Rulon Hurt: The main character in Einstein's Trunk

     The Bible says there is nothing new under the sun. And that may be true, but as a writer I wanted my two main characters, Rulon Hurt and Yohaba Meleksen, to be unique in the world of thrillers. This post is about Rulon. The next one will cover Yohaba - my heroine.
     Rulon Hurt s a former bull-rider and Boise State University athlete who works for a private American security company called Office Crimes Division (OCD). He's six-foot, two-hundred-ninety pounds, self-conscious about his weight, self-deprecating, not good with women but nobody's fool, has a dry sense of humor, and generally would rather talk his way out of a fight than be in one. He also is amazingly strong and quick for his size, having been an accomplished NCAA hammer throw and Greco-Roman wrestler.
     He has two claims to fame in the world of combat skills: First, he's a superb shot, having grown up around guns all his life as a rancher in the Twin Falls area of Idaho. Second, under certain occasions, he carries a short-handled Wilton Demolition model sledge hammer under his jacket - a weapon he first picked up several years before the events in ET during a scrape with some murderous neo-Nazis in a bar in Marseilles.
      I wanted Rulon to be different from your average thriller hero. I wanted him to be more...well, more normal. I didn't want him to be suave, handsome, totally self-confident, as murderous as his adversaries, laughing in the face of death, careless of human life, and conscienceless. I wanted him to have gifts but to be someone who I would enjoy spending time with, and someone I could recognize from my associations with people in Idaho.

      Jim