A Bomb Built in Hell

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In 1972, I was represented by the John Schaffner Agency, largely on the strength of some short stories I published in minor magazines.* My first full-length effort was, essentially, the journal I kept during my time in the infamous NYC Welfare Department between 1966 and 1969, ending when I left to enter the warzone inside a country calling itself Biafra.** That book was (as was all my work prior to Flood) considered unacceptable by the publishing establishment, on the grounds that there was no market for “this kind of material.”

Victor Chapin, my tireless agent, who never lost faith in me, thought my varied ground-zero experiences (including, by that time, not only the genocidal madness in Africa, but a stint as a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, working as an organizer in Lake County, Indiana, running a center for urban migrants in Chicago, a re-entry joint for ex-cons, and a maximum-security prison for violent youth) would lend themselves perfectly to a “hardboiled” novel of the type that was so successful in the ’50s. A Bomb Built in Hell followed.

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