for every memorable incident – Ray calling The Daily Telegraph from a phone box in Earls Court to get a contact number for a mercenary – there was a stronger sense of familiar ground being retrodden.
The killings of the Sixties that have come to symbolise the decade – JFK, King, Bobby Kennedy, Sharon Tate – have all been covered in depth. To revisit one and merely describe what happened, no matter how meticulous the job, leaves the reader with a curious sensation.
Here is an event, to quote Sides, whose "shock waves continue to register across the globe". Yet in Hellhound there is no attempt to follow a single wave from April 4 1968 and see what it has caused 42 years later. This telling of the story exists in a time capsule, floating in the past, a polished and rigorous so-what.
To write about King and civil rights and not even mention Obama seems wilful to the point of being daft. Three weeks before his death, King even delivers a speech in Los Angeles called "The Meaning of Hope". There is so much that the author recounts that begs to be given renewed context now that we view it from 2010, when the world's most powerful man is black.
Even ignoring race, the book brings back to light another story that resonates today: the project that King was working on when he died, The Poor People's Campaign. Having forced legislative change on racial equality, it was his plan to march huge numbers of the poor of all races into Washington, to show that the real scandal in the world's richest country was not about colour but poverty. With King dead, a tepid version of the march goes ahead, but has little impact. What a contrast between the transformations in race in America – a black president – and the desperate lack of progress on poverty. This book is an elegant tale of murder and pursuit, but might have been so much more.
400pp, Allen Lane, £25 T £23 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or Telegraph Books
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