A Gilmer County author is excited, albeit a little surprised, that one of his self-published books has been picked up for re-release by a publishing company.
Don VanLandingham‘s first novel, the crime thriller “Drawn Into Hell,” was first released in 2010. He recently contracted with Aspire Publishing, of California, to re-release the book.
“They notified me that they thought it was a real good book, and they (wanted) to take me on as a client and re-publish it,” said VanLandingham. “It was something I had done in the past, but wasn’t trying to promote. I’d really forgotten about it, so this just came out of the blue.”
“Drawn Into Hell” is a work of fiction based on real historical events, noted VanLandingham. It uses the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi as a springboard for an investigation and court case that follows. The heated civil rights movement, the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and questions of police corruption all play into the unfolding story.
“I tried to make the story as authentic as possible, considering that it is a novel,” he writes in the novel’s introduction, adding that the plot “illustrates the lethal side of prejudice, hatred and injustice.”
VanLandingham’s father, a career FBI agent who later worked as a private investigator, had personal ties to the real case that inspired not only “Drawn Into Hell,” but also the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”
“NBC News hired my dad because the sheriff and the deputy sheriff in Philadelphia,
Miss., were suing NBC because of what they called malicious lying,” he said. “They didn’t lie, as it turned out, and they hired him to conduct an investigation into the murders and find out what he could about the personalities of the sheriff and deputy sheriff.”
VanLandingham said his father passed away in 1981, but left behind a collection of files from his time as a private investigator. That’s how VanLandingham became aware of his father’s involvement with the case, which once carried the FBI code name “MIBURN.”
“It was several years after he passed away that I found his papers,” he said. “He’d been a PI for several cases, but this one really intrigued me. We were living in Mississippi at the time all that happened, but I had no idea that he was employed by NBC News (at the time).”
VanLandingham said he made some updates to the new edition of the novel, which also bears a new cover. “The cover was completely redone, and some of the inside has also been changed. We took out some misprints, grammatical problems and things like that,” he added.
Since its initial release, “Drawn Into Hell” has received a five-star seal from Reader Favorites, a popular book review website. The silver seal, which is given to books that receive five-star reviews on the site, appears on the front cover of this new edition.
“I was very pleased at those reviews,” said VanLandingham.
A retired CPA who once worked bankruptcy cases as a Chapter 13 Trustee, VanLandingham released his second novel, “Corruptacy,” in 2021. He described that book, a political thriller, as “a lesson in how bankruptcy does, and doesn’t work in the United States.”
The new edition of “Drawn Into Hell” is available online from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Copies are available locally at Gilmer Arts and Huff’s Drug Store.