My name is Donald Allen. I have been a close friend and business advisor to the author. I was a pilot in Vietnam, a member of law enforcement and successful entrepreneur. I have worked with members of the Intelligence community, for the DNC, and two presidential candidates. I am also the gentleman who introduced the author to an ex-pat known as “the Ferryman,” and in part was responsible for a journey the author took into Mexico to find a girl who had escaped a violent cult. That journey, which put the author’s life at risk, became the background for his award-winning novel GOD IS A BULLET. What follows are excerpts from the author’s letters and diaries as unearthed by his French editor Marie-Caroline Aubert. These deal not only with how his novel THE WORLD EVE LEFT US (TROIS FEMMES) came to be, but GOD IS A BULLET is also referenced, along with the true story of the author’s journey that became GOD IS A BULLET.
THE WORLD EVE LEFT US (TROIS FEMMES)
…what most people don’t realize is that the Bronx of the fifties on through the seventies was so quintessentially America. The range of ethnicities there, the extremes of politics, the poverty and wealth, the deeply entrenched views of religion and racism. You can track the changes on those streets from the fifties when the darker impulses were more latent on into the late seventies when they became the raw sunlight of the world we know now. You can document the march of alienation and destruction as it was confronted by resolve and survival in neighborhood after neighborhood after neighborhood.
The True Story Behind GOD IS A BULLET
Hughes asked to meet. Seems there’s some danger around the edges of his life to be dealt with. He’s picked up chatter a brother might have slipped Witness Protection and is dead. Hughes has to make one of those “nasty” little trips… and you know all too well, Don, what that means. I gave him a few contact names. Maybe I’ll head out and do some hunting on the ground for him. After all, I owe Hughes. If it weren’t for him, Rose might never have gotten her daughter back and out of Mexico. And me, there would be no GOD IS A BULLET. (Rose is the actual person Case Hardin in the novel GOD IS A BULLET is based on.) He asked about the manuscript I was writing. (That manuscript is the true story of Boston’s journey into Mexico which gave him background and a world of characters for his novel GOD IS A BULLET. The author left that manuscript, along with a number of others in his family’s care.) Hughes has a way of relating that is ruthlessly detached, yet relentlessly there. He reminded me of a conversation we had in a coffee shop by the Suave Trailer Park in Acapulco the night before that “final” reckoning. He knew I was after, among other things, a book. He warned me that night about the futility of chasing either dream or passion. Those, along with the loftiest and leanest of human sentiment were just “dancing before the dragon’s teeth.” That’s how he described all human endeavor. “Dancing before the dragon’s teeth… and in the end,” he said, “it’s the dragon alone who never falters, the dragon who never dies.” I tell you this about Hughes. He’s like some character straight out of Poe, an ultimate fiction moving through the real world yet so utterly real himself. A grim reaper of the heart going about his time quietly unnoticed. I’ll have the manuscript finished before I get on the road. Will leave it, along with the others, in your care. After that – who knows.
