As the 50th anniversary of the assassination nears, Stephen King was first out of the gate, with his 11/22/63. Now comes news that former Morning News scribe Bill Minutaglio and his buddy Steven L. Davis will be coming out with a book about the worst day in Dallas. Here’s how the press release describes the nonfiction book:
Dallas 1963 follows the city through three turbulent years, beginning with the Kennedy election in November 1960 and ending on November 22, 1963. Set against the backdrop of a nation in transition, Minutaglio and Davis explain what the President and his team were thinking and doing in those three years, and why they could never have really understood the swirling forces awaiting them in Texas, where a rich and surprising ensemble of characters defined the city many people would blame for killing the President: rabid politicos, gangsters, unsung civil rights leaders, strippers, billionaires, defrocked military generals, fundamentalist preachers, clandestine heroes, and marauding police, among them.
The book will be published by Twelve in 2013, to coincide with the assassination’s anniversary. North American rights were sold in a heated three-day auction by Dallas power literary agent David Hale Smith, who used to run his own DHS Literary but then sold out to the Man and now works for an enormous, soulless, New York-based publishing behemoth called InkWell Management. David used to be a friend of mine. I asked him to confirm for me that the book had sold for $650,000 and a reservation for four at momofuku. He just put his stockinged feet up on his desk, threw his head back, and laughed like Max Cady through the smoke from a fine Cuban cigar.
