Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins

INTRODUCTION There are many thousands of books on particular assassinations and on the subject in general, but nearly all of them deal with the victims, not the perpetrators. This is overwhelmingly the case even in the roomful of volumes on the John Kennedy assassination, the instance in which the most attention has been paid to the presumed killer or the hunt for substitute suspects. Until now, however, there has been no single reference book solely on assassins themselves, in various periods and countries, for the convenience of students, researchers, historians, criminologists, psychologists and general readers interested in true crime. This is ironic in a sense, because a certain kind of assassin, as the reader will see quite readily, kills in order to be ensured a place in history, only to be rejected by the historical record in the chaos that the killing sets in motion. Ask yourself this question: Who killed the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, thus igniting the First World War, in which ten million people died and twenty million were wounded and which redrew the map of Europe, dealt the coup de grace to European colonialism, made the United States a world powerand led inevitably, unstoppably, to the Second World War? That person, arguably one of the most influential of the twentieth century, survived until 1918 but his name has been forgotten by all but a few. (You'll find the answer by consulting Franz-Ferdinand in the Index of Victims at the end of this book.) Similarly, who carried out Stalin's orders and killed Leon Trotsky at his well-guarded compound in Mexico City in 1940? This was surely one of the most important events in the rise and fall of communism, the world's numerically dominant political system for much of the twentieth century. The person's name is not generally remembered though he lived until 1978. For that matter, who killed Rasputin and then lived on until 1967? Then there are acts of assassination as little known as the people who perform them. How many recall now that, a decade before he was gunned down in Memphis in 1968, a young Dr. Martin Luther King was very nearly assassinated in New York during a book signing? This encyclopedia will answer such questions and tell such tales, and many more besides. I can't resist pointing out some of history's most infamous assassins turn out not to have been assassins at all. Lucrezia Borgia is often referred to as an assassin but in fact never attempted to kill anybody (unlike her brother Cesare, who was probably the most prolific assassin of the Italian Renaissance, one of the great boom periods in assassination). Yet the world has not been without its female assassins, of whom the most notorious is Charlotte Corday, who killed the French political writer Jean-Paul Marat in the Revolutionary period and actually inspired later women to kill or try to. Because the women assassins are so interesting and so contrary to our preconceived ideas about gender, I have let them make up ten per cent of this book (an artificially high figure) and include women who have made attempts on the lives of people as different as Adolf Hitler and Andy Warhol. This leads to a related point. The greater the variety of assassins, the more diverse the targets. Sakamoto Ryoma, the founder of what became Mitsubishi Corporation, was an assassin. Alexandr Ulyanov led a failed conspiracy to kill the czar of Russia and was executed, thus provoking his younger brother, V.I. Lenin, to a life of communist agitation. Although most of the people identified in the Index of Victims are political or religious figures or social activists (for such is the nature of power and the reaction against it), the book also includes three professional criminals, two singers, two actors and one each of the following: fashion designer, banker, publisher, explorer, playwright, industrialist, raFetherling, George is the author of 'Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins' with ISBN 9780679310518 and ISBN 0679310517.