Author Biography

Geoffrey Gray writes about crime, politics, sports, travel and food. He is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, covered boxing for The New York Times and for programs like This American Life, writes for other newspapers and magazines, and once drove an ice-cream truck. Skyjack is his first book.

Table of Contents

The Jump

The Hunt

The Curse

Afterword

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Review

"Gray dives into the world of online sleuths, speculators, and zealots as if he were Hunter S. Thompson hitting the road with the Hell's Angels. . . . One thing Skyjack makes entertainingly clear is that it's a weird, weird world."—Washington Post

"Skyjack will take you on an engaging discovery."—Chicago Sun-Times

"Gray organizes this, his first book, like a Tarantino film, cutting chronology into strips, then reassembling them in a sequence that readers may consider (pick one) eccentric, confusing, artistic, random, maddening, fun, revelatory. It's all of the above."—Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Fascinating. . . . [A] rollicking reading experience."—Oregonian

"Out of the wild blue yonder comes this pleasing tale of obsession and mystery. Geoffrey Gray has essentially parachuted into the early 1970s and found a nearly forgotten episode that elucidates a swath of our cultural history. The result is a clean, smart whodunit full of quirky characters, imaginative sleuthing, and thrilling surprises."—Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail

"With verve and assurance worthy of his protagonist, Geoffrey Gray pulls readers along on a kaleidoscopic chase through the cult of Cooper. Both a masterful re-creation of the paranoid 1970s, and an exhilarating firsthand account of an erosive obsession, Skyjack takes us down the rabbit hole with Gray—and what a journey it is."—James  Swanson, author of Manhunt and Bloody Crimes

"Who was D.B. Cooper? In Skyjack, Geoffrey Gray lures in the reader with this iconic unsolved mystery, and for the next 290 pages explores a story as attention-grabbing as a bag of hot money. D.B. Cooper emerges as the great McGuffin of 1970s America, a prism through which Gray exploits to the fullest with his propulsive writing style, mad commitment to detail, and explores everything from the early years of gender reassignment surgery to the birth of airline security culture to the ghostly legends of the Pacific Northwest's Dark Divide."—Evan Wright, New York Times bestselling author of Generation Kill

"Skyjack tells the legendary story of D.B. Cooper in a way that's as inventive and as engaging as the subject itself. Only a writer as talented as Geoffrey Gray could knit together the many strands of this mystery and the extraordinary characters who have dedicated, and in some cases destroyed, their lives in pursuit of the truth. Just as Gray finds himself sucked into the tale, readers will leap into the void alongside him, landing on their feet and smiling at the shared adventure."—Mitchell Zuckoff, author of Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II

"Easily one of the most delightful books I've read in a long, long time. In his obsessive search for answers in the legendary case, Gray becomes a little unhinged himself as well as encountering an array of characters I haven't seen the likes of since Mark Twain sent Huck down the Mississippi. His style fits the case, and Gray can be compared with Tom Wolfe and Evelyn Waugh in his talent for unearthing the eccentrics of the world and the bizarreness of life."—John Bowers, Associate Professor of Writing, Columbia University, author of The Colony and Love in Tennessee

Review Quote

"Out of the wild blue yonder comes this pleasing tale of obsession and mystery. Geoffrey Gray has essentially parachuted into the early 1970s and found a nearly forgotten episode that elucidates a swath of our cultural history. The result is a clean, smart whodunit full of quirky characters, imaginative sleuthing, and thrilling surprises." - Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail "Here is writing and storytelling that is vivid and fresh-a delectable adventure from a talented new author." -Gay Talese "With verve and assurance worthy of his protagonist, Geoffrey Gray pulls readers along on a kaleidoscopic chase through the cult of Cooper. Both a masterful re-creation of the paranoid 1970s, and an exhilarating firsthand account of an erosive obsession, Skyjack takes us down the rabbit hole with Gray-and what a journey it is." -James Swanson, author of Manhunt and Bloody Crimes "Who was D.B. Cooper? In SKYJACK, Geoffrey Gray lures in the reader with this iconic unsolved mystery, and for the next 290 pages explores a story as attention-grabbing as a bag of hot money. D.B. Cooper emerges as the great McGuffin of 1970s America, a prism through which Gray exploits to the fullest with his propulsive writing style, mad commitment to detail, and explores everything from the early years of gender reassignment surgery to the birth of airline security culture to the ghostly legends of the Pacific Northwest's Dark Divide." -Evan Wright, New York Times bestselling author of Generation Kill "SKYJACK tells the legendary story of D.B. Cooper in a way that's as inventive and as engaging as the subject itself. Only a writer as talented as Geoffrey Gray could knit together the many strands of this mystery and the extraordinary characters who have dedicated, and in some cases destroyed, their lives in pursuit of the truth. Just as Gray finds himself sucked into the tale, readers will leap into the void alongside him, landing on their feet and smiling at the shared adventure." -Mitchell Zuckoff, author of Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II "Easily one of the most delightful books I've read in a long, long time. In his obsessive search for answers in the legendary case, Gray becomes a little unhinged himself as well as encountering an array of characters I haven't seen the likes of since Mark Twain sent Huck down the Mississippi. His style fits the case, and Gray can be compared with Tom Wolfe and Evelyn Waugh in his talent for unearthing the eccentrics of the world and the bizarreness of life." -John Bowers, Associate Professor of Writing, Columbia University, author of The Colony and Love in Tennessee "…An exciting journey into the byways of popular culture. This is hardly the first book about Cooper, but it may be the first to treat his story for what it has become: an ongoing phenomenon, like the search for Bigfoot, with a remarkable ability to consume the imaginations and lives of generations of searchers." -Booklist , Starred "Gray organizes this, his first book, like a Tarantino film, cutting chronology into strips, then reassembling them in a sequence that readers may consider (pick one) eccentric, confusing, artistic, random, maddening, fun, revelatory. It's all of the above."-- Cleveland Plain Dealer From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt from Book

July 6, 2007 New York, New York Skipp Porteous wants to talk and says can we meet and I say fine. He arrives in a suit that is South Beach white, and between the wide lapels is a T-shirt that is snug and black. He has leather sandals on his feet, no socks. His hair is curly and brown. His goatee is trimmed and gray in spots. He removes his sunglasses, which reveal hooded eyes, and gives the room a looky-loo. The bistro is typical midtown Manhattan. A fruit basket of martinis on the menu--mango, peach, Lillet. The clatter of voices at the banquettes and the clank of dishes ricochet over the roar of lunch talk. In the gilded mirrors on the walls are reflections of Windsor knots, hair gel, six-figure cleavage. I have dealt with Porteous before. He had a few story ideas; none worked. I can''t remember why now. Porteous was his own story, and maybe I should have written about him. He used to be a preacher before he became a private investigator. In the late 1960s, Porteous ran a church in Los Angeles and worked the Sunset Strip with his Bible. He preached to hippies, the homeless, anybody who would listen to his salvation pitch. "Excuse me," he would say, "if you died tonight, where would you spend eternity? The game for Porteous then was to win souls for the Church, until he lost his own. He saw corruption in the Church and started digging around. What he found was that he was good at digging around, often in disguise. Porteous liked undercover work so much he made a second career out of it. For a small-town sheriff, he bought drugs as a narc. For the FBI, he infiltrated gangs and groups wearing a wire. It was a decent living. The feds paid on time, and in cash. His style is not tough-talking or pushy. Porteous has a holistic approach toward PI work. Some retired cops flash badges or guns. Porteous starts each investigative day with a meditation session. He also hires mostly women to do PI work. "Women have better instincts than men," he told me when we first met. Sherlock Investigations, his agency, had the gimmicky type of title that attracts a lot of attention on the Web. It snared me, and countless others needing help solving problems of an unusual kind. Like the disappearance of Captain Jack, an iguana that was stolen through an open window in Greenwich Village. Or the woman who called because she was convinced the actress Lily Tomlin was stalking her (she wasn''t). Or the man convinced his wife was having an affair with his father (she was). Or the runaway from Israel they found living under a bridge in Arizona. Or the mother from India who wanted to spy on the man her daughter was dating, and all the suspicious spouses and suits who are convinced (and wrongly so) that their phone receivers are tapped and their offices are bugged. Sin and paranoia form the backbone of his business. It''s loud in the bistro and I can''t hear the private investigator so good. I lean over my moules, anxious to hear what case has come over Porteous''s transom. Another missing pet? Another teenage runaway? Gypsy scams? Nope. It''s a new client, Lyle Christiansen. His intel is sparse. From what the private detective has pieced together, Lyle Christiansen appears to be a kooky old man, an eccentric, and prodigious. He is eighty years old, and lives in Morris, Minnesota, a prairie town closer to Fargo, North Dakota, than it is to Minneapolis. Lyle grew up in Morris and worked for the post office there. In retirement, he has become an inventor. He is in the process of patenting a hodgepodge of household contraptions: the Yucky Cleaning Wand (it slips into the neck of a bottle to clean the tough-to-reach places), an egg breaker that cracks eggs perfectly every time, and a shirt that disguises the appearance of suspenders (he finds them distasteful--in his version, you wear them on the inside of the shirt). Christiansen''s wife, Donna, has a creative mind, too. Over the years she has assembled a collection of expressions, adages, sayings, idioms, clich

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