Some stories grip us because they are imagined so vividly that they feel real. Others grip us because they are real, but told with such narrative force that they read like fiction. In How to Kill a President: Colt the Smoking Gun by Colt Donaldson, both forces collide. The result is a saga that lives in the tension between documented history and the underworld whispers that never make it into the textbooks.
Donaldson’s work stands out because it refuses to treat history as background scenery. Instead, moments like the assassination of JFK, the quagmire of Vietnam, and the rise of real estate moguls in New York become living, breathing elements of the Colt family’s survival. These events don’t just “frame” the story; they shape the fates of its characters. The line between fact and fiction blurs until readers are left asking, could this have happened?
That question is part of the magic. For instance, the Vietnam War isn’t portrayed as a distant policy decision—it is recounted through the torn wrists of a cousin, through the desperation of soldiers clinging to survival in muddy rivers. Likewise, the Waldorf Astoria isn’t just a glamorous hotel; it becomes the stage for ultimatums and blackmail that echo the very real collusion between organized crime and high society. These grounded details give the narrative a weight that pure invention rarely achieves.
But what makes this storytelling deeply human is the way personal memory collides with national memory. For many readers, history is something learned in classrooms or seen in grainy newsreels. For the Colts, it is intimate. A child remembers watching Walter Cronkite announce the president’s death on television. A teenager grows up in neighborhoods where mobsters aren’t distant figures—they’re family friends or enemies around the block. History isn’t distant; it’s a relative at the dinner table.
This weaving of fact and fiction mirrors how many of us actually experience life. We know the headlines—wars, scandals, elections—but we experience them filtered through our families, our neighborhoods, our own survival. When Donaldson blends verifiable figures like Bugsy Siegel or Donald Trump into the narrative of a fictionalized family, he captures that truth: our personal stories are always stitched into the broader fabric of history, whether we recognize it or not.
It also raises an uncomfortable question about truth itself. Do we ever really know where history ends and myth begins? Was the Colt family’s survival the result of luck, cunning, or powerful alliances? Did certain whispered conversations in gilded ballrooms really happen? The lack of certainty is what makes the story so gripping.
In the end, the collision of history and crime in Donaldson’s storytelling reminds us that fact and fiction are not always opposites. Sometimes, they are partners. Sometimes, truth needs the raw honesty of storytelling to make its impact felt. And sometimes, the stories that blur the lines are the ones that tell us the most about who we are.
Volume 1: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DX3Y1QCQ
Volume 2: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DX3NHG2P