This is where we learn about me. Jimmy Edwards---yes, you've come to the right page---was born in Brooklyn.  In deepest Flatbush.  (The "Hougan' came later, more or less over my dead body, but it came.)  Mom was a model.  Dad was a paratrooper.  It didn't work out.  (Why was that a surprise?)

Between the nuns at Our Lady Help of Christians and the duck-and-cover drills they put us through, I think I had Tourette's.  But maybe not.  It might have been a premonition.

Anyway...Brooklyn was stickball and Captain Video, Carol McGowan and the incense of autumn leaves---piles of them that we burned in the street because...we could.

But like I said, "it didn't work out."  So we moved to Reno, where Mom worked as a shill in a casino, while I stayed home for six months, reading comics and playing with toy soldiers.  (Not the painted lead masterpieces you see in the London arcades, but the cheap taupe plastic ones that crouch behind ashtrays and knick-knacks, training their carbines on the front-door.)

Then L.A., where Mom remarried a 6-6 Norwegian with four kids and a silent "u" in his name.  Suddenly, I was a Hougan.  With instant siblings! Judy, Tom, Dave and Jerry (or as I thought of them, L, X-L, X-X-L, and Jumbo).  Suddenly, I was a dwarf!  And this, on the brink of adolescence.  (No wonder so many people get killed in the books, and horribly.)

Tulsa followed.  And then Racine, where I went to Horlick High School.  (We were the Rebels, only no one called us that.  What they actually called us was: "the Horlickers.")
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Fast forward to the beautiful Carolyn by way of San Miguel, Mykonos and Ibiza.  And what you get is an award-winning investigative reporter and sometime documentary film-maker, a former private-eye who is also (and not incidentally) the author or co-author of seven novels and three non-fiction books.

But I've gotten ahead of myself.

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, I won a string of journalism awards from the Maryland-Delaware Press Association, which landed me a job as a reporter on one of the country's great liberal dailies, the Capital Times.  It was a grand time to be in Madison, with its symphonies of breaking glass (even now, I love the smell tear-gas in the morning).  The antiwar riots and demonstrations were never-ending---or so it seemed, until the New Year's Gang blew up the Army Mathematics Research Center, inadvertently killing a researcher.  (Talk about the day the music died---that was it.)

The stories I wrote about the antiwar scene led to fellowships with the Alicia Patterson and Rockefeller Foundations.  They sent me to Mexico and Europe to report on the massacre in Tlatelolco Square, the junta in Athens, and youth movements in London, Amsterdam and pre-disco Ibiza.  The reports that I wrote were syndicated to newspapers and magazines everywhere.

In 1973, I returned from London, a couple of months after Daisy was born.  Moving to Maine, I wanted to write longer pieces and, eventually, the Most Excellent American Novel.  What I actually wrote was Decadence, which compared the counterculture of the 60s and 70s to millenarian movements in the Middle Ages. 

It did not do great.  But I got most of my wish, and soon found myself writing cover-stories for an array of national magazines.  In 1979, I became Washington Editor of Harper's Magazine.

By then, I'd published a second book.  This was Spooks, a rock-'em-sock-'em study of the private use of secret agents by multinational corporations and the rich.  The Los Angeles Times called it "One of the best non-fiction books of the year, a monument of fourth-level research and fact-searching."

It was around this time that I had one of those Copernican moments that drives the Inquisition crazy.  (You didn't know we had an Inquisition?)  While researching an article about a mysterious private-eye named Lou Russell, I stumbled upon a fundamental contradiction in the Watergate story.  That is, despite repeated and targeted searches, no working bug had been found inside the Democrats' headquarters, though more than 200 telephone conversations---most of them about sex---had been monitored by Gordon Liddy's agents.

Hunh?  How could that be?  How do you monitor telephone conversations in the absence of a working bug?  What did it mean?

Well, it meant that the Emperor had no clothes.

A contract with Random House quickly materialized to fund a groundbreaking investigation that consumed four years of my life.  The result was a book that dismantled the Watergate mythos propounded by Woodward & Bernstein with the help of Hollywood, Langley and the Pentagon.

Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection that the New York Times picked as "one of the year's most noteworthy books."  Norman Mailer called it "a startling mine of veins, leads, lodes and deep shafts into the ongoing mystery of Watergate.  Three cheers for Hougan's investigative reporting."

During this same period, I did a bit of reporting for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and (with David Fanning and Antony Thomas) produced "Confessions of a Dangerous Man"---a documentary filmed in Beirut with a fugitive arms-dealer and former CIA officer named Frank Terpil.  (The film won a national Emmy for investigative reporting.  "Mr. Frank" remains at large.)

About a year after Secret Agenda came out, I formed Jim Hougan Associates in a desperate attempt to pay the rent.  By now, Daisy had been joined by Matt, and their mother was insisting that the children should be fed, clothed, and educated.  "What's so bad about 'feral'?" I asked.  "'Feral' is the new 'civilized.'"

In the event, the new firm undertook investigative research for law firms and labor unions---and a couple of private clients.  I'd expected the work to be boring, but...no.  Because of my background, and because of the books that I'd written about the intelligence community, I attracted a more interesting clientele than most.  Their problems and interests took me around the world---to the back-streets of Rio de Janeiro, where Jim Jones studied faith-healing and Candomble, to a meeting with a hit-man in a spooky hotel atop a volcano off the coast of Africa.  (NB: the hit-man wasn't just a hit-man, he was also a source, and that was why I met with him.)

Eventually, I got to Zug.

This was the glamorous Swiss bastion to which fugitive billionaire Marc Rich had flown when indictments rained down against him for trading with the enemy (Iran).  I was hired by the United Steelworkers to run an investigation against Rich, who was one of the world's biggest commodity dealers.  The goal was to win back the jobs of 1500 Steelworkers who'd been locked out of an aluminum plant in Ravenswood, West Virginia.  "Marc" (as we thought of him) had an interest in the plant and, it seemed, in breaking the union.  If the Steelworkers didn't get their jobs back, the town of Ravenswood was going to blow away.  The plant was the only show in town.

For two years, then, I traveled between Washington and London (where the Metals Exchange is located), Amsterdam and Zurich (where the bankers could be found).  It was important and interesting work, and just a little bit dangerous.  My hotel room was burglarized, and the Steelworkers were warned that if I didn't turn back from my drive to the World Economic Forum in Davos (where Marc was doing his nabob thing), I'd end up at the bottom of a ravine---under the truck I was driving, covered with snow.  (The reader may wonder, why was I driving a truck?  Well, the short answer is: we had these really big puppets. They were 15' tall, which made it possible for the puppets to peer in through the second floor windows of the Marc Rich headquarters in Zug, and watch the brokers trade. The sudden appearance of Mother Jones at the window was said to be unnerving.  But it amused the Swiss and, in particular, the Zugeoisie, who seemed never to have seen a demonstration before.)

I wasn't the only one to be threatened by Marc's thugs.  The AFL-CIO's Joe Uehlein was promised a spot at the bottom of the Serpentine, across from Grosvenor House in London's Hyde Park.  (This was outside the annual frolic given by London Metals Exchange.)

Long story short: Daisy and Matt were clothed and fed, and went on to great things.  And the Steelworkers got their jobs back, thanks largely to the efforts of Joe Uehlein and then-Steelworkers' President George Becker.

Which left me with a decision to make.  Did I want to be a writer or a spook?  I couldn't be both.

And I couldn't decide, either.  So what I did was, I went to Beirut for "60 Minutes."  In point of fact, I was probably the first American journalist to return to the city after the Lebanese civil war.  Working with Lowell Bergman and Mike Wallace, I arranged exclusive interviews with a troika of dangerous men: the former Secretary-General of Hezballah, Sheik Sobhi Tufayli; Hezballah's "spiritual leader," Sheik Mohammed Fadlallah; and the rather alarming Hussein Mussawi, head of a pro-Iranian splinter-group, called "Islamic Amal."

After the Beirut segment aired, I continued to work as a consultant to "60 Minutes," while writing and making films on my own.  One was "The Vodka Dons," which I co-produced with a brilliant director named Gary Horne.  A one-hour film about the Russian Mafia, it was shown on the Discovery Channel in the U.S. and Europe, where it was nominated for a Cable Ace award.

In recent years, I've published five thrillers with the inestimable Carolyn, writing under the name "John Case."

The Magdalen Cipher, which I wrote on my own, was originally published by Ballantine, under the title, Kingdom Come.  It came out in 1999, but didn't do much until two years ago, when Planeta put it out in Spain under the title, El Ultimo Merovingio.  When that book became a best-seller there, Harper-Collins agreed to publish it in the U.S.  Other editions are coming out in the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, "John Case" toils on, with his sixth book, Ghost Dancer, set for publication this August.  I hope you'll like it.  It's about love, diamonds and revenge, Nikola Tesla and a villain named "Jack Wilson"---who just might be your hero.