The Plot to Kill Jackie Robinson
Posted by Rhubarb_Runner on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 5:30 am
[contributed by: Rhubarb_Runner]
The Plot to Kill Jackie Robinson
by Donald Honig
Copyright © 1992 by Penguin Books
hardcover, 261 pages
About the Author: Donald Honig is a highly regarded baseball historian who has written a number of nonfiction bestsellers on the game, and is also the author of six novels. He lives in Cromwell, Connecticut.
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About the Book:
Tinker, a post-WWII vet, was a New York sportswriter currently serving a suspension for skipping the last two games of the World Series in St. Louis in favor instead of a spending a weekend with a lonely gal he met. One night during his suspension, he and his girlfriend hear a gunshot across the street from their apartment, and the murder of a straight-laced NYPD detective in a black hooker's room becomes the catalyst that sets in motion the plot of the book's title.
With the heavy weight of fate on Jackie Robinson's shoulders, he finds a concerned and sympathetic fellow in Tinker, who's been re-instated to cover Robinson during spring training. While Brooklyn Dodgers' owner Branch Rickey (with a trusting Jackie Robinson) carefully orchestrates each step of his Grand Plan to integrate baseball, the antagonist is setting up his own plan to end it before it can begin, leaving Tinker in the middle to uncover the mystery before it leads to a tragic conclusion.
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Personal notes:
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This bit of fiction is more of a hardboiled detective story than a historic look at baseball, but it was mildly entertaining.
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I found it interesting the extents that Branch Rickey took to successfully ease a black man into baseball, from selecting just the right person, to having Jackie work out with his Montreal Royals minor league team in spring training instead of the Dodgers, and having both of their spring training moved from Florida to instead be held in Cuba, etc.
Please drop an email to SBGLibrary (at) hotmail (dot) com if you have a suggestion or a submission for the SBG Library.
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Is the author one of those guys who writes two books a year?
Well, I'm not sure who those guys are, but he's got several books listed at Amazon, and very few are fiction-type (thanks, Bert).
When I saw this under the recent posts I didn't realize it was a Library entry. At first I thought it was under "Headlines" and that the FBI opened some old file they had on a plot. Still, sounds like an interesting book.
btw, there are sections of the book which are, uh, somewhat explicit material... /father mode
and the murder of a straight-laced NYPD detective in a black hooker's room becomes the catalyst that sets in motion the plot of the book's title
I would have never guessed.