Word: mailer
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...definitive work on the nature of terrorism"-based on the newly discovered journals of a 19th century anarchist named Sergei Gennadiyevich Nechayev. Halliday's fee: $50,000. Such jack being rare for a hack, Halliday warily takes on the job. It leads him to Italy and to the mailer of the bomb, an unsavory entrepreneur of many aliases-Zander, Brochet, Hecht, Luccio-all of which, in various languages, mean pike, the fish...
...author of those words, Jack Henry Abbott, 37, had practiced that lethal sidestep on a fellow inmate while doing time in Utah state prison. He described the art of murder in one of some 1,000 letters that he wrote to Author Norman Mailer between 1977 and 1980, providing a cool but furious description of life behind bars. It was an existence filled with violence: the violence done to Abbott in roach-infested solitary-confinement cells and the violence that Abbott, long a prison incorrigible, did to others. His was a voice so choked with rage that he admitted...
Abbott began his correspondence with Mailer after reading that he was at work on a book about Gary Gilmore, a Utah inmate who was executed for murder in 1977. Abbott, who had spent all but 9½ months of his adult life in prison, offered to give the author a sense of "the atmospheric pressure" endured by long-term convicts like Gilmore. Mailer accepted the offer and was stunned by the hard-edged eloquence of the self-educated Abbott, who boasted: "Nine-tenths of my vocabulary I have never heard spoken." Wrote Mailer: "I felt all the awe one knows...
...What happened?" asked Scott Meredith, who is both Mailer's and Abbott's literary agent. "Every conversation I had with Jack, we talked about the future. Everything was ahead of him." John Dockendorff, director of the halfway house, was "absolutely baffled how Jack got the knife and how he hid it." Abbott had been "cooperative" and had even appeared for one of the attendance checks after the murder, before vanishing into the streets...
...another analogy from the 1960s, when Conservative Writer William F. Buckley Jr. championed the cause of a literarily gifted convicted killer, Edgar Smith, and helped set him at liberty to attempt murder again. Years later, Buckley acknowledged in an article how easily conned and naive he had been. Mailer, whose writings attest to his fascination with outlaws, has made only one comment on the Abbott affair: "A tragic situation all around...