Contrary to the disclaimers usually provided in novels, the vast majority of the characters and events depicted here are entirely real. The visit of King George VI and Elizabeth, his queen consort, to North America during the late spring and early summer of 1939 has been portrayed in absolutely accurate, minute-by-minute detail, from the clothes they wore and the food they ate to the composition of their security detail. More important, the efforts of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, the FBI and other federal and state agencies to track down and apprehend an Irish assassin intent on killing the king, the queen and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on American soil have been included, much of the information culled from newly declassified State Department and Royal Canadian Mounted Police documents.
How close that assassin came to achieving his goal has never been described until now, although for many years there have been a number of vague rumors, most of them relating to the involvement of the Irish Republican Army and of one man in particular, Sean Russell, IRA chief of staff at the time.
In fact, neither Russell nor the IRA had anything at all to do with the plot. The real conspirators were all Americans and included several senators, a Catholic archbishop, a lawyer who would go on to become head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Roosevelt’s own vice president, and a man who, following another assassination, would himself become president of the United States more than twenty years later.
While several hundred books have been consulted in an effort to give a socially and politically accurate picture of that tumultuous time in America, I am greatly indebted to the grandson of one of the key participants in the story, who gave me free access to his grandfather’s private diaries. Without those diaries, especially the entries between Thursday, February 18 and Monday, June 12, 1939, the truth might never have come to light.
For the skeptical among you who read this story and say, “Pure fiction,” I urge you to telephone M. Georges Colbert of the Hotel Louvre et Paix (DRagone 35.37) in Marseille and ask him to describe what he discovered under the floorboards of room 506 on a July afternoon in 1964 when he was redecorating. He’ll be happy to tell you, and for a small fee he’ll even send you a postcard.