The mention of the RAG house is a nod to PRAG House, a collective household occupying an old mansion on Capitol Hill where I lived with my young daughter for a few years during the 1980s. PRAG House is a remnant of the many collectives that sprang up during the Sixties and Seventies—the acronym PRAG stands for Practical Revolutionary Action Group. It was started in 1972 by a collective of University of Washington professors and graduate students who wanted to practice living communally. It is still in existence and is one of the oldest cooperative households in the city, probably because of the innovative creation of a land trust (also still in existence) to hold the property on behalf of the current residents, thus eliminating the need for constant transfer of ownership. There was no printing press in the basement, but the older kids used to scare the younger ones by claiming it was haunted by the ghost of a woman named Ellie Prag who was murdered in the house. Ellie Prag was actually the name under which the main house telephone number was listed in the phone directory.
My invention of the radical group that Ellie Foley joined was based on the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group which kidnapped Patty Hearts, which operated out of San Francisco and Los Angeles, not Seattle. I simply posited a similar group with a charismatic but deluded leader and a willing cadre of mostly women followers, who kidnap the Pacific Northwest equivalent of Patty Hearst, the heiress of a logging fortune. The mix-up between the Seattle PI and the FBI during the planned bank robbery, which was being reported to both sides by two different informants, is certainly plausible as both agencies often worked these cases. Ellie’s escape through a ventilation vent is more unlikely, but I did know the bank well as it was where I took the deposits when I worked for Ecotope, a small environmental energy business that was started by in the Seventies, along with many other organizations that upheld the values of the protesters, including Country Doctor community clinic, Rainbow Groceries and Natural Remedies, and the Experimental College, where I taught for many years.
I learned a lot about the way the FBI used informants to provoke crimes by reading several books. Known as Cointelpro, the FBI, under the leadership of J Edgar Hoover, targeted the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, Students of a Democratic Society, and other groups they considered dangerous through underhanded tactics designed to “increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections.”
One book that was illuminating was Last Man Standing by Jack Olson, about Geronimo Pratt, a highly-decorated black Vietnam vet who was framed for a murder at a tennis court in Santa Monica and spent twenty-five years in prison. Pratt was Minister of Defense of the Los Angeles Black Panther Party after the killing of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins during a Black Student Union meeting at UCLA in 1969. (The same year I graduated from high school and started attending UCLA. I’m surprised my parents let me go there. They didn’t permit me to go to UC Berkeley or San Francisco State, my first and second choices, which is how I ended up living at home and attending UCLA where I saw Joan Baez and Tom Hayden at an anti-war rally where draft cards were actually burned, and enrolled in Angela Davis’s philosophy class, which did not meet during the Spring Strike of 1970.)
Perhaps the saddest story from the Seattle scene is the police shooting and killing of Larry Ward in 1970, a wounded black veteran who had been recruited by a police informant, who actually drove him to the scene, to plant a bomb at a racist realty company. Another informant was the key witness for the prosecution in the Seattle 7 trial.
Although I read many books about the various black power movements, I only lightly touched on their struggles through the introduction of Darrell Darnell, the black veteran and policeman who is related to a family of black activists, a nod to the Dixon family. Two brothers, Aaron and Elmer Dixon, founded the first Black Panther chapter outside of California. They began a program serving breakfast to hungry African-American children and helped open community medical and legal clinics that still operate today. Aaron Dixon’s memoir about his time in the Panthers, My People Are Rising, was not published until 2012 so I did not read it while working on this novel. Like many of the revolutionary movements of the time, the Panther party ultimately splintered into different factions. Elaine Brown’s book, A Taste of Power, was useful in tracking that disintegration and also showcased the difficulty of being a woman, especially a woman with a child, working in the black power and anti-war movements.
Some of the characters in this book I borrowed from my friend Curt Colbert’s book, All Along the Watchtower. Curt was the one who invented Boo Riley. His picture of Boo, as a stone-cold killing machine, is quite different from mine. I saw him more as a Big Lebowski type surfer dude. And Curt also invented Smitty, the disabled vet living in Astoria, Oregon. We both collaborated on these characters as we worked together on our separate novels. I don’t remember who came up with the idea of Smitty writing his memoir, but I do remember insisting that Curt use a passage from the memoir as a plot point in his novel. I’m not sure who came up with Smitty’s baking business either, but it was certainly useful in helping me connect my detective, Rachel Stern, with the woman she’s been chasing throughout the novel.
I had a great time researching, writing, and revising this novel. I hope you enjoy reading it.
Acknowledgments
Of course, I need to thank my loyal writing partner, Curt Colbert. We’ve been writing together for years. After writing All Along the Watchtower and Hard Rain, we wrote a series of humorous mysteries about a talking Chihuahua under the pen name Waverly Curtis. The first book in the series is Dial C for Chihuahua.
I also want to thank my writing group: Linda Anderson, Rachel Bukey, Martha Crites and Janis Wildy, who commented on every chapter as I read it out loud to them at our weekly meetings and were always enthusiastic.
Francesca Penchant, who was a student in my novel writing classes at Hugo House, created a fantastic cover for her novel-in-progress (still unpublished! possibly still unfinished? I’m waiting for it). So when Curt and I were looking for covers for these parallel books, I asked her if she would design covers for us. She did a marvelous job.
I also need to thank Phil Garrett of Epicenter Press who agreed to publish Hard Rain as a print book but gave me permission to create this e-book version in conjunction with the publication of Curt’s book, All Along the Watchtower, in October of 2019.
And finally, thanks to my current writing partner, E. A. Stewart. She was the person who invited me to move into PRAG house so many years ago, thus certainly contributing to the atmosphere of this novel. We’ve been writing together almost daily for over four years and those hours are the best hours of my day. And it’s thanks to her expertise in publishing (she helped me published my first book, Celebrating the Seasonal Holy Days, back in 1991) that my Word document was converted into this pleasing and easy-to-read e-book.
Copyright
Hard Rain
By Waverly Fitzgerald
Copyright © 2019 by Waverly Fitzgerald
Published by Genesta Press
505 Broadway E #237
Seattle WA 98102
www.genestapress.com
This book is provided for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This book, or any parts of it, may not be reproduced without permission.
Cover design by Francesca Penchant
Cover photo taken by MirianaL. Found on Flickr and covered by the Creative Commons License.
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