Overview
Linus Owen is a professor of conspiracy theory at Modesto College in San Rafael, California. He teaches, among other things, a graduate-level class on JFK and gives seminars on magic bullet theories and how the symbols on the dollar bill reveal the presence of a secret government leading the world toward biblical Armageddon. Recently, Linus's marriage has had its problems, so his wife, Claudia, has taken a few days off to visit her mother in Chicago. But if Claudia is in Chicago, how is it that two FBI agents can show up at Linus's office and tell him that she has been killed in a plane crash on her way from New York to Brazil? Enlisting the aid of Edward and Roy, his friends and fellow conspiracy theorists, who help him sort through disinformation from federal authorities, Linus begins an investigation that will ultimately bring all three men to the heart of the American desert and to the realization that what they thought was the truth is really something far more sinister.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Orwellian echoes haunt this provocative, tongue-in-cheek debut chiller about bureaucratic mind control. When the feds fly Linus Owens, a professor of conspiracy theory at a small San Francisco college, to Florida to identify his wife's body at the site of a terrorist airliner bombing, he's devastated to learn she was on her way to Brazil with a secret lover. Mistrustful of the government, Linus coerces the airline into supplying him with the plane's unaltered passenger list and sets out with a pair of fellow conspiracy analysts to find the radicals responsible for his wife's death. After the three academics pull off some fancy computer hacking, Linus escapes the spying eyes of his pill-popping, neurotic "FBI" (really CIA) babysitter and heads cross-country to track the culprits to their lair. Marital infidelity, an enigmatic terrorist group called Danton, the long-forgotten disappearance of a talk-radio rabble-rouser, pharmaceutical intrigue involving clandestine trials of a mind-control drug, government-orchestrated kidnapping and murder all figure in the plot. Linus's search turns up more dead ends than a street map of Washington, D.C., until, by the end of this suspenseful, cerebral satire, staying alive becomes more important than finding answers as the outraged professor matches wits with men in black.Bowman
A Conspiracy of Tall Men starts with a hip premise: Protagonist Linus Owen is a professor of "conspiracy theory" at a California college -- shades of the Hitler Studies guru in Don DeLillo's "White Noise." Linus teaches "a graduate-level class on JFK, gives seminars on magic bullet theory and the hidden etymological meaning of the words 'Dealey Plaza.'" He also shows "slides meant to prove the faking of the 1967 Apollo moon landing." When Linus' wife mysteriously ends up dead next to her apparent lover on a Brazil-bound flight that explodes and crashes outside Orlando, Fla., the prof shows up at the site demanding a roster of passengers. Why? "When Pan Am flight 103 went down over Lockerbie there were five CIA agents aboard," Linus explains. He's convinced that his wife's plane, like Pan Am 103, may have had rogue CIA operatives on board -- operatives that others in the CIA wanted rubbed out.Hawley's plot, about a conspiracy freak caught up in his own apparent national intrigue, seems perfect for our times. Why hasn't anyone thought of it before? Actually, they have. When Linus teams with two fellow conspiracy buffs to try to crack the mystery, it's goodbye DeLillo references, hello "X-Files" -- this trio are stand-ins for the Lone Gunmen, the three hacker nerds from the TV show. Hawley's story even veers into UFO sightings and abductions. With its competent but meat-and-potatoes prose, A Conspiracy of Tall Men reads like a hip and enjoyable novelization of a lost "X-Files" episode.
While Hawley's novel isn't in DeLillo's league (what is?), A Conspiracy of Tall Men is what's known in the trade as a "swell beach read." Hawley also makes cool speculations on the nature of conspiracy: "A conspiracy is the reason we are here, in this room and on this earth. The trick is to ignore the smoke and mirrors. The trick is to always ask questions. If the clue seems too obvious or the evidence too conclusive, you must ask yourself, Is this what I am to believe or what they want me to believe?"
For all Hawley's musings, the ultimate conspiracy he invents for the book's conclusion is straight from the domain of "The X-Files." Been there, done that. If Hawley's plot had pushed the envelope somehow, his book might have made American readers reexamine their own feelings toward conspiracies. Finally, one might ask: "Just who is Noah Hawley really?" I suspect that he is either the son of Watergate's Deep Throat or else one of the pseudonyms that the alien visitors use when they want to try their hands at pulp fiction. SalonJuly 10, 1998