The Fifth Assassin

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I’ve been working on this book for almost four years now. That means I’ve spent four years surrounding myself with presidential deaths. And yes, the death of a President shouldn’t be any more compelling than the death of anyone else, but when I hear that John Wilkes Booth used a mysterious card to get into Ford’s Theatre, my eyebrow starts twitching and I get obsessed.

And so, let me answer the number one question that the proofreaders kept asking me when they finished reading: How much of this is real? The question took many forms. Did John Wilkes Booth really have that creepy tattoo? What about the second killer? Did he have that tattoo also? And what about the playing cards?

I love doing the research and including as much real history in my books as I can (even as it consumes me). To that end, the scenes with the Presidents’ deaths are as accurate as could be. That museum in here that has pieces of Lincoln’s skull and John Wilkes Booth’s bones? That place is real too and has even more cool stuff that I didn’t have room for. And those tunnels under Camp David? I changed a few security details for safety purposes, but yeah, those are pretty darn real too.

But as you know, this is still a work of fiction. So yes, John Wilkes Booth really did have a JWB tattoo on the web of his hand, but he didn’t have an ace of spades. The playing card details came from a tattoo on a leathery piece of skin that I found in an old museum box. Inside the box were many artifacts that purportedly belonged to presidential assassin Charles Guiteau, including the bones of his trigger finger. As it says in the novel, those bones were stolen from the museum and then returned. When they came back, that piece of skin was with it (and yes, the tattoo is exactly as I described, including the eagle and the red diamond with the knife in it). To this day, no one knows where the skin came from or if it’s Guiteau’s or not, but the moment the museum folks put it in my hands, the lightbulb went off and I started researching playing cards (and yes, George Washington really did order playing cards by the dozens).

If you want to know more about the other historical details — or ask a question about anything else — then let me invite you to BradMeltzer.com. You’ll see answers to tons of questions there, including ones about the secret code that I hid in the pages of The Inner Circle. Crack the code and it’ll lead you to the location for a hidden “treasure” (no one’s found it yet). Even the Decoded folks haven’t uncovered it.

Other than that, let me say the most important thing of all: Thank you for reading to the very end (or at least skipping to the end and ruining all the good parts).

See you in the Archives.