INSIDE MY NEW NOVEL “RIDE THE TYGER” November 7, 2025
Reading a novel is easy. Harder: writing my tenth novel, “Ride the Tyger: The Lost, Unauthorized Oral Biography of Madison Hadder.”
I started with a question: What leads someone to embrace the political far right and ignore reality? Witness Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R., Georgia) with “Jewish space lasers” and Trump former counselor Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts.” “Ride the Tyger” would propose one answer.
While my protagonist would go down the rabbit-hole, I rejected a contemporary setting. Politics can shift radically between concept and publication. So, I set the story in the early- to mid-twentieth century when many Americans embraced the Ku Klux Klan, Adolf Hitler and the Red-baiting Joe McCarthy. At the same time, widespread poverty, the stock market crash of 1929 and the Depression drove many to Communism.
Next, I had to create my protagonist. Result: Madison Hadder, born in 1908 and growing up in the fictional small city of Giffordville in an unnamed state in America’s Heartland. The historical background would be real, but the story would have a somewhat mythic quality.
As to format, I usually use third-person omniscient, past tense. (My last novel, “Taking Stock,” was written first-person.) I saw an opportunity to do something different—take a fictional approach to oral histories like Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times” (the Depression) and “The Good War” (World War Two). I’d read them decades earlier and soon re-read them.
I’d need interview subjects. Also an interviewer. For the latter, I created a fictional history professor, John L. Green. A native Ohioan, he taught at Chicago’s DePaul University. Green discovered a newspaper article about Madison Hadder not long after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and “wrote his book” several years after.
Why was his book “lost”? Green’s foreword and the fictional publisher’s note reveal that.
As to subjects: how many? As many as needed but no so many as to be confusing. These people knew Madison Hadder with one exception, who had a critical story to tell relating to Madison. I settled on 21 subjects. They included Madison’s deeply Christian mother, his sister, ex-wives, children, childhood friends, a newspaper editor, a radio-station owner, two political wheeler-dealers, a minister and a prison warden.
I decided to tell the story chronologically. It begins with Madison’s mother relating his difficult birth and challenging relationship with his father. Subjects keep coming back, recalling Madison’s station in life, their own lives and the country’s situation.
Regarding research, knowing much of the history of the United States from pre-World War one through the JFK assassination didn’t get me off the hook. I did a ton—both for authentic background and to develop plot points tying in with Madison’s growing up, becoming an adult and eventually entering politics. Besides Terkel’s books, I read Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism” and Larry Tye’s “Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy.” And others. I also gave the internet a workout.
As intended, Madison Hadder became a complex character rather than a black-and-white stereotype. The ending sends the story in an interesting direction.
There in a nutshell is what it took to write “Ride the Tyger” (“Tyger” spelled as in William Blake’s classic poem). Do read it. You’ll discover the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
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