A novel based on real events and newly declassified documents, Magic City is to Miami what L.A. Confidential and Chinatown were to Los Angeles. It evokes a time in our nation’s history when powerful men were willing to do whatever they thought necessary to achieve their goals.
Overview
A simple black and white photograph taken during the 1964 Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight on Miami Beach may hold the key to a horrific, politically-motivated crime forty-two years earlier. After it suddenly appears on display at a trendy Miami gallery opening, the photograph is burned in an act of arson that sets off a modern-day murder spree, reaching from the quiet neighborhoods of Miami to the back corridors of the White House.
What the killer didn’t know is that there is one remaining copy. When it falls into Thorn’s hands, he and everyone he loves become the target of madmen and trained killers, each of whom has his own powerful motive to see the photograph destroyed forever and its mysteries kept hidden.
To find retribution for the death of a loved one, Thorn joins forces with a dangerous enemy to solve a maddening puzzle. At its center are two families from very different worlds with their own dark secrets. Unraveling this dangerous riddle shakes the foundation of his bond with both Alexandra and his closest friend, and sends him on a deadly journey. But cover-ups have a way of disintegrating over time, especially when someone like Thorn is pounding on the door. Magic City is an epic crime thriller–exposing the past of a city in a time capsule of a novel.
Praise
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A secret plan drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 to provoke a war with Cuba fueled this story about how Miami got to be Miami.
James on Writing Magic City
I’d always loved Cassius Clay (who of course later became Muhammad Ali.)
For one thing, he was from Kentucky as I was. And he was brash and charismatic and liked to spout doggerel. He smiled into the camera lights and made funny faces. He was a brave kid, spunky and funny and quick as lightning.
Reminiscing, I was looking through old newspapers from the year that I first came to South Florida (1964), and I discovered that a young Ali had been there too, training for his championship fight with Sonny Liston, and I said bingo. I started pouring over everything I could find about that period in Miami—1963-1965, and after a short while I knew I had to find some way to set a large portion of the novel during that era.
So much was going on in Miami and across the country in the early 60’s. But the thing that really brought it all together for me was Operation Northwoods. I got a whiff of it when reading about the Cuban immigration that was occurring in the early sixties. Then I started digging and found the document itself, revealed in a Freedom of Information search. It was a secret plan drawn up by the Joint Chief’s of Staff that had eerie echoes to the misinformation campaign leading up to the Iraq invasion. It was, in short, a plan to provoke a war with Cuba.
I realized that I wanted to write about this aspect of “how Miami got to be Miami.” And in doing that I wanted to write about politics and about Muhammad Ali—a man who became a symbol of anti-war sentiments years later when he refused to go to Vietnam. So then the problem was simple. Fuse the story of Muhammad Ali’s fight for the heavyweight championship with some fictional event right out of Operation Northwoods. Voila: I invented a photograph that created that fusion and I was off to the races.
And once again, poor Thorn is dragged right into the middle of it.
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