Who Killed Kennedy
- You may be looking for the novel that features this fictional book.
Who Killed Kennedy was a non-fiction book by the journalist James Stevens.
Stevens began writing the book on 22 January 1996, completing it shortly before his disappearance in April of that year. Using his journalistic notes from October 1969 to September 1971, Stevens wrote an exposé detailing his investigations of the Doctor, UNIT, Department C19 and the numerous alien invasions which befell Earth during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
While primarily focussed on these investigations, the book also provides details of Stevens' personal life such as the fact that he was born in New Zealand on 22 November 1945 as the illegitimate son of a wealthy 17-year-old girl and an American GI who died before he was born. His interest in journalism was sparked by the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy on his 18th birthday in 1963. After moving to the United Kingdom in 1968, he married Natasha Howarth, the daughter of Lord Howarth, in September 1969. However, their marriage proved to short-lived due to Stevens' affair with another woman, also named Natasha.
Stevens began researching the book at the age of 23 when he was working for the Daily Chronicle. Through the paper's crank line, he received a report from an Ashbridge Cottage Hospital porter named Mullins that a man with inhuman blood had been admitted into the hospital. Upon arriving at the hospital, Stevens noticed the presence of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the commander of the British division of UNIT. Several days later, the United Kingdom suffered its worst terrorist attack of the 1970s. Unbeknownst to Stevens, Black Thursday was in actuality a cover story for the attempted Nestene invasion of Earth.
These two incidents marked the beginning of Stevens' two year investigation of UNIT, C19 and a series of agent provocateurs known as "the Doctor" who had been involved in numerous incidents such as the ULTIMA Incident in 1943, the Shangri-La Incident in 1959, the Shoreditch Incident in November 1963, the C-Day fiasco and the contemporaneous Gatwick Incident on 20 July 1966 and the London Event. He believed that these "Doctor" agents were malevolent figures in the employ of C19 and, along with UNIT, were secretly working against the interests of the United Kingdom.
Stevens was able to identify four distinct "Doctor" agents. The first was "a short, quirkily dressed man, with a slight Scottish accent and immense intelligence" who was involved in the ULTIMA Incident and was accompanied by a teenage girl named Ace. He noted that the two matched the descriptions of an enigmatic pair also known as the Doctor and Ace who were heavily involved in the Shoreditch Incident in November 1963. However, he was sceptical about the possibility of them being the same people as neither of them seemed to have aged in the intervening 20 years. The second was "an English gentleman in his early sixties with "imperious white hair swept back from his face and reaching almost to collar length, with haughty features and piercing eyes that burned with intelligence and wit." In his memoirs, Sir Charles Summer credited this Doctor with the successful resolution of the C-Day crisis.
The third was "a short man with a mournful face and dishevelled clothing" who was accompanied by "a young Scots lad in a kilt, called 'Jamie'." According to Samantha Briggs, he had a "blurred" English accent which defied description and seemed to be extremely knowledgeable on a wide variety of subjects. This Doctor was involved in the investigation of holiday fraud at Gatwick Airport, leading Stevens to dub him "the Gatwick Doctor." Stevens also found evidence that the Gatwick Doctor was later heavily involved in the London Event, an infamous nerve gas scare on the London Underground, during which the population of Central London was evacuated. The fourth "Doctor" operative was the only one with whom Stevens had any direct contact. He saw this Doctor at the demonstration of the Keller Process at Stangmoor Prison and described him as wearing "an extravagantly ruffled white shirt [which] was barely held in check by a two-piece velvet suit. Over this was draped a black, silk-lined cape." When it came to his appearance, "his hair was a quiet explosion of greying curls over a lived-in face" and he had a "hawkish nose [which] jutted from between a pair of piercing eyes that swept the room quickly to assess those present." (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)
Behind the scenes
Who Killed Kennedy was the fictional book-within-a-book of the novel of the same. Most of the events of the novel can be assumed to be within the fictional book, but the novel certainly contains things that weren't in the fictional book. It's a bit hard to separate the two with any degree of specificity, however.
