H. H. Charles, is a pseudonym for Charles H. Helein, who is a practicing lawyer in Washington, D.C. His first novel No Escape - A Maze of Greed and Murder is about dirty politics and murder in Washington, D.C. His second novel also draws on his experience working and living in the D.C. area. It is based on facts of how big business gets its way in Washington through money, influence, cover ups, and when necessary, murder. His next novel is about gun violence and the NRA lobby.
Mr. Helein began his career with the United States Senate, having been chosen from the top law school graduates in 1963 from his home state of Missouri. He served as Assistant General Counsel to the United States Senate's Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure of the Senate Judiciary Committee. During his tenure, the principal legislation governing all the federal agencies, the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 was revised and of particular note, the Freedom of Information Act was enacted opening up government records to the press, scholars and the public.
After leaving the Senate, Mr. Helein worked for a brief period with a firm that represented Motorola which at the time was in need of more radio spectrum for its mobile radios. Due in part to his efforts in gathering the facts to support the need for spectrum, the FCC did expand the use of radio spectrum for mobile communications.
Until 1993, Mr. Helein was a partner in several large law firms, while also serving as General Counsel to a national trade association. In 1993, he founded his own law firm which he ran until November 2011. While he continues to practice his profession, he found more time to devote to writing, a keen interest he developed some twenty years earlier but could not afford the time to pursue. With more time at his disposal, his first book, No Escape - A Maze of Greed and Murder, was published in October 2013. This was followed quickly by Dark Corridors - A Labyrinth of Lies, Loss, Lust and Murder, published in April 2014. The manuscript for his third book, Seeds of Anarchy - A Harvest of Indifference was completed in December 2014 and is being circulated to publishers.
Based on his experience as a lawyer practicing in Washington, D.C., while Mr. Helein's books deal with issues that are are not only current, but have proven to be intractable - drugs, government duplicity and gun violence. While Mr. Helein's takes on each issue , his focus is on the people who are confronted and affected by them. What happens to the characters in each book as they react and attempt to deal with the issues that personally impact their lives and loves is told in a fast-paced, tense narrative with unpredictable unfolding of events filled with action, betrayal, love, lust, loss, corruption, deception and murder. There are enough twists and turns that some have likened the novels to those of Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy.
To reach a broader audience, Mr. Helein believes that issues of importance and concern about them must reach as broad an audience as possible. He believes that history teaches that in many cases, to reach a broader audience the issue must be dramatized through the mediums of novels, plays, films, in short the arts. Mr. Helein believes this view is supported by such iconic works as To Kill a Mocking Bird, by Harper Lee, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens to name but a few. Mr. Helein by no means to imply his work is comparable to these great authors. They are cited simply as precedent supporting his thesis. As a lawyer, such citations are fundamental to the legal profession.
Mr. Helein intends to continue to take on other issues that he perceives to be of broad public concern and importance. For example, the tax exemption status of the NRA (noted far more for its intense lobbying efforts against any common sense gun regulation than for charitable or social welfare efforts); the indifference of Congress, the Supreme Court and the Presidency to the people of this country, that, unseen by those in power, channels the same elite indifference that propelled the events of 1789; and the fear mongering and bigotry on immigration that has made a mockery of the principles engraved on the Statute of Liberty - "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores."
Fred was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young ‘pullets,’ and ten roosters to fertilize the eggs. He kept records, and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced. But this took a lot of time, so he bought some tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone, so he could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now, he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells.
Fred’s favorite rooster, old Butch, was a very fine specimen, but this morning he noticed old Butch’s bell hadn’t rung at all! When he went to investigate, he saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover. To Fred’s amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He’d sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.
Fred was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Brisbane City Show and he became an overnight sensation among the judges. The result was the judges not only awarded old Butch the “No Bell Piece Prize,” but they also awarded him the “Pulletsurprise” as well.
Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making. Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the unsuspecting populace and screwing them when they weren’t paying attention.
Vote carefully in the next election, you can’t always hear the bell.
On a Christmas morning, the body of a sixteen-year old girl is found in a field near the local railroad overpass. Although the temperature the night before was well below freezing, she was discovered without any winter clothes. An autopsy determined she died of hyperthermia and her blood alcohol level showed she was legally incapacitated.
Three months after a State Supreme Court holds that the death penalty is unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment, its Chief Justice who cast the deciding vote in the 5-4 decision is found shot to death in his bedroom. There’s no signs of a struggle, but the police find a crumpled piece of paper on the Justice’s body with a series of letters that are unintelligible.
Why this book? Why this effort? The following thoughts that arose when beginning may provide some insight.
The focus of this book is a review, from the very beginnings of this nation, from its “discovery” by Columbus to present day Trump, on “American Greatness!” And to ask - was there, is there, any truth to “American Greatness?” Or does it exist only because much of the country’s history of bigotry, racism, genocide, slavery, discrimination, indifference is either ignored or unknown because it is covered up and/or denied?
SEEDS OF ANARCHY is a novel about gun violence. In doing researching for the book, Federalist Papers and subsequent writings of the founding fathers established a convincing basis that the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment was indeed limited to those in a well-regulated militia.
U.S. Senator Tom Graves's proposal to legalize drugs creates a backlash from the religious right, whose opposition is unwittingly organized and funded by Carlos Renner, one of Washington's many power brokers.