One day I did a search for novels in which Lee Harvey Oswald is a character, and, among others, I turned up, The People v. Lee Harvey Oswald, by Walt Brown.
Walt Brown is interesting. A one-time FBI agent who went back to school to become a history professor, he says his life-long ambition, since he was a boy, was not to be either an FBI agent or a history professor, but to become a lawyer. He’d watched TV traffic courts as a boy, and was fascinated by them.
When Lee Harvery Oswald was arrested for the assassination of JFK, Brown immediately wished he could be Oswald’s lawyer.
When Oswald was murdered by mafia associate Jack Ruby, ending the possibility of a trial, and the media and the Warren Commision then combined to convict him without a trial, Brown got the idea of writing novel in which Oswald would get his trial.
When I did a search for this book in the Toronto Library system, it was not there. This is a gigantic library system that has almost 99% of the books I search for. Why didn’t it have this one?
Some people would say it’s a Canadian library, so the book doesn’t have the same importance to Canadians as to Americans. Well, in his time, JFK was the hope of most of the world, Canadians included.
Now, in defence of the library, I should say that there are a lot of books about the JFK assassination. Depending who you consult, there are at least 1,000. You wouldn’t expect to find them all in one library.
However, I’ve examined The People v. Lee Harvey Oswald on Amazon (where you can read a significant excerpt from most books, including mine), and it looks to me like it’s one of the most important of those books. I’ve ordered a copy and I hope to report on it soon.
Alan Conrad 