Robert Blair Kaiser

Clare Booth Luce discovered me when I was a young reporter for the Arizona Republic in Phoenix. Soon I was covering the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in Rome, winning prizes and plaudits for my inside reporting on the progress of Pope John's push to bring the Church up to date. Since then, I've done five books on the post-conciliar Church, and a dozen others on various other obsessions. I did an important book (I would say the most important book) on the assassination of Robert Kennedy, "R.F.K. Must Die!" (which reads like a novel) and, most recently, two novels, both pieces of reality fiction that sometimes use the real names of real people, to make the story look and sound like a news story.

In each of these novels, I try to make a point as well as to entertain. On the surface, "Cardinal Mahony" looks like an ecclesiastical thriller, but it is really an action plan for the future of a people's Church in America, where everyone has a voice, a vote, and citizenship in their Church. My latest novel, "Razzle Dazzle," is a fantasy about a beauty I call "Jessica Burns" who inherits the NY Jets, hires a coach with revolutionary ideas who takes her and the Jets all the way to the Super Bowl. I have a point to make here, too: that, by creating razzle dazzle offenses with a lot of downfield laterals, we can have more fun and less violence in the NFL.