by Roger Zotti
For his latest book, “Nathan Hale: The Life and Death of An American Spy” (St. Martin’s Press), it took acclaimed investigative journalist M. William Phelps about six years, he said, “to collect and read all the research, analyze it, and back up what I wrote. It’s a process similar to what I do on my day job, which is writing true crime, except [writing about Hale] was deeper and I found it harder to track down things.”
Phelps’s research paid off. “Nathan Hale” is engaging, compelling, and informative. Yes, it marks a departure from the author’s previously published works because it’s set in the 18th Century. “It’s history,” Phelps said. “There’s nobody [living] I could interview for it, like I do with my other stuff.” With his true crime books, Phelps explained, “I’m going through police reports and trial transcripts. I’m always researching. Writing about Hale isn’t the same but at the same time it is.”
Phelps, who lives with his family in a small CT farming community, said he’d like readers to take away from his latest book “a clear picture of who this famous American patriot was. One thing is that God came first for Nathan and everything else was second. It’s just the opposite today: We come first. God comes second, or third.” Moreso, Phelps hopes readers “learn the truth about Nathan. I tampered down some of the falsehoods about him.”
Phelps added that one reason he wrote about Nathan Hale is “because there’s no contemporary biography out about him. Almost everything written about Nathan that people know, or think they know, is false.”
One of the book’s defining moments is the meeting between the 21-year-old, handsome, athletic Nathan and Colonel Robert Rogers, a man, Phelps writes, “British commanders looked to for his brutal, bloodthirsty reputation and plain, soft spoken method of talking people into doing what he wanted.” It was on September 20, 1776, at a local tavern in Long Island, that Robert introduced himself to Nathan “as a fellow American soldier.” A gullible Nathan believed him. Phelps continues, “Robert knew exactly what to say. Nathan fell right into Robert’s trap and began to talk openly with him.” They ate breakfast together the next day and Robert got Nathan to admit he was “sent over the British lines by George Washington” to spy. His legs shackled and his hands tied behind his back, Nathan “was an official prisoner of war now, [he] was going to be executed.” As Phelps makes clear, Nathan knew little about spying; and as David McCullough writes in “1776”: “The mission was doomed from the start.”
Next for M. William Phelps is a book about serial killer Amy Archer Gilligan (1893-1928). “She’s a pioneering health care person who, in a way, invented the concept of convalescent homes, and she’s from CT,” he said. “The story takes place in the early nineteen hundreds. What I’m doing is marrying history and true crime.”
