Review: Did Lincoln’s killer get away?

April 2, 2015 By Henrik Krogius Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Nate Chura, a popular tennis professional at the Heights Casino in Brooklyn Heights, is also author of “The Man in the Barn.” Eagle file photo by Rob Abruzzese

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You never know where you’ll find literary talent. It turns out that Nate Chura, a popular tennis professional at the Heights Casino in Brooklyn Heights, wields a pen as deftly as his tennis racket. His novel “The Man in the Barn” (New Memphis Press, 2015) plays on some old suspicions that John Wilkes Booth did not die in a Virginia barn after he was tracked down following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but that he escaped and lived for many years in Texas under a pair of aliases.

The story Chura so vividly tells is about a hunt for verification of that hypothesis. His narrator is Dr. Al Pearson, a defrocked psychiatrist, who observes and joins a young friend, Daniel Boland, a reporter for “The Brooklyn Beacon” who believes himself to be a Booth descendant, on a hellbent mission to secure DNA evidence that the “man in the barn” was not John Wilkes Booth.

As part of the background to this quest, the novel posits that the racist and ambitious Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton both had their motives for wanting Lincoln done away with, and they enlisted Booth in earlier attempts to kidnap or to kill the president that were foiled, as well as to kill Secretary of State William Seward, an attempt that would have succeeded if Booth hadn’t gotten cold feet at the last moment.

The momentum of the story pulls the reader right along, even as it blurs fact and fiction. Chura, in his acknowledgements, indicates that a good deal of research went into his tale. When he notes, for instance, that in his speech on taking the oath of office as president, Johnson made not a single mention of Lincoln, the reader figures this must be true. And the reader is persuaded to at least half-believe what follows.

Several scenes in the book are set in The Players Club on Gramercy Park, an artistic and social gathering place founded by the great Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, who, until the assassination, was by far the better known of the Booth brothers. It is at the Players that Dr. Pearson learns of Daniel’s determination to establish what really happened with John Wilkes.

The hope is that Edwin Booth’s body can be exhumed from its grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., and that scrapings from its bones can be subjected to DNA testing against a surviving pair of bones from the man in the barn, and thus to prove that the latter was someone other than John Wilkes Booth.

Daniel and his supporters encounter all kinds of resistance from the guardians of the official version. There is even the murder of an administrator of the Booth homestead in Maryland. Two young women, seemingly European, may have been the culprits, but they vanish, leaving Daniel to hope that circumstantial evidence pointing to him is not discovered. This is only one of the many twists and turns within the rather short confines (218 pages) of this engrossing novel.

Daniel eventually prevails in having Edwin Booth’s body exhumed and the DNA analysis performed, but that is not quite the end of it. We are still left with unanswered questions, including just what becomes of Daniel.

The number of names in the story (both actual and fictional) can be hard to keep track of, but the verve and mood of the writing keeps the reader glued. Here’s how Chura establishes a moment of tense silence: “The only motion came from the bubbles in Marilyn’s glass of prosecco.” And about the media, as they awaited the official DNA report, “… reporters and producers, left and right, left no grave un-dug lining up interviews, before and after, with anyone who would talk to them about the results…” Chura advised me to overlook any errors of style or spelling in my advance copy, saying they were being taken care of. Among such that I noted, I certainly hope the editors caught “reigns” for the reins that control a horse, and that the last name of Frederick Law Olmsted (even he is mentioned!) emerges without the errant “a.”

For those who may be led to read what recent scholarship says about Booth, a new biography, “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth” by Terry Alford, accepts that he died in the barn. As Chura cautions in his Author’s Note, his novel “is fiction and the actions and descriptions of any contemporary figures are purely fictional.” But it’s a great ride that also makes you think about history, and how much we can know about it with any certainty.

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Henrik Krogius is the past editor of the Brooklyn Heights Press.