Robert Rosen

For the better part of the past 12 years I've been excavating my memory for material. A Brooklyn Memoir, set in Flatbush when I was a child, is one result of this excavation. I began writing the book with only an image in my head of my father in his candy store, in 1961, and a germ of an idea: Something interesting was happening at this time and in this place, and it was worth exploring. What I learned over the many years I worked on the book is that if you think about something every day for an extended period of time, you're going to remember things you thought were long forgotten, and the more you remember the more you remember.

 

I bring this up now because of my debate with a conspiracy theorist about the murder of John Lennon that will go live on Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, sometime in December. As misguided as I find David Whelan and his theories about who really killed Lennon, and as sloppy and ill-informed as some of his research is (I discuss it here and here), I give him credit for getting me to consider certain things I haven't thought about in the 25 years since I wrote the Mark David Chapman section of Nowhere Man. For example, there's a scene where Lennon, the afternoon before the murder, signs Chapman's copy of Double Fantasy. I wrote that Chapman asked him for a job. Whelan says that I'm the only one who reported this and demanded to know where I got the information. I told him I got it from Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman.

 

Whelan says that Seaman wasn't there to witness the exchange. According to Seaman's memoir, The Last Days of John Lennon, he was there.* A former Lenono Music employee reminded me who was also there to witness it. Paul Goresh, who died in 2018, is the photographer who took the picture of Lennon signing Chapman's album.

 

The week of December 8, 1980, Seaman came to my apartment. It was the first time I'd seen him since Lennon was killed. One of the things we talked about was Chapman asking John for a job. And now that I think about it, I can almost hear him say that he heard the story from Goresh. Can this detail of a 44-year-old memory be trusted? I don't know. But if he did hear about it from Goresh, it would make sense. Seaman and Goresh knew each other, they did talk on occasion, and it seems likely that they would have discussed the photo.

 

Whelan also got me thinking about the conversation I had with the publisher of Soft Skull Press when he asked me to write about Chapman. What I'd forgotten was that he'd originally wanted me to write that Chapman was part of a conspiracy. I refused. I told him I didn't believe it. At the time, I'd given little thought to the idea of a conspiracy—it would be several months before an insane conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA archivist who was somehow involved in the plot to eliminate Lennon. (Several years later, an even crazier conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA spymaster who plotted with Ronald Reagan and Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, to assassinate the ex-Beatle.)

 

I told the publisher I could write a better story if I wrote what felt true: Chapman, suffering from severe mental illness, acted alone.

 

My only purpose in writing the Chapman section of Nowhere Man was to tell a compelling story that would give people some understanding of a seemingly inexplicable act. I wrote it as a thriller. I got inside Chapman's head just as I'd gotten inside Lennon's head. And to write about Chapman was liberating after feeling that Yoko Ono and her attorneys were looking over my shoulder as I was making the final corrections on the main Lennon section of the manuscript. I think it's this combination of style and information that has kept people reading Nowhere Man for a quarter of a century.

 

A critic for the British music magazine Mojo noticed. "Rather like reading a favorite detective story," he wrote. "Though you know how the story's going to end, you still wind up willing the events to unfold differently."

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*During the Whelan debate, I'd forgotten that Seaman had written in his memoir that he was there when Lennon signed Chapman's album. In the unlikely event that Whelan was able to interview Seaman, as he said he was going to do, I'd like to know if Seaman contradicted his memoir. So numerous are Whelan's misstatements, I'm now also wondering if it's true, as he claimed during the debate, that Chapman's statement, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round," is not in the court transcript. (See my previous post, "The 27th Round.")

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

Last week, in a post titled "The 27th Round," I wrote about David Whelan, a conspiracy theorist whom I sort of debated—Whelan mostly talks, interrupts, and talks some more—on an episode of Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, scheduled to go live sometime in December. Whelan believes that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman, the man currently in prison for the murder of John Lennon, to be a Manchurian patsy who didn't shoot the ex-Beatle—the real killer is a professional assassin who got away.

 

I, in short, don't believe it.

 

Whelan went into his investigation with the preconceived notion that Lennon was the victim of a conspiracy. Consequently, everything looks to him like a clue pointing in the direction of conspiracy and nobody is above suspicion, with the possible exceptions of Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, who was five at the time of the murder (but now, Whelan says, knows more than he's letting on).

 

In an episode of SATB released October 10, after the debate was recorded, Rodriguez interviewed Whelan again. Whelan, who wrote a conspiracy-theory book, Mind Games, and shares his theories on Substack and in many interviews, says that much of what I say about Chapman in Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon is "laughable." This is an unsurprising response from somebody I've called a "conspiracy hustler" because he misrepresented himself to Lennon's assistant Michael "Tree" Medeiros in order to get him to agree to an interview. Whelan denies he did this.

 

"I gave the producers of the UK documentary John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial extensive video interviews, which were never used in the final cut," Medeiros says. "A few days after those interviews, I got a phone call from David Whelan, who said he called to check my quotes for the doc. This turned out to be untrue. I believe he was fishing for additional info for his crazy conspiracy theory book."

 

It would be an exercise in tedium if I were to refute all of Whelan's misstatements in our debate, in his recent SABT interview, on his blog, and in his book, which I've made a point of not reading because it's clear what he thinks from reading his blog and listening to his interviews. But I do want to point out two of his misstatements in the October 10 SATB interview.

 

Whelan says that in Nowhere Man, I called Chapman "an art dealer," and that it's "laughable" that I say he raised the money to travel from Hawaii to New York City by selling a few pieces of art.

 

This is what I say in Nowhere Man:

 

Chapman fancies himself an art aficionado. For years he's been acquiring paintings, lithographs, objets d'art. First he sells a $5,000 Salvador Dali gold plaque, originally purchased with a loan from his father-in-law. Then, with a $2,500 loan from his mother, he purchases a Norman Rockwell print titled "Triple Self Portrait." Shrewdly, he's able to sell it to a collector for a good profit.

 

I based this paragraph on details I found in the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones, who interviewed Chapman in prison. The book was the definitive source of information about Chapman's life when I wrote about him in Nowhere Man in 1999. Whelan thinks Let Me Take You Down is worthless and questions if Jones is really a journalist. (He was a reporter and columnist on The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.)

 

It's the same book I cited in my "27th Round" post. Whelan, in the debate, said that I'm the only writer who quoted Chapman at his sentencing hearing saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." (Whelan questions if I really attended the hearing—yes, I did.) And he said that no information exists indicating that, as I wrote in Nowhere Man, this is what Chapman told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt. I directed Whelan to the page in Let Me Take You Down that has this information. Let Me Take You Down, apparently, is impervious to Whelan's research techniques. (Pro tip: Look in the index.)

 

Whelan gave me a sense of what his research techniques might be during the debate. He said that I was the only one who reported that Chapman asked Lennon for a job when John signed his copy of Double Fantasy outside the Dakota the afternoon before the murder. He asked me where I heard this. I said that Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman told me about it several days after the murder. If Seaman was not there to witness this, as Whelan claims, then somebody who was there must have told him about it. I saw no reason why Seaman would lie about this particular detail. So I took his statement at face value and included it in Nowhere Man.

 

"I'm going to ask Seaman," Whelan said.

 

Will Seaman remember what he told me in passing 44 years ago? Unlikely, but who knows? And even if Seaman remembers, would he deny it? Possibly. But let's stick to the most likely scenario of this imagined interview: Seaman doesn't remember, which gives Whelan what he wants—a contradiction that raises suspicions of... something.

 

Whelan's other misstatement in the October 10 podcast involves Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA employee in charge of their MK-ULTRA mind-control program, the agency's attempt to create programmed assassins (or patsies, as the case may be) with a combination of drugs and hypnosis. Whelan says it's "laughable" that I take Gottlieb at his word that MK-ULTRA was a failure. It's not that I take Gottlieb at his word, though he would have known more about the program than anybody, and the possibility exists that he could have been telling the truth. My point was that there's no credible evidence to prove that MK-ULTRA was successful. Of course, there's no credible evidence to prove that it was a failure, either. The CIA destroyed their MK-ULTRA files in the 1970s. It's this lack of evidence that conspiracy theorists use as proof that it's possible to create programmed assassins who will commit murder at a specific time, in a specific place, in a specific way, and the CIA as well as some mysterious right-wing entities have, indeed, created such assassins (and patsies).

 

I have no doubt that it's possible to use MK-ULTRA techniques to get certain people predisposed to violence to commit mayhem. What I don't believe is that it's possible to control somebody for weeks and months at a time, as if they're a robot, before the command is given to commit mayhem—or to induce somebody to believe they're committing mayhem, as would have been the case with Chapman.

 

Like virtually all conspiracy theories, this one will never be proven or disproven. Without certainty, what's left is common sense and Occam's Razor, a philosophical concept that says if you have two or more theories to explain an event, the simpler, more straightforward one is usually correct.

 

And I do wonder: If a number of Whelan's statements about me are false, which he should have known from basic research, what else is wrong with the "facts" he uses to attempt to show that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy who did not kill Lennon?

 

I'll leave it to a more dedicated researcher to pick apart Whelan's thesis, line by tedious line.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

My book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon has been under scrutiny for 25 years. Since early 2000, when the publisher first distributed advance reader copies, I've done somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 interviews. I often think I've been asked and have answered every possible question. But sometimes I'm surprised.

 

Last week I participated in a… let's call it a panel discussion though it was probably more of a debate, on Robert Rodriquez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, broadcast date TBA. Rodriguez and Carole Kirstein-Chase, an attorney, acted as moderators. The other panelist was David Whelan, author of Mind Games, a book that suggests a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy, that he did not shoot Lennon, and that there was a second shooter who got away.

 

My contention is that similar conspiracy theories have been circulating for 44 years, none of them have come to anything, and Chapman did it.

 

Nowhere Man's "Chapter 27," named after the so-called missing chapter of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, is about Chapman's sentencing hearing, which I attended. (Whelan disputes that I was there.) In the chapter, I quote Chapman saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." I also say that this is what he told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt.

 

Whelan asked me three questions about this quote that I'd never been asked: Why isn't it in the court transcript? Why did nobody else report it? Why is there no mention anywhere else of him saying this to a psychiatrist?

 

I didn't know, and I told the story behind the Chapman section of Nowhere Man: When Soft Skull Press accepted the book, in 1999, it was about Lennon's final years and ended when John was alive. There was no Chapman section. Soft Skull's publisher asked me to write one. I didn't want to. He insisted. I thought about it and decided that because I'd attended the sentencing hearing I could write something original and worthwhile.

 

In late 1999, I wrote Part IV of the book, "The Coda," about Chapman. It's based on my memory, accounts in newspapers and other books, and notes I took in August 1981 at the sentencing hearing.

 

In "Chapter 27" I say that Chapman said what he did about the bloodied prizefighter immediately after he read from The Catcher in the Rye but before the judge sentenced him to 20 years to life.

 

I suppose it's possible that the court reporter simply didn't hear Chapman say that.

 

But after thinking about it for a couple of days it occurred to me that maybe I had the events slightly out of sequence. Maybe Chapman said it after the judge sentenced him, the hearing was over, and the court reporter had stopped transcribing.

 

I flashed on a scene from 43 years ago: The judge pounds his gavel, dismisses the court, and Chapman, handcuffed, standing by his chair, facing sideways towards me, a cop on each arm, is about to be led out of the courtroom. That's when he says, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." But nobody's paying attention. The reporters have their stories, they're on deadline, and they're clamoring to get out. And that's when I write of Chapman, "He walks fearlessly out of the courtroom, holding his head high, veritably glowing with pride. He's done what he came to do."

 

Whelan questions if this description of Chapman is accurate because nobody else reported it.

 

Maybe I was the only reporter there who knew that the story wasn't over, and there was one more thing to see and hear.

 

And by the way, the following quote can be found on page 145 of the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones. This is Chapman speaking to a psychiatrist in Hawaii: "I think of myself as a boxer in the twenty-seventh round with my face all bloody, my teeth knocked out and my body all bruised."

 

Note to Whelan: Go to Let Me Take You Down in Google books and search for "twenty-seventh round." Comes right up.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

If you get the reference in the title, then you're probably of a certain age--an age of turntables, vinyl LPs, and the Beatles as an ongoing musical enterprise.

If you're not of a certain age, you've still probably heard about a rumor that began in 1969. Some people believed that Paul McCartney was dead and the Beatles had replaced him with a look-alike so the fans wouldn't get upset. But because they were the Beatles, and couldn't resist playing Beatle games, they'd also left clues to his demise on their albums, both in the music and on the album covers.

One of the most famous clues can be found on the fadeout of John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It sounds as if Lennon is saying, “I buried Paul.” (“I’m very bored,” is what he claims to have said.)

I mention this now because a site called Ranker is asking people to vote for the “most outlandish conspiracy theory” about the Beatles, and “Paul Is Dead” is among the 22 theories they’ve listed.

But so am I!

A Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorist has been insisting for years that I’m the CIA spymaster who ordered a hit on Lennon—or at least that’s what he seems to be saying if you delve deeply into his insane ramblings. It’s as if a conspiracy theorist is having my (Evil) Walter Mitty fantasies for me.

Ranker calls this theory “Robert Rosen, Author or Assassin?” And I have indeed buried Paul under a landslide of votes.

Yes, I am the #1 most outlandish Beatles conspiracy theory and Dead Paul is #2. This is like Bernie Sanders getting the nomination over Hillary Clinton.

So, I’d like to thank all the people who voted for me, and my campaign manager, Mary Lyn Maiscott. But keep in mind that this is only a fast start, and as long as Ranker exists, people can keep voting. Which means if Live Paul ever rallies his base for Dead Paul, “Robert Rosen: Author or Assassin?” will go the way of Michael Dukakis.

In the meantime, call me Jackal.

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Last December, Roberto Ponce, an editor at the Mexico City newsweekly Proceso, sent me four questions about the numerous conspiracy theories surrounding John Lennon's murder. A comprehensive Spanish-language Lennon biography, Bendito Lennon, by Octavio Cavalli, had recently been published and the book gave credence to one of the theories. My answers to Ponce's questions ran as a column, titled "Sólo creo en una conspiración: la de Yoko Ono en mi contra" (I just believe in one conspiracy: Yoko Ono's against me), in a special Lennon section in their December 8, 2013 issue.

My blog posting yesterday, "Imagine Yoko Watching," about an upcoming Lennon episode of Hollywood Scandals that I’ll be appearing in provoked a flurry of questions on Facebook about the conspiracy theories.

Here are Ponce's questions and my answers in the original English.

1) Octavio Cavalli, author of the biography Bendito Lennon, told me that one of his important sources of information about John Lennon’s murder is an article by Salvador Astucia, “José Joaquín Sanjeanis Perdomo: John Lennon’s true assassin?” In another one of his articles, Astucia has accused you, Mr. Robert Rosen, of being involved in the killing of John Lennon. What can you say about this?

I’m aware that Octavio Cavalli has thoroughly researched every aspect of John Lennon’s murder and for a variety of reasons doesn’t believe that Mark Chapman was the lone gunman. Among the issues Cavalli raises is the presence at the murder scene of Dakota doorman José Joaquín Sanjeanis Perdomo, a Cuban exile and former CIA agent, according to “Salvador Astucia,” which is the pseudonym of a Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorist. Astucia says, among other things too numerous to recount here, that I’m the Zionist-funded CIA spymaster who gave the order to kill Lennon, after which, in order to disgrace his memory (as well as the entire antiwar movement), the CIA then paid me to write Nowhere Man. He also says that I, along with another Jew, Edward Teller, the “Father of the H-bomb,” and Ronald Reagan, felt that Lennon had to die (and his memory besmirched) so America could go forward with its “Star Wars” missile-defense initiative.

The mere fact that Astucia is still alive is proof enough that his theories are absurd. Because if anything he said were true, a real spymaster would have silenced him 10 years ago, when he started posting this stuff online.

I don’t know if Astucia says these things because he believes them, or to provoke and to get attention. My inclination is to dismiss outright everything he or any other Holocaust denier says about anything. That Cavalli was able to find one shred of truth in Astucia’s insane ravings is a tribute to Cavalli’s tenaciousness, and his abilities as a researcher.

Though I must give Astucia full credit for my inclusion as number two, alongside J. D. Salinger and Stephen King, on a list titled “Top Three Conspiracy Theories Revolving Around the Death of John Lennon.”

And I’m sure that he’d be pleased to know that I briefly considered dedicating to him the novel I just finished writing, Bobby in Naziland, about a kid growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and early-60s, alongside Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans who’d fought the Nazis. That dedication would have read: “For ______, my Personal Nazi, who reminded me I was a Jew and taught me anew the meaning of anti-Semitism.”

2) What do you think of the conspiracy theories that accuse the CIA, FBI, various ex-presidents of the U.S., Operation 40, and even the Jewish people of being behind Lennon’s murder?

I don’t completely reject all conspiracy theories. I’ve had 50 years to think about JFK, and the official explanation still strikes me as less than satisfying. But I don’t think Lennon was the victim of a conspiracy. I think Chapman was a lone nut, and I think if Yoko Ono believed that Lennon’s murderer, or an accomplice to the murder was still at large, she’d have conducted a private investigation—for her own safety. She’s done nothing of the sort.

I think most conspiracy theories—Manchurian Candidates, for example—are based on scenarios so complex, they’d be nearly impossible to execute. My understanding of the psychology behind conspiracy theories is that certain people cannot accept the fact that horrendous events, like murder, can be totally random and can happen to anybody. So they need to invent fairy tales, impervious to rational evidence, that give them a sense of control and show that it can’t happen to them. That’s why Astucia is the only so-called “journalist” I’ve ever refused to speak to. Because no matter what I told him, he’d use it as further “proof” that I work for the CIA and that I did order Lennon’s murder.

There is, however, one Lennon-related conspiracy I am aware of: The unsuccessful attempt by Ono, the New York District Attorney’s office, and G. Barry Golson, a former Playboy editor, to have me arrested on criminal conspiracy charges unless I signed a document forfeiting my First Amendment rights to write about Lennon’s diaries. The libelous article that Golson ran in the March 1984 Playboy is the root of all Lennon conspiracy theories about me. He took a comment from my diary (which Ono had given to him), about what I saw as Ono’s skillful exploitation of the Lennon legacy, and depicted that comment, “Dead Lennons=BIG $$$$$,” as my indictment of my own behavior, portraying me as a criminal conspirator drooling over Lennon’s corpse.

3) In your book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon you created an interesting profile of Mark Chapman’s mind. How has your vision of the killer changed since then? Why did he kill John Lennon? Did he commit the crime alone or maybe not?

My vision of Mark Chapman has not changed since I wrote Nowhere Man. I still think he was a mentally unstable and possibly psychotic individual who acted alone and was motivated by envy and a desire to be famous, and believed that by shooting Lennon, whom he considered a hypocrite, he’d literally vanish into the pages of The Catcher in the Rye and become The Catcher in the Rye for his generation. I await definitive proof that this is not the case.

4) After your experience with the Lennon diaries, what ideas would you suggest to the new generation of Latin American students about how they can be more effective in their work and lives?

In 1982, I was an obscure freelance writer who’d uncovered a story that was the equivalent of Rock ’n’ Roll Watergate. That’s why it took me 18 years to publish what I knew about Lennon’s diaries. In the eyes of the mainstream media, in any country, it’s simply unacceptable for an unknown journalist to come out of nowhere and break the story of the decade. Also, what I learned from the diaries went against the myth that Ono remains determined to perpetuate—that in his final years, John Lennon was a content, bread-baking househusband. That’s why she used all the political and media influence at her disposal to try and stop me. So, I’d say to any journalism students that it’s not enough to uncover a great story, especially one that goes against powerful people or institutions (as great stories often do). You must be prepared to fight for years, if not decades, to get your story out to a mass audience. I’d also say that anybody who’s considering investigating conspiracy theories should be aware that you’re walking into a swamp that you may never come out of. Or if you do make it out, you’ll emerge with a bag of half-answers, shadows, suspicions, and more questions than you took in there with you.

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If Nowhere Man is destined to become a genuine classic, a book that readers will continue to talk about for decades to come, I can thank the Latin American media.

Since it was originally published, in English, in 2000, the press in countries like Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia (as well as Spain), have given Nowhere Man more serious, thoughtful coverage than any of the scandal-splattered stories that have occasionally roiled U.S. tabloids, like the New York Daily News, to name one.

The Latin American trend continues with two articles commemorating today’s anniversary of John Lennon’s murder that ran in the current issue of Proceso, which is, more or less, a progressive Spanish-language version of Newsweek in its heyday.

In the more than ten years since Random House Mondadori brought out a Spanish edition of Nowhere Man, this Mexico City-based journal of politics and culture has provided frequent, in-depth features about the book and its myriad literary and historical implications.

The two articles that ran in the December 8 issue are “Lennon, una biografía total” (Lennon, a full biography), by Roberto Ponce, and the provocatively titled “Sólo creo en una conspiración: la de Yoko Ono en mi contra” (I just believe in one conspiracy: Yoko Ono’s against me), which I wrote.

Ponce’s piece is about a massive Lennon bio, Bendito Lennon, by Octavio Cavalli, a Buenos Aires attorney who has obsessively researched every aspect of the ex-Beatle’s life. Prosa Amerian Editores is bringing out a revised edition next year, and it will feature new information about Lennon’s diaries, which I’ve been discussing with Cavalli.

The article analyzes Cavalli’s belief that Lennon was the victim of a conspiracy, that Mark David Chapman did not act alone, and that Dakota doorman José Perdomo, who was on duty the night of the murder, was a former CIA agent.

My piece is about “Salvador Astucia,” a pseudonymous Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorist who has accused me of being the CIA spymaster who ordered Lennon’s murder. As it turned out, Cavalli has uncovered what may be the only scrap of truth in “Astucia’s” insane online ravings: José Perdomo may very well be a former CIA agent.

The conspiracy in the headline is a reference to the unsuccessful efforts of Yoko Ono, former Playboy editor G. Barry Golson, and the New York district attorney to have me arrested unless I agreed never to tell the story of Lennon’s diaries. (Click here to see both articles.)

I cannot imagine the mainstream media in the U.S. ever publishing such a story, which I will soon post here, it its original English.

Hey hey, my my, conspiracy theories will never die.

Imagine if I were fluent in Spanish.

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In the Adolf Eichmann chapter of Bobby in Naziland, the novel to which I'm currently applying some finishing touches, one of the things the Mistress of Syntax flagged was my reference to a bone-grinding machine used in death camps. She wanted to know if the machine had been built specifically for use in the camps. This was a good question, I thought, and turned to Google for an answer. The search terms I put in, as shown in the graphic, were: bone grinding machine Nazis. I was shocked and dismayed to see that the first three results were Holocaust denial sites. (In a search two days later, the denial sites placed two and four, and the order continues to change.)

One of the first things that popped into my head was the idea of a kid in grade school, who knows nothing about the Holocaust, being given an assignment to write a report about the Nazis. He goes to Google and the first thing he sees is that the Holocaust didn't happen, thereby handing a tremendous victory to the deniers.

I posted this on Facebook, and it led to a surprisingly large number of comments, notably from fellow Headpress writer Shade Rupe, who’s done a great deal of Holocaust research.

What I hadn’t mentioned on Facebook was that part of the inspiration for Bobby in Naziland was my own dealings with a Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorist who’d read Nowhere Man, and in Internet postings that described me as a “Jewish writer,” said that I was the Zionist-funded CIA spymaster who’d given the order to kill John Lennon. He also tried to goad me into an online debate about whether or not the Holocaust really happened.

In the book’s endnotes, I say of this (naturally) pseudonymous fellow, “That there are people like this lurking on the Internet should come as no surprise to anybody. That other people who call themselves journalists echo such theories in cyberspace and, on occasion, have published them in books, and in at least one legitimate newspaper, is an alarming truth that cannot be ignored.”

That’s just the way it is in the fact-free 21st century. Holocaust denial is spreading and Bobby in Naziland is, in part, my own small response to it, for whatever that may be worth.

And, yes, the bone-grinding machines were specifically built to grind human bones in Nazi death camps.

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Like most writers, Stephen King does what he can to get the media to pay attention to his books, and he does it very well. The above video, from August 6, 2012, is King’s impressive appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and it should serve as an instructional video for any author out there doing promotion. Comfortable, articulate, and clearly into it, King shows us all how it’s done as he discusses the writing process, the contrast between what an author says in his books and his real-world personality, the afterlife, Jung, and the collective unconscious.

Ironically, at the 14:10 point in my interview on ReW and WhO? last week, Rew brings up Holocaust denial, and I mention my Holocaust-denying “personal conspiracy theorist” who also thinks I’m the CIA spymaster who ordered the hit on John Lennon.

“I heard someone else did it,” Rew says.

“Yeah, it was Stephen King,” I jokingly reply.

I am, of course, referring to the fact that King, too, has his own personal conspiracy theorist who believes he killed John Lennon. (Other conspiracy theorists believe Mark David Chapman received the order to kill Lennon through The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger.)

Ferguson, however, chose not to go there with King, though King’s take on the twisted psyche of conspiracy theorists, Holocaust-denying and otherwise, would be fascinating. Perhaps it’s a job for Rew.

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Even more common than the practice of authors paying for rave reviews, which I discussed yesterday, is the practice of authors anonymously trashing competitors' books. My John Lennon biography, Nowhere Man, seems to be a magnet for such attacks, probably because, for the most part, I'm competing with a collection of vicious hacks.

One such review, titled "Worst Book Ever!" was posted on Amazon U.K. soon after Nowhere Man was published. "This book is just a bunch of lies," the anonymous critic (whose identity is transparent) wrote. "If I could rate this book 0 stars I would, but the computer makes you rate it 1 star and up. I think Robert Rosen should read [name redacted]'s books. Maybe he will get some sense knoked (sic) into him." He then posted a similar review on Amazon U.S., this time referring to his own book as "masterful."

I learned a long time ago that such critiques can help sell a book, provided that there are enough positive reviews to balance them out. Hatchet jobs make books seem interesting and controversial. Fifty Shades of Grey, for example, has 3,800 one-star reviews to go along with its 4,700 five-star reviews.

Yesterday, I also said that I never have and never will pay for a review. On one occasion, though, I have gone over to the dark side and anonymously trashed another author’s book. But it wasn’t a competing author and it was a special case, the first of its kind: A high-profile conspiracy theorist published a book implicating me in a CIA-backed plot to murder John Lennon.

I remember standing in a bookstore in Chicago, the week that Nowhere Man was scheduled to be published, reading this book in a state of shock and horror, and wondering how anybody who called himself a journalist could a) believe such a thing, and b) publish it without speaking to me first.

A few months later I got the brilliant idea to post an anonymous one-star review of this book on Amazon. What I wrote, though, was completely true: “Not only is this book so murkily written that it borders on unreadable, but the author offers not a shred of concrete evidence to support his paranoid fantasy—that the CIA was behind the death of every one of the [10 rock stars mentioned in the subtitle]. This is trash fiction masquerading as investigative journalism.”

Naturally, the author guessed who was behind this review and accused me on his blog of viciously attacking and ridiculing him.

Beaver Street has yet to be anonymously trashed by a competing author. Perhaps that’s because it’s usually porn stars who write books about pornography, and your average porn star has more integrity than your average conspiracy theorist or Beatles biographer. Or maybe porn stars just have better things to do.

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Let’s take a day off from Beaver Street to talk about conspiracy theories. I bring it up now because in the course of my correspondence with “Alan” (click here and here), I mentioned that after publishing Nowhere Man, a conspiracy theorist who calls himself “Salvador Astucia” began posting articles suggesting that I’m the CIA spymaster who gave the order to whack John Lennon. (Or something like that. It’s hard to make sense of his insanity.) I also sent Alan a link to a satirical piece about the top three Lennon-murder conspiracy theories, which includes the spymaster theory. Alan’s astonished and expletive-filled reaction prompted me to try to explain what it’s like to have a conspiracy “nut” accuse you of murder, which, oddly enough, has its upside.

Alan,

This has been going on for years, and at first it was disturbing, especially when other writers picked up on it and reprinted his “theories.” You’d think that people who call themselves journalists would make an effort to get in contact with someone before they implicate him in a high-profile murder. But the only conspiracy theorist who’s asked to interview me is Astucia (means “clever” or “cunning” in Spanish), and that is the only interview I’ve ever refused to do. I don’t know if he really believes what he’s writing, or he knows it’s bullshit and he just says it to be provocative. But he’s also a Holocaust denier and tends to describe me as a “Jewish writer.” That’s why I call him My Personal Nazi. (Everybody should have one.) What I finally realized is that when Astucia gets active, and starts splattering stuff all over the Internet—it goes in cycles—it sells books. So, I don't totally hate him. And any time I find myself on a top-three list with Stephen King and J. D. Salinger, I only have My Personal Nazi to thank.

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If you’ve ever googled me, you may have come across the website of a prolific conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier who’s implicated me in John Lennon’s murder. This has been going on for years and I’ve ignored it because…it’s insane. (Though I do take some comfort in the fact that Stephen King, too, has his own personal conspiracy theorist who’s implicated him in Lennon’s murder.) But now I’d like to bring your attention to a piece I found yesterday that satirizes the top three Lennon murder conspiracy theories, including the one that implicates me. When your conspiracy theories are reduced to satirical grist, the game, at last, is over. Read More