Baldwin lives adventurous life, inspiring for novels

Bestselling author Ed Baldwin is an accomplished author that has quite the knack for writing very exciting plot lines and creating fascinating characters. He also has a knack for living a life every bit as exciting as the books he writes. His last trip to Blytheville was on August 29 to promote his newest techno thriller novel, The Fourth Domain, at That Bookstore in Blytheville.

Baldwin grew up in Kennett and has lived in every southern state except Mississippi, but he is proud to say that he did spend a night in jail there once. That trip and the experiences surrounding his time then inspired him to write his first novel, Bookman. Bookman tells the story of a door-to-door salesman traveling through the South in the 1960s during the Civil Rights era.

He has written a series of four, stand alone techno thriller novels (in the style of Tom Clancy) that feature his hero, Major Boyd Chailland. Chailland, the son of a disabled father of modest means, was a star high school football player in Kennett before attending the Air Force Academy and becoming a fighter pilot. In the first story of the series (the Other Pilot) the experienced F-16 combat pilot gets assigned onto an accident board charged with investigating the explosion of a four star general's plane. Thus begins the series of thrillers, chock full of political corruption and the twists and turns of nefarious intrigue. Baldwin said that each book stands alone and can be read without having read any of the previous books first. Books in the series are: The Other Pilot, The Devil on Chardonnay, The Mingrelian and The Fourth Domain.

"All fiction is autobiographical, but I'm not a pilot. I was a flight surgeon but I have flown an F-16, an F-15, an A-7, and a T-38...so I have been 'upside down and supersonic' in an F-15," Baldwin said when asked how much of the Chailland character is autobiographical.

He also said that he always thought that it was "so way cool" that his father was a fighter pilot and that he has always been a fighter pilot "wannabe". He even reenlisted in the guard just to be around jet planes and fighter pilots.

Currently, he is putting the finishing touches on a historical novel, Sliding Delta, about a quest to find legendary Mississippi musician John Hurt. The southern novel tells the story of a Chicago boy that goes south of Memphis, in the summer of 1965, in his search and learns to pick the delta blues along the way.

Next, he plans to write something he is now calling Little River Empire. It will be an epic saga that follows the wealth and power of three families starting during the time of slavery before the Civil War and continuing through the Little River drainage efforts and into the present day.

"I'll take those three families and carry them through until the present day. One of the families will be black and they'll be intertwined in various ways along the way. It will be historical fiction, but it will also be bodice ripping romantic type stuff.... and solidly researched fiction," Baldwin added.

He has wanted to write a book about Southeast Missouri for a long time, primarily because his family has very deep roots in the Kennett area. His great-great-grandfather was a colonel for the Confederacy and despite being captured, returned to the fight after being paroled. Once the war was over, his great-great-grandfather went into business with one of his former slaves and that relationship continued for many, many years.

Baldwin's grandfather was a typical Kennett doctor and his father became an army fighter pilot before World War II, after an abbreviated time as an Ivy League graduate student at the Wharton School of Finance. His family's military tradition includes an uncle that served as one of the first flight surgeons after World War I. The author was born while his father was an instructor pilot in Florida during the last days of World War II. Once the war ended, the Baldwins returned to Kennett, with Ed graduating from Kennett High School.

The author's brother Warren was a very young, very talented lead guitar player that played in honky-tonks all over the Mid-South and eventually was even signed to make a record. Baldwin's novels include, in a manner of speaking, numerous characters and events that he and his brother witnessed first hand while his brother played music with the Ken Williams Band in area honky-tonks.

He fondly remembers time at the B&B Club in Gobler (for the first time on Election Day when he was 15). He also recalls hilarious events at the Hanger (Arbyrd/Cardwell), the Top Hat (Kennett), the 25 Club (north of Kennett), the Zanza Club (between Hayti and Caruthersville) and most of all, the infamous Rebel Club (Osceola).

Baldwin graduated college at Westminster College, attended summer school at Memphis State in 1963 and 1964, and even sold books door to door throughout the South (just like Phil Lazar did in his first novel, Bookman) in 1965. While in Memphis he was drafted, but the Draft Board allowed him to stay in medical school. After medical school he completed a residency at Duke University before opening a private practice in Greeley, Colorado. It was while there that he enlisted into the Colorado National Guard as a flight surgeon and was later activated for Desert Shield in 1991.

At the age of 47, he had been writing books for about 15 years, but was desperate for adventure. As a Lieutenant Colonel, he took an opportunity to enter active duty with the Air Force. As a result, he held a variety of positions including running a hospital in the Azores, working for the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, going to War College (which is unusual for a doctor) and working at the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB, just to name a few. But, most notable, was his time as the senior medical advisor to the Commander of Strategic Command (the unified command of all nuclear weapons, submarines, missiles, bombers, etc. for the U.S. military).

As part of that assignment, he was assigned to Offutt AFB (therefore Strategic Command) as senior medical advisor on the battle staff that wrote nuclear war plans and was in the bunker with President George W. Bush after the World Trade Center and Pentagon was attacked on September 11th. [Note: Strategic Command was formerly known as Strategic Air Command (SAC). Blytheville Air Force Base was a SAC base.]

On the morning of the September 11, he and the battle staff were performing war games that involved moving ships, submarines and aircraft all around the world. The United States had alerted Russia and China of the exercises before American planes began probing over the polar ice cap as well as Russian and Chinese air defenses (but never crossed the intrusion line). Russia and China sent up mirror fighters and no incident occurred. Once the first airliner hit the World Trade Center, the four-star Navy Admiral in charge of American operations, cancelled the exercises, and the Chinese and Russian commanders simultaneously did so as well.

In that tense atmosphere, a huge digital Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) map of all aircraft flying over the nation was displayed on the large screens above the control room. One by one, the lights twinkled out as all American flights were grounded. Soon, they noticed a combat fighter patrol circling over their location and simultaneously received word that within the hour President George W. Bush would be arriving. Bush needed the ability to communicate in a top-secret fashion with his cabinet and the nearest place to do that was Offutt AFB. Right on schedule, as promised, in walked President Bush.

Baldwin described a speakerphone conversation held in his presence that took place between Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The conversation involved friendly, concerned dialogue between the two as they inquired about how each other was doing in the wake of the attack. Then permission was sought from and granted by the President to shoot down any airliner that is suspected of having been high-jacked and flying in a manner similar to those that attached the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It was while at Offutt AFB, that Bush and his cabinet decided it was time for the President return to Washington. Almost immediately thereafter he was gone.

Baldwin also went to space command at Colorado Springs, made several trips to Thule Greenland (secret polar/intelligence activities) and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008 (where he performed medevac missions). He said that during his career, he served aircrew duty over every continent except Antarctica, but now he just wants to be a southern writer.

Techno thriller genre creator Tom Clancy's extensive use of detail and "multiple points of view" (which helps sustain tension and sense of movement) have been great inspirations to Baldwin. Baldwin also attempts to emulate James A. Michener's technique of fully researching a topic before writing the first word. Both authors like to take real life historical stories or characters they "meet" during their research and somehow included them into their novels.

Despite being a southern writer, Baldwin does not care too much for the legendary William Faulkner's writings.

"As far as Southern writers, you know I've read Faulkner and I don't like Faulkner. He's boring...absolutely, just boring. The one that I do like is All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren. All the King's Men is a wonderful story and if someone wants to know about politics, particularly politics in the south, then read All the King's Men...Warren recognized a basic human trait," Baldwin said.

Regarding his future book, Little River Empire, Baldwin said that he is researching and searching out interesting characters that he can meld into the story. Much of that research has been conducted in Southeast Missouri State University's library holdings, including the memoirs of Otto Kochtitsky, who was the engineer that started the whole Little River Project. He has also found some wonderful stuff in the library's personal memorial sketches of the early pioneers and settlers of Southeast Missouri.

Baldwin's extensive life experiences and his relentlessly detail-oriented nature are evident in each of his books. Everything he writes either has happened or can really happen. For example, The Mingrelian, though he published it in May 2014, accurately predicted where things are now with Iran and how Iranians get around oil sales restrictions. The book also describes what would happen if Iran supplied Hezbollah with a nuclear weapon to deploy against Israel.

"What would that look like? How would that affect the U.S. and what would the U.S. do? It's all in that book. It is all researched and I'm telling you I wrote nuclear war plans in the Air Force and that's how it would go. Every detail of those thrillers have been researched either by me actually being at that place or doing that thing myself or by knowing someone that has been there and done it and had them tell me about it," Baldwin said.

There is quite a difference between Bookman, his first novel and his last novel, The Fourth Domain. Bookman is an entirely different genre than his other books, so to compare them directly would be like comparing apples to oranges. All of his books do have one thing in common though, they are all worthy of being read.

Bookman is a brutally honest, gritty, slow-paced, at times naughty, Southern novel that gives the reader a truly voyeuristic experience knocking on doors and entering the living rooms of numerous interesting characters. The book is by no means vulgar, but Baldwin did say that he purposefully create a main character with significant character flaws in order to amplify the changes he goes through before book's end. The novel also describes how Southerners, at the time, viewed race and those meddling Yankees that came down to force change.

Baldwin's other books are in the techno thriller genre and move at a much faster pace. They include numerous points of view, which sustains tension and encourages a sense of movement much better. His latest book, The Fourth Domain, is a page-turner and forces readers to read far more pages at each sitting than originally anticipated. Baldwin provides excitement, adventure and intrigue through extremely well developed and fascinating characters.

thenry@blythevillecourier.com