 D. B.
By Elwood Reid
This stunning fictional imagining of legendary American folk hero D.B. Cooper's daring hijacking and its aftermath is penned by one of the toughest, most distinctive voices in American fiction.
List Price: $23.95 Price: $16.77
Product Details
- Hardcover: 368 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.09 x 9.30 x 6.48
- Publisher: Doubleday; (July 13, 2004)
- ISBN: 0385497385
From the Author
On November 24, 1971, a man named DB Cooper boarded a Seattle-bound Boeing 727 in Portland, OR. He wore dark sunglasses, a black suit, and black tie. It was the day before Thanksgiving and the 36 passengers aboard the jet were on their way home for the holiday. Shortly after take-off he motioned a stewardess over and said he had a bomb and that he was prepared to use it. He wanted $200,000 and four parachutes, or else. "I touch these two wires," he said, displaying a bomb-like device stowed in a briefcase (this was the pre-metal detector golden age of air travel where people smoked and drank and there was legroom). There was no reason to doubt the sincerity of Cooper's threat. His calm demeanor suggested he might be suicidal or out to make a point, and in 1971, the country was ripe with protest: Vietnam, the Black Panthers, Kent State, the Attica uprising, to name a few. And so the pilot radioed ahead and arranged to meet the hijacker's demands; money and parachutes would be waiting for him.
When the plane finally landed in Seattle, the passengers deplaned still oblivious to the fact that the man sitting in seat 18C, chain-smoking and drinking bourbon, had engineered the perfect hijacking. As the jet refueled the weather turned cold and rainy and the light began to fail. With the passengers gone and the fuel tanks full, Cooper calmly instructed the pilot to take off and set a course for Mexico City with the flaps at 10 degrees and an altitude of 10,000 feet. He ordered the remaining crew up to the cockpit while he readied the parachutes and lashed the money to his waist. Five minutes out of Seattle the "aft stair light" warning came on in the cockpit and the cabin rapidly depressurized. When efforts to raise Cooper over the intercom failed the flight crew checked the cabin and found it deserted. Cooper was gone-he'd jumped into the cold rainy night somewhere over the Pacific Northwest.
A massive manhunt followed. FBI agents, local authorities and the National Guard combed the woods for months looking for traces of the man calling himself Dan Cooper. They found nothing, and to this day, his crime remains the only unsolved skyjacking in US criminal history. He left behind almost no clues. No one was hurt and the sketch sent over the wire depicted a thin, menacingly cool man in dark glasses, a hip Robin Hood who had pulled one over on the Man. He remains an enigma. Even his name is a creation of the media; a glitch made by a sleep deprived AP reporter. He has become the ultimate missing person-the perfect vessel for our own escape fantasies (not to mention a great leaping-off point for a novel). Was his jump a desperate break for freedom, or a heroically grand death wish? Wanting to answer that question drove me to write the book. And in the interest of full disclosure, the In Search Of segment on the D.B. Cooper skyjacking was a huge influence, especially the manic theme music and jerky Blair Witchy teaser as host Leonard Nimoy, pledged "to travel the world and probe the world's greatest and most enduring unsolved mysteries; natural and supernatural phenomena." Other In Search Of favorites, such as Sasquatch and UFOs, make cameos in D.B.
Haven't we all at one time or another fantasized about disappearing-jumping out of a plane, leaving the world behind and escaping our dull 9 to 5 lives? I know I have. More than once, while out hiking the mountains behind my house, I've fantasized about what would happen if I just kept walking and never came back. Try it, it's an easy thrill that quickly becomes impossible with each step as all those responsibilities you want to take a powder on start to look a lot like love and duty-and well, for lack of a better word, life. I threw myself into this novel with that same abandon, not knowing where it would lead or if it would exorcise Cooper's deed from that tumbler of ideas that all writers maintain. But enough of that crap-I despise books that try hard to be about something. In the end I want D.B. to be a good read-the kind of book that gets passed from reader to reader because of the crackling good story and characters that jump off the page.
|
