The Man Who Heard Too Much

When a mentally challenged man in possession of deadly secrets is targeted by an assassin, he must fight to survive, in this chilling espionage thriller. Martin Fowler is a determined twenty-eight-year-old who hasn’t let his mental handicap hold him back. He has a job at a service station, a bed in a halfway house, and a real shot at leading a normal life. He’s a kind man who’s never done anyone harm, but for reasons beyond his control, he’s been marked for death. Corrupt Washington senator Rutledge Galatin Baxter believes Martin knows a secret about him, and the politician will kill to keep it safe. He dispatches his lover, expert assassin Althea Remington, to end Martin’s life. The first attempt fails, but Althea won’t stop until she succeeds. Martin may be innocent, but to survive, he’ll have to learn to understand the nature of evil. And with the help of the director of his halfway house, Martin will do something he never thought he would have to do: stand and fight—or die. In the spirit of classic conspiracy thriller Six Days of the Condor, this is a story of a man on the run from sinister forces he can’t understand. Its hero is someone never before seen in a spy novel, making The Man Who Heard Too Much one of the most unique espionage thrillers in history.

It begins in Sweden. A low-level defection by a Russian sailor in Stockholm coincides with the theft of critical tapes at a high-level Soviet-American conference in Malmo. At stake is a sophisticated computer virus potentially more lethal that any biological plague in history. From Paris to Copenhagen to Washington to the Vatican, two adversaries once more find themselves on opposite sides: Henry McGee, the traitorous, seemingly indestructible double agent, and Devereaux, code name November, waging his personal, deadly war for--and against--both the CIA and the KGB.

A dazzling exploration of American culture—from high pop to highbrow—by acclaimed music authority, cultural historian, and biographer Anthony Heilbut, author of the now classic The Gospel Sound (“Definitive” —Rolling Stone), Exiled in Paradise, and Thomas Mann (“Electric”—Harold Brodkey). In The Fan Who Knew Too Much, Heilbut writes about art and obsession, from country blues singers and male sopranos to European intellectuals and the originators of radio soap opera—figures transfixed and transformed who helped to change the American cultural landscape. Heilbut writes about Aretha Franklin, the longest-lasting female star of our time, who changed performing for women of all races. He writes about Aretha’s evolution as a singer and performer (she came out of the tradition of Mahalia Jackson); before Aretha, there were only two blues-singing gospel women—Dinah Washington, who told it like it was, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who specialized, like Aretha, in ambivalence, erotic gospel, and holy blues. We see the influence of Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, famous pastor of Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church. Franklin’s albums preached a theology of liberation and racial pride that sold millions and helped prepare the way for Martin Luther King Jr. Reverend Franklin was considered royalty and, Heilbut writes, it was inevitable that his daughter would become the Queen of Soul. In “The Children and Their Secret Closet,” Heilbut writes about gays in the Pentecostal church, the black church’s rock and shield for more than a hundred years, its true heroes, and among its most faithful members and vivid celebrants. And he explores, as well, the influential role of gays in the white Pentecostal church. In “Somebody Else’s Paradise,” Heilbut writes about the German exiles who fled Hitler—Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Marlene Dietrich, and others—and their long reach into the world of American science, art, politics, and literature. He contemplates the continued relevance of the émigré Joseph Roth, a Galician Jew, who died an impoverished alcoholic and is now considered the peer of Kafka and Thomas Mann. And in “Brave Tomorrows for Bachelor’s Children,” Heilbut explores the evolution of the soap opera. He writes about the form itself and how it catered to social outcasts and have-nots; the writers insisting its values were traditional, conservative; their critics seeing soap operas as the secret saboteurs of traditional marriage—the women as castrating wives; their husbands as emasculated men. Heilbut writes that soaps went beyond melodrama, deep into the perverse and the surreal, domesticating Freud and making sibling rivalry, transference, and Oedipal and Electra complexes the stuff of daily life. And he writes of the “daytime serial’s unwed mother,” Irna Phillips, a Chicago wannabe actress (a Margaret Hamilton of the shtetl) who created radio’s most seminal soap operas—Today’s Children, The Road of Life among them—and for television, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, etc., and who became known as the “queen of the soaps.” Hers, Heilbut writes, was the proud perspective of someone who didn’t fit anywhere, the stray no one loved. The Fan Who Knew Too Much is a revelatory look at some of our American icons and iconic institutions, high, low, and exalted.