My Vanity Fair photo shoot at the Vatican (2006)
This is from my Vanity Fair photo shoot defending my book “Daughter of God” against Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Clone – https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2006/7/the-da-vinci-clone
17/05/24
Selections by Claude Opus 3 from Anthropic Sniper Fiction There have been several successful fiction books featuring snipers as central characters or focusing on sniping as a key element of the story. Here are some notable examples: “Point of Impact” by Stephen Hunter (1993) – The first book in the Bob Lee Swagger series, featuring […]
New Edition Of Slatewiper Available January 1, 2024
Free at Kindle Select and also available in paperback. As the clock clicks swiftly down, biotech entrepreneur Lara Blackwood races to stop ultra-right-wing extremists from using her stolen gene technology to start an ethnic purge that would kill billions worldwide — all for them to keep their bloodline “unpolluted.” Slatewiper is science-based thriller I originally […]
Brash Books Has Bought Most of My Backlist
Brash books has bought most of my thriller backlist! This box from Brash Books was the first tranche: my Tesla Bequest, and The Delphi Betrayal — an awesome Sunday delivery, October 30, 2033! Yeah, I am way behind on posting this. That’s because, just about the time Brash’s finished books were ready, I got an […]
I’ve Sold My Digital Wine Business Publications
After 14 years of founding Wine Industry Insight (wineindustryinsight.com) and running its News Fetch newsletter, I recently sold them to another passionate wine industry professional, Kevin Merritt. Not only is Kevin a wine lover and an experienced operator of tech companies, but he’s also a winemaker. Editor Becca Yeamans continues to curate the Daily News […]
Chat GPT-4 May Be An AI Genius, But Gets All Hot & Bothered By A Mainstream Thriller
For some time now, I have been haunted by a book I have never finished: The Nassau Directives I started it in the mid-1980s, but then got pulled in to helping launch two tech startups in Silicon Valley. When I moved to Sonoma in 1989, I picked up the book again. Then I got sidetracked […]
KSVY Interview Links
This is a quick set of follow-up links from my interview with Marcia Macomber at KSVY on Dcember 5, 2022 Playing Whack-A-Mole With Plastics And Your Health Center for Research On Environmental Chemicals In Humans Stealth Syndromes Human Study The published study
Hellhound: Dedicated To My African American Cousins & To Mississippi Social Justice Advocates
Dedication From The Book For the enormous contributions they have made – and are continuing to make for social justice and education, Hellhound is dedicated to The Mississippi Center for Justice (web link), and the Sunflower County Freedom Project (web link). Also, to my African-American cousins at the George Family Facebook Group who diligently search […]
End Paper #1: Why Did I Write Hellhound?
Hellhound is the result of a long and widely scattered set of my seemingly random life decisions whose order and direction seem inevitable only when taken as a whole. In short, I believe I have been led to this point in my life for specific, solid reasons. Many of those are described below and are […]
Hellhound: Multi-generational saga of racial injustice & redemption wrapped around a true-science thriller
The Core A multi-generational saga of racial injustice and redemption wrapped in a partly autobiographical action thriller that delves into the personal choices that lead to good and evil. Now at Amazon Kindle Unlimited and in paperback. The thriller wrapped around the core UCLA neurosurgeon Brad Stone believes he had long ago escaped his Faulknerian […]
The Times They Were A-Changin’ — book review
The Times They Were a-Changin’: 1964, the Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn by Robert S McElvaine Hardcover $28.99 – ISBN13: 9781950994106 My long-time friend Bob McElvaine has crafted a highly original and deeply insightful analysis of events from 1964 and their direct connections to the present day’s […]
Nuclear Radiation Hazards of Burning Coal? (Yep!)
This is an article I wrote shortly after leaving my Washington D.C investigative reporting career and started teaching journalism at UCLA. Ironically, this could be a worse hazard to public health than climate change. Yet, it has been ignored. Read the entire article at this link (pdf): NuclearCoal-Perdue
Investigative Reporting: Breaking Koreagate With Shredded Documents — Busting Up a Betting Ring Run by U.S. Capitol Police
Tongsun Park’s Paper Jigsaw Puzzle Solved Betting Ring Found on Capitol Hill
A genuine artifact of U.S. History with today’s social upheaval written all over it Ku Klux Klan Poster, 1971. Now an NFT.
View NFT and bid at OpenSea. Summer job with U.S. Department of Agriculture between my junior and senior years at Cornell. Majoring in Ecology, Evolution and Systematics. I did grunt work in the federal fire ant eradication program which involved the aerial dispersion of cornmeal containing the insecticide Mirex. My job was to drive […]
How 2 Billion pennies explain why social distancing is so vital to defeating COVID-19 (And not killing Grandma)
Note: This article is a cross-post of a March 20, 2020 article reprinted by permission of the Stealth Syndromes Project which underpins a study approved by the University of California San Francisco Medical School’s Committee on Human Research. The study is funded by the Center for Research on Environmental Chemicals in Humans. These two exponential/geometric […]
Les Whitten – Tribute
See also: What The Argo Movie Got Wrong About Shredded Documents I originally posted the text, below on James Grady’s Facebook page the day after Les Whitten died. Jim is a good friend — and former investigative reporting co-conspirator who knew Les even better than I did. The last time I saw Les was March […]
Mississippi Memories and the new Civil Rights Museum in Jackson
The opening yesterday of the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum dredged up some memories, both old and new. And that led me to dig up the following article — “Mississippi: A Giant Step to Moderation” — written after I graduated from Cornell back when when I was sure I would never live in Mississippi again. […]
Mississippi: Remove The Confederate Flag From Your State Flag!
I am the great-great-great-grandson of U.S. Senator J. Z. George, a Confederate brigadier general, chief justice of the state supreme court and one of the chief architects of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890. That constitution which is still the governing document of the state, codified all of the elements of Jim Crow segregation, most notably […]
Among Maya Angelou’s Last Words: Praise For An Overlooked Freedom Summer Book
Among Maya Angelou’s last published writings is a tribute to a new, but mostly overlooked, book that sheds valuable context on Mississippi’s Freedom Summer – on its 50th commemoration. “The murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner rocked me to the core of my very being,” wrote Angelou in the foreward to My […]
#BringBackOur Girls – Outrage Tunnel Vision?
Outrage is a fickle thing. Yes, the kidnapping of an entire girl’s school is outrageous and wrong. Selling these young girls as brides is nothing less than than pimping for pedophilia. But long before #BringBackOurGirls made outrage all the current rage, millions of girls — many of them just 11 or 12 years old — […]
Asides
Snipers Briefing For Henwood Ranch Range Day For Writers
NOTE: Please address questions of comments to: lperdue@ideaworx.com Why This Post? This briefing is based on my personal experience with a type of weapon that has been used by snipers, and on research I have conducted with military snipers and document research. It also reflects my own author efforts to create credible sniper characters for […]
The story of an author’s powerful Faulknerian family told through the lens of a thriller about why good people do bad things.
This is a very personal book for me. When I set out to write a thriller about what makes good people do bad things, realized that I had to look no farther for examples than my own family. While the immune system of my Faulknerian ancestry had rejected me over my support for civil rights, […]
Author’s Note To Hellhound
In 2005, two-thirds of this book was published in hardcover by Macmillan/Forge titled Perfect Killer. This edition – Hellhound: The Author’s Cut — incorporates the missing third, along with all of the words in the previously published version. I’ve also added several thousand words of supplemental material. Please see “The accidental 3-book novel” (End Paper […]
Hellhound: End Paper #3 – The accidental 3-book novel
Two-thirds of Hellhound was previously published in hardcover by Macmillan/Forge as Perfect Killer. That incomplete version has about 110,000 words. By comparison, the length of the average novel varies widely, but is generally considered to be around 50,000 to 70,000 words. By contrast, Hellhound, contains 174,110 words. That restored third finally completes the book with […]
Hellhound End Paper #2: Write what you know
”What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? ”What did I know about truly and care for the most? ”Ask those questions of yourself, then write whatever story comes to mind.” – Ernest Hemingway: To the best of my ability, I have written what I know and truly care for […]
The Townhouse Operation Exposed
Breaking the Townhouse Operation meant that I had to sue the Watergate Special Prosecutor. The legal bills were all min=e Because Congressional News Service was my own company I founded. The bills were in the high tens of thousands of dollars and, if I had not been successful, it would have meant bankruptcy. The now-deceased […]
Excite and eBay: Flirting With Disaster? Firearm sales may pose a potential litigation time bomb for eBay, Excite and perhaps other Internet auction sites
(see also: Why eBay Alone Draws Fire in Online Auction Probe) Tactical Police Shotgun … Remington 870 Police Magnum 12-gauge shotgun with Surefire Model 618 Tactical Light. Weapon is solid black with a parkerized finish. Light is operated by a touch pad located on the pump. Shoots buck shot or slug. — For sale at […]
Lewis Perdue – A glimpse at journalism experience
Lewis Perdue taught journalism and investigative reporting courses as a regular faculty member at Cornell University, and UCLA and as an adjunct professor at Elmira College.He also served as the advisor to the UCLA Daily Bruin student newspaper. He has more than 50 years of experience spanning local reporting to enterprise and investigative reporting in […]
Stealth Terror: More Frightening, More Profitable
Why would stealth terror be more frightening and more profitable? From Chapter Fifty of Die By Wire A dense gauze of cigarette smoke packed the windowless room so tightly the naked white walls seemed to recede toward an unseen horizon. An unornamented round table barely a meter in diameter rested on gray institutional carpeting, its […]
Malaysia Airlines Flt 370: Charity For Family Support?
I’m looking for guidance on a legitimate charity that supports families of passengers on Malaysia Airlines Flt 370. I’d like to donate my income from all the recent increased sales of my book, Die By Wire. Why? Because less than a day after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on March 8, I received emails from […]
Book Bastards: Loveable Books, Loathable Writers
“Tolstoy I’m sure was an incredible jackass, but I still love him. I still love Stevens, I still love Pound. If we didn’t read people who were bastards, we’d never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards. We bastards love people who love our books, regardless. Read the rest of […]
Amazonians Won’t Let Amazon Own The Amazon
Amazon can’t have a monopoly on the Amazon like they almost do with books. According to The Register: “Web supermarket Amazon’s bid to create new top-level domain name .amazon has hit a dead end…Committee members of internet overlord ICANN – which oversees the world’s DNS and other such technical stuff – rejected the e-tailer’s application […]
Every New Day, A New Room … But Only Once
“No one ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and they’re not the same person.” — Heraclitus (Gender-neutral edits added) Characters in my thrillers have relied on that quote and the meaning behind it more than once. But the true meaning came home for me last night while falling […]
Prism Spying More About Secrecy Than Data
The real scandal in the NSA Prism revelations is not so much about what data is kept or the merits of how that may keep us safe. The real issue is the fact that the whole program was kept so secret. The US was founded on the principle that those who govern do so ONLY […]
Memories And Time – The Beginning Of A New Approach
All we are is memories and time. Think about that for a moment while I explain a different approach I am taking with some of my writing. I’ve tried for decades to deal with deep issues … serious things … in the context of my main fiction genre, thrillers. I put the thoughts — and […]
Radical Egyptian Clerics Seek to Legalise Child Brides
Radical Egyptian Clerics Seek to Legalise Child Brides Pedophile sex traffickers are the sorts of perverts that heroine Mira Longbow goes after in Die By Wire
A Veterans Day Thanks To A Hero
Click to enlarge. And click that one for full size. A Veteran’s Day salute to my uncle, LTC Buddy Barner, USAF. I dedicated my book Perfect Killer to him and wrote him in as a character before he died. More images here.
David Stone: Superb Writing in Thrillers
David Stone is, for my reading taste, one of the best writers on the planet in any genre. His ability to use the best possible words to evoke a mood, describe a character or set a scene just resonates with me … and makes me envious as hell. Below are a few of my favorite […]
Vonnegut For President
Vonnegut for President! Platform: Cat’s Cradle. Slogan (from Chapter 4): “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” Clearly a man of his word! He has my vote!
