Thank you for coming to this panel. At 2 45. True crime across america. Im the graduate dean at jackson state university, and im happy to be here as a room coordinator. Well have 45 minutes for the session and then leave 15 for q a. The sponsors for our panel are cecile and nancy brown. Are they with us . [applause] im happy to introduce our moderator for this session, james, at i skipped over. Curtis wilkie. An associate prefer of journalism at the university of mississippi and fellow at the university oses center for southern journalism and politics and will take over. Thank you and thank you all for coming, and we appreciate the presence of our guest on the panel here at the mississippi book festival. Its getting bigger and better every year. Im going to start off by introducing very briefly our guests, and well carry on a discussion and i hope you all will have some questions for the panel toward the end of hour our hour. Karen abbott is bestsale august authorize of several books and her newest one, the ghost of eden park, is an indy next pick as well as an amazon best book for august. A glowing review in last sundays clarion ledger. Said abbott, quote, captures the feel of the jazz age and its gangsters, and they also called her book a wellresearched and highly engaging work filled with intrigue and fidelity, murder and headline catching courtroom drama. Abbott lives in new york. Glad to have you with us. Casey cent is author of furious hours, which recent review in the memphis commercial appeal described as her ravishing debut. Casey lives the Eastern Shore of maryland. She is a graduate of harvard and won an advanced degree in theology from that other oxford as a rhodes scholar. The lesser oxnard oxford. We like to think. She winning critical acclaim for her book this commercial appeal in memphis, said, quote, with exquisite prose and the pacing of a thriller, furious hours reveals a major tall present in full possession of he gifts. And then we have those of us old enough to remember the tv show the untouchables. I see some gray hair out there. Some of us remember that and more recently the film. Brad schwartz is the cao author with Max Allen Collins of scar face and the untouchable, thats elliott ness. Another tail that grow owls the prohibition era that features a couple of familiar characters, for those who are old enough to remember that, and set in one of my favorite cities in america, chicago. In fact, no less an authority than the chicago magazine calls the book, quote, a gripping take on chicagos past that reads like a novel. Brad is a doctoral student in American History at princeton and this is his first book also. My second. Im sorry. My second. Sorry. Forgive me. Okay. To set the stage for our discussion, i thought id ask each of them to give us just a capsule summary of what the book is about and what attracted them to the subject. So lets just go, brad down the line. Sure, ill answer the second part of your question as a way of answering your first which is that i grew up not quite so much on the roberts stack tv series but first loving dick tracy and then finding my way to the kevin costmer, Robert De Niro film the on touchables from 1997. Loving i because itself was its reminded me of the come nick strip i loved as a kid but it was base evened true story or was supposed to be and growing up in michigan, not too far from chicago, that familiarity geographically made me want to know more about the story of elliott ness and al capone so i was the rare kid that would go to library and try to read as much as i could. If something interested me and all of book i pulled out al capone. Id seep the film present its with agrees story of good and evil with elliott ness as the hero and every Nonfiction Book i read presented be mistaste perspective that elliott ness was as glory hound, took credit for other peoples work and had nothing to dive with al capone and i discovered a writer whose fiction i knew had written dick tracy but written some books about elliott ness and his career and presenting a very different image of ness that while not Kevin Costner and robert stack was closer to the heroic image i knew from hollywood and these were historical novels and always had a short after word at the end, and the talking pout ice research and source asks pricessed he was no to 0 to use nesss papers are kept and to discover what had been discounted but his career spying live with regard to al capone were verifiable fact and i loved his work, got to know him and i was studying history at the university of michigan doing the thesis that would become my first book but the or son wells war of the worlds broadcast and complained how the story had been misrepresented by hollywood and by a lot of poorly founded nonfiction accounts and eventually i said to max, we got to stop complaining and do something. Im being trained as an historian, youre a master novelist so we can write the proverbial Nonfiction Book that reads like a novel and too the story right and according to chicago magazine at least we succeeded. So thats the story. If anybody here ever watched the tv show boardwalk empire, there was a minner character name george reamus, incredibly odd and cuckoo and innovative and spoke of himself in the third person, and with all of these abbott and costelloesque exchanges with al capone and he steal every scene he was in and i wondered if he was real person and he was ask the real gorge spoke of himself in the third person and said thing likes so many want to kill reamus, reamus brain exploded. And to make ill give you my elevator pitch. Reamus ended up in 1921 become the most successful boot legger in American History, also reportedly an inspiration for are great gatsby. His wife, his glamorous second wife, imogene with whom he threw parties fell in love with the very prohibition agent who put him in jail. And this is all true. So that started a very sordid love triangle. There was a murder and a sensational trial and my book j. Ed gar hoover is one of the good guys. I just want to say thank you to curtis and the festival for having me and curtis did me the fav of not read the subtitlele which i murder, fraud and the last trial of harper lee and i was reluctant. And i grew up loving mockingbird and also being interested in harper lees life and i went down in 2015 for the new yorker to write a story but go set a watchman, the surprising announce. She would be publishing a new book and when i was reporting on that it learned about this other book she tried to write it and was a true crime project but a series of murders in a small town to alabama so thats the store of the book the first twothirds is the crime story and the last the are harper lees life and what made her interested in this case and what made it hard for the writemer own book about it. Thank you. Correct me if im wrong but i dont think theres any central character in any of your books that is still living. Anybody encounter any personal 0 observation or talk to characters . Well,. Ever talk to harper lee at all. She was alive for the first year i was working on the book but for toes who have read it i dont want to get bogged down in a plot but the alleged murderer in my book was gunned down by a vigilante at the funeral of his last victim and that vigilante is very much alive and i interviewed him nor book and i have the advantage the rare moment where i feel like my story is contemporary to this guys if interviewed a lot of people who knew hi central characters and many of their family members, spokeswoman, children, and obviously a lot of folkses in the town remember meeting harper lee and her friends and family cooperated, too. I wanted to ask eve l each of you how you were able to develop the characters, to define their personalities, not really knowing them. I was lucky, did speak with family members, george reamus has an sten became the biggest employer in cincinnati, employed 3500 people during hoe hib biggs and amassed he owned 35 of all the liquor in the United States. And had about a 40 million fortune in 1921 which is not adjusted for inflation. So i actually talked to a lot of his the people who worked with him and and descend dents they had storied and artifacts but i had a trial transcript found at the Yale University law library which was invaluable. It gave really incredible detail about george reamus, his life, various people who knew him. And just sort of bizarre quirks. One of favorite is he did not wear underwear which was a cause for great alarm in the 1920s. It was only the sign on an unsound mind. Little things that probably i wouldnt have found by talking to any relatives. Didnt know what his underwear habits were but that wasnt the spine of my research, i would say. In our case we really i moe author and i began with the understanding these aring mic characters who have been portrayed in films and Television Series we wanted to make them live and bring as much as possible. Our watch word was to let you know what files like to be in the room with these guys because both of them, especially elliott ness and alka pope were so different from robert stack and Robert De Niro, and it came down to i think incorp operating their voices as much as possible. Neither really left elliott ness left a compromised autobiography which we can talk about but he wrote a very sort of short and spare 21 page account of the capone investigation that gets spun into the book that becomes the basis for the tv series. So we tried to go back to that to quote from that to give you his words. Fortunately the two of them gave a lot of interviews and you can pull their voices from that as much as possible. I because these two men died both surprisingly young. Capone takes over the chicago outfit their chicago mob, at the age of 26. And elliott ness is 27 when he is put in charge of what we now know as the untouchables and they died very young. Capone in 47. Ness in 57 and i spam to whom who new ness and one in particular was very he reference decide i asked him what from portrayal was most authentic and she say that part of the untouchable where he threes man off the building would have never happened help hated guns and hated violence and was the exact antithesis of what you expect. We tried to make them live and breathe again. Casey, you got some indelible characters in your book. I like the reverend. A great question and im sure everybody here tried to learn beaut something the never a met. A grandmother, a great grandfather, the patriarch of the town where we were born. When you write true crime this almost always Police Report order investigative records or trial transcripts and get a sense of the persons voice but then you just go rooting around like a pig for truffles, looking for any mention of the people in thousands or magazines or contemporary coverage, and we talk before hand, being clear about our methods was as important to us as the final product so for all of us you can look and a pretty serious each of you have again way beyond the kind of journalistic approach of just the facts, maam, and have developed a really very colorful story with the strong character develop. And i want you to read a short passaging from cases book that torchons czech instinct that Truman Capote likes to think he invented. Casey referred to him, he thought he was the marco polo of new journalism invented the first nonfiction novel. But this is what i think for purpose of our discussion a good line. Capote borrowed the strategies of fiction writers in his nonfiction. Rendering settings that were more than just datelines, crafting characters who were more than just quotations and physical descriptions, and identifying within his reporting or imposing on it moods and themes that made a story more than the sum of its parts. And certainly it is more of a call it new journalism in magazine writing or the Nonfiction Books that we read. They are more colorful than people tend to put themselves in the heads of their characters and so and so may have thought such a thing. I want to ask each of you, how much of your own imagination dare you use in crafting your story . Casey, start up with you. I was hoping could get an answer from these two we are all creatures blinds and imagines when you mcput someone you start imagine things, but i just think you have to be very careful when you write a Nonfiction Book and you want to be very clear about the sourcing and where things are coming from and if you do speculate, which some People Choose to just want to flag that for reader but its an interesting thing, were greaterred around the genre of true crime and has different standards from other nonfiction genres and its been constanted by pawed confidents and its the boundaries are porous when twats is true and what is not and what is spectrum someplace what is fact. Guess im probably on the conservative side of things and i took my cue from harper lee because part of the book is about her relationship to genre of true crime and helped capote report in cold blood and theres commentary bet her feelings but the genre and her thoughts and really her objections to the places it was going in the 70s and 80s. Exactly what casey said. Also, i was dealing with a trial transcript, and the whole the nature of a trial is somebody is lying. If not one person, several people are lying. The whole nature of he said she said and i was very careful i do think that what people say and lie about and what they omit is just as telling to them as a character and to the story as what they say thats truthful. So i dont like to interly omit it but i like to flag it and just say this what this person contended or this person claimed. And i like to trust that the reader has some Emotional Intelligence to decide on their own exactly who is lying and i dont have to spell it out for you. And sort of at the en, sort of act like a prosecutor and lay out the case of what i think happened while leaving it a little open to interpretation. So, that people can have a little intellectual play with the book on their own with their own psych see and prejudices that everybody brings to reading. And this is one place in my case where i dont i didnt need the devil on my shoulder pulling me in that direction because i was working with a novelist this would be the one thing that made the collaboration interesting and hopefully makes the book a little unusual. That would be the wasnt a dispute often times but a tug of war between we can say that, cant say that. His imagination having written a lot of historical novel would pull him more in that line and i would say, well, this is about as far as i think we can do. We have places where theres speculation and its necessary speculation and its sign posted as such. But just to give an example, theres a famous the devin costmer movie and theres a famous scene where al capone kills someone with a baseball bat and thats one of the few things that has a basis in history. It had been discounted by a lot of revisionist historians histoe were able to find contemporary newspapers and true crime magazines not proving it happened that way but the story had been spread very deliberately by the capone mob as a way of engendering fear because capone in other words in his position as muss a wanted to be loved by the public eneedded to be feared by his employee in order to maintain his hold on power so letting people know if you tried cross him, you we be beaten with a baseball bat and that is an instance where we have the discovery of the bodies and then we say this story started going out on the gangline grapevine and tilt the way it came down to us and we can be pretty confident Something Like it happened, but that is an instance where you deal with people who arent going to leave a record often times of multiple homicides. So, you are sort of left with the stories they told about themselves. Im going read you your account of that scene, where de niro goes crazy in the movie but thisunder book. A body girded handed capone a baseball bat which he gripped in hands as powerful as babe ruth. The boss began crushing his skill, red streamed down the mans face like a cracked egg. The screams of the two brave gunmen awaiting the turns were cut off by similar blows. Capote worked him over for a while, then none of the men dead, each clinging to consciousness, they were turned over to the waiting clutch of bodyguards who blasted away. And then theres a line, so goes the story, viv variation but chilling similarities. Arent you pulling your punch a little bit. Again, this is an instance where we are very mindful that were dealing with an account characters of story that has been so mythologizes that sometimes people door quick to discount the myths in this instance i think theres a great basis of fact behind it. But at the same time, as we talk about earlier, i did have to convince my coauthor that the book needed 150 pages of source note. He would say cant we just write an is say and i said no we have to show our work, and so you dock right back to the back of the book and see what were we pulling from the newspaper article, true crime conditions knowledge when you he dollar with an historian, dated to the 7 associations having a image from a true crime magazine from 1932, an illustration of capone taking a baseball bat to the guys puts the try that strongly. I think you added some credibility to your story by suggesting, maybe it didnt happen exactly this way. You mentioned end notes. We talk about this before we went on. A fatherly new phenomenon with so much of nonfiction. All three of these books are chockfull of endnotes, 3040 paints maybe more in the back of the book. So if youre wondering where did that it get that you look in the back of the book and see it am notice net academic footnotes that clutter academic writing, but its there for you, and up until maybe 25 years ago, you really didnt have that requirement and i think its a good one, and i congratulate all three of these writers. It is very extensive footnotes. You have an authors note, where you assure the reader that there are, quote, no invented dialogue in the book, and you provide a lot of ab attribution your end note size thought id test it. Oh, no. Well, bear with me. This is the beginning of a chapter and its kind of the way writees try to develop a scene. And it begins on the morning of november 29, 1922 preparing for an appearance before the United States supreme court, wily brant the assistant attorney general has a cameo role in your book, too she stood at her closet and contemplated what to wear. If she had her way she wouldnt spend more than a moment thinking about fashion, but from her first day on the job, the press focused on the cut of her dress, the style of her hair, the height of her heels, et cetera. I i said, come on york obviously making this up and damned if i down look in the end notes and you got it from her own diorite library of congress. So, its a good example of how these people have gone out of their way to assure that there is credibility in what youre writing about. Sure. If i could just flag one thing. The danger is only to tell story that are so rich live documented and obviously only certain people of certain means had access or time keep a diary and exert putin story prioritizes over others and i think that the kind of attention to detail in this scrupulousness with which we operate is important but equally important is the seen lazy we historical record may never give you enough to make a character and dont want to rethats these people from your story and i dont want to make it sound like its a game of you can only make characters from those who left a robust record behind because there are real injustices in history and its why off academics aside from their own biases or biased by what remains of the historical past. Academic historians really took part our own shelby foote. And there nor footnote and theyre particularly cited a very dramatic scene with robert e. Lee at the battle of gettysburg when the mississippi ewanas decimated and he had lee going round on his horse, beating his chest and saying, my fault, my fault, all my fault. My men are lost. And the historians insist theres no other reference of that anywhere, and charged to put with the making it up. And then we talked briefly but this, but we were talking about another book that hadnt occurred to me but thats midnight in the garden of good and evil, which was a beautiful book but came in for a lot of criticism because not really nonfiction. Its strong suspicion of a lot of it is made up. Interesting. He massaged the time frame, too. That was the big criticism of that. Yeah. In our case, i referenced earlier that ness had a ghost writer write an autobiography that became the basis of the tv me and film and thats a book that the publisher version of the book the untouchables which came out after ness died in 1957 has been disparaged and dismissed in a lot of the nonfiction writing about al capone and elliott ness and one thing my coauthor and i sed out to do was lets subject this to scrutiny and try to verify because doesnt have footnotes. It has lot of invented dialogue and he cant know what people were wearing on a particular day. Necessarily. But he if you take the incidents thatter described the book piecemeal, the chronology is med it but take the incidents and compare them to the scrapbooks ness kept and other source is were able to find, i was shocked frankly how much of it checked out. And how much we were able to talk about in our own book to put in the proper Chronological Order and with the additional context because we had we didnt use anything from the book we couldnt independently verify but we endedded independently verifying at least threequarters of the stuff kind in it. What at your best guess why harper lee never got around to writing. Someone cutting to the chase. I spent hundreds of pages avoiding the question. My book has a couple of mysteries in summer them are the true crime sections. White cases unfolded the way that they did that sort of thing. You are the stories were told about the murder at the time. The big mystery of the section of the book about hartley at what happened to her on the attempt to write about this on the case. The truth at something she finished it and she wrote the whole thing and chose not to publish it. Theres a difference between a writer might do for herself and what she would do for the public. I want to honor those people. Their real nameea of the her and her founding. Theres another group that pointed to difficulties he came to this case and we are a poet panel full writers and some of them are familiar and some are other writers struggle from. She struggled its a drinking problem and she had experienced Writers Block throughout the years after mockingbird. This project hadad energized her if you move anything about her work, she was really the key of that community and she had gone to the small town and gotten people to tell their stories. She did the same thing in a small town in alabama. She was energized and moved by the reporting but struggled its writing. I make this. In the book you can have all of the fun in the world reporting gathering information and learning about a story but the three of us did but at some. You have to sit down to write it. Thats where hartley his troubles started. I think if they are interested in true crime, her experience its this case will bee interesting because you will get to see the kinds of decisions we make all of the time. Who at the figueroa and who at the villain and how do we represent dialogue and what is the robot reliable source. How do i handle the complexities about a story when i thought it was about a murder one at actually about insurance hard insurance fraud. A lot of Different Things that made it hard for her to write in general and specifically this book. In mississippi, we are very familiar its prohibition. We were the last eight they did away its it and it took us in till 1966 and we are later than the rest of the country. Anyway, whether your books were about prohibition. Was there anything and they are about to go backk to the criminl aspect of criminal parts of the prohibition. Is just want to say that i dont think my book at about prohibition. Its out of the backdrop. What about the king of the bootleggers. Right. I certainly understand the factors that contributed to the prohibition. Women,ri had certainly had some valid reason for not wanting their asthma at to drink and domestic and violence and lost paychecks unstable communities. I can certainly understand that. Rybut as we all move time and te again, history repeats itself. You cannot legislate live. It just doesnt work. I guess we just spent over a decade figuring that out its prohibition. The grand experiment, it failed. So george lemus, his brilliance because he knew prohibition was going to be a failure. As anybody who got into bootlegging obviously but he at able to find a loophole. It was his particularly experienced and what made him so successful. He hadnd a background of up beig a pharmacist and a lawyer. He found the luitpold that was a physicians prescription. You can by manufactured alcohol for medicinal purposes. But of course no one was using alcohol for medicinal purposes and he took full advantages of this. In the country loved him for it. We always had her ways in mississippi. There was actually rhonda my favorite things that i do a slideshow, i think called cow shoes. The bootlegger in rural areas do did moonshine and meadows and things would wear these couches and they were basically heels were made from wood that look like animal hooves so they would literally cover their tracks. The prohibition ages were trailing them through a meadow and they would look down and look for subbase footprint and only just see a bunch of hooves. [laughter] i kind of wish they would comee. Back in style. I would be really like a pair. [laughter] the point at people are going to find a way. People are always going to find a way. You talked about it briefly, you are a coauthor, your kind of an odd couple. A novelist and historian. How did it work that the two of you put together this cohesive book. B a very difficult thing tofi describe somebody who hasnt cowritten a book. People wanteb clear dividing lines. You wrote this in europe that. But when a collaboration works, mas my coauthor would say,ol to plus two doesnt end up equaling five. The pairing brings something to the book that wouldve been there otherwise. Generally, as a sort of way of boiling it down, i was responsible for writing the first draft of the part that had to do its tillinghast and Law Enforcement more generally and he was more responsible for first drafting the parts having to do its the gangster side of things. We started initially planning to do alternating chapters but the story gets messy and good way. We found that wouldve been is it too distracting so would let it naturally come together. After having written those parts, its the manuscripts kevin traded a backandforth. To the point where you really did become one voice. It at difficult for me now to look at any particular pages i will i wrote that her figueroa of that. Because both of our finger prints are all over it. Its not coupling not just in terms of these different approaches but in terms of we got a couple of generations between us. I wont say how many. What i think made it work, i think the odd nature of it at what made it work. Im coming at it as a historian and hes coming at it as a novelist. But we have the same vision for it. We both knew what we wanted the book to be and how it we wanted it to read and what we wanted it to say. If he trusted me on the history aspect, and i trusted him on the storytelling aspect which at how it worked out, that sort of pushing whole a and giving the book energy that is unusual. Each of you have wonderful characters in the book. Very well grown. Er just wondering each of you, which character did you most enjoy dealing its. Casey wanted to start. Casey theyre all interesting for Different Reasons and i thinkk that in my experience talking about the book that people are interesting in them for Different Reasons and i think i wrote a book that is partly about a very famous novelist and a famously private one so i o was aware of the pubc appetite for information about our parleys live. For a satisfying emotional count of a writer means so much to so many of us. T me for that reason i felt most compelled that i need it to spend a lot more time its the alleged murder in the book, reverend and his lawyer tom, and rhonda book to be democratic. I wanteded to look at their livs and their stories seriously because that went out them, t it would be no to tell about properly in this book. That went out theirir stories is it too, there would not be a satisfying excavation for why it was so hard for her to write. Im interested in religion and politics at on those two characters were every bit as interesting to me but i try to be democratic not only the writing but in the researching and the thinking through the structure of the book. Im going to go its all three equally which at to say i refuse to answer the question. [laughter] in panels like this they call it pocketing the tennis ball. He just rb Something Really Nice but i pocketed the tennis ball. [laughter] george was by far the most bizarre character in history. But the person i think i was most amazed by on several Different Levels was the mabel walker, he was also a character named esther, mabel was when president harding appointed her to be the assistant attorney generall, nine months and the right to vote. She wasas 33 years old five yeaa out of law school had never prosecuted a single case in her career. Suddenly she was in charge of thousands of prohibition cases across the country including cases against george ramis. She had this very hardscrabble upbringing. She had a favorite staying live has few darlings. Performative childhood events, she wrote about it, her father one time, she bet a cat ear and her father bit her ear back. She was inhumanly tough and thickskinned. To make matters even more difficult, she was nearly deaf. She had to spend an hour each morning arranging her hair over her hearing aids because she won her melt colleagues to realize that she was also working its that deficit. In addition to theme sexism she faced. I love the fact that her bosses at the Justice Department and in the white house, all members of hardings crooked ohio gang, just figured out lets just put the lady there and she will be overwhelmed and she wont move what she at doing. We can continue our cozy relationships and continued to take bribes from bootleggers. In the fall of 1920 one, she started kicking butt. I thoroughly enjoyed that part. I wish he could and i wish i couldve spent more time its her. Shes rhonda those people i wouldve liked to of hung out its in real live. I maybe your coauthor, component times, seemed like a very applicable lovable role. Was that your intention. En will yeah. Sure. Thats why think it can be difficult to take which of these characters are the most fun to write about because they areun both so confounding and so surprising. Capone as you said, he was extremely charming man. Rhonda the things that was most surprising to me about him that ive never seen portrayed, sourcing the upandcoming more of an empire. Weve seen the mythic capone and the untouchables other things. He the way he had the power thrust upon him, every veiled character. He grows into it. Very quickly matures from a street tough. Into captain of industry. Someone who thinks he ought to be a captain. People often say if you can warning into different circumstances, he wouldve been to the president of standard oil or something. I thought he was a born politician. They talked about when he got into prison, spoiler alert, the first thing he does when he gets to the yard at walk around and takes everybodys hand. If anything should happen, just come to me and ill deal its it. [laughter] at always struggling because the undisciplined side of himim, the brooklyn kid, at always straining to just burst out of the service. The it becomes harder for him to keep that under control as the disease progressed. Maybe my coauthor would say so, personally if i had to pick a favorite character. Since i cant do will bring, it would be lns. Just because he was surprising in so many different ways. Heres a guy. He inspired tracy. He definitely leans into that public image. They are talking about a guy who at crashing your truck into capone his breweries and yet was so interpersonally shy that he couldnt ask a stranger on the street for a restaurant recommendation. He can think about approaching somebody on a stranger in that way. Or heres somebody who turns down what inflation would be one . 5 million in brights rights. And yet he lies about his age on his job application to become a prohibition agent in order to qualify. Someone who we remember as rubber stack as the ultimate two gun federal agent and yet who had some ideas about Law Enforcement that would be progressive even for todays standards. I think as much as we owe hollywood for remembering even his name, the way that the film and tv shows have mis characterized him, has obscured it. We find them so fascinating that we are currently finishing up a sql about the rest of his live. Hopefully we can bring some of what he actually wanted to stand for in real live back to the public his attention. Thank you. Weve got about 15 minutes lift. We like to hear from you. Surely have some questions that will have this discussion go further. If you do and you are able, we have a starting right here. In the center of the room so everybody can do the questions. Some of you may be fleeing the room. [laughter]e i hope some of you are coming up right there. Thank you. Hi my namee. At maggie, thank you all so much for being here today. This at been such an interesting call. Ti my question at about your own biases. Going into writing all of your books, you are dealing its largerthanlife mythological almost people. How do you disentangle your own biases about we do thought about them to begin its your finished product. I think there is a difference the thing that it its nonfiction we do state narrative nonfiction. Not fiction that you want to read, novel, story. You have the key thing at details. Narrative nonfiction writers cannot try to be funny or poignant. We have to let the details bring the boss. Not that we dont have a style or voice but all of those sort of emotional connections come through the details. I think that is important for us and another reason why we all just do deep diving and searching for truffles. I believe as casey put it. I dont think that you bring you do bring your bias but at sort of covered over its the details. I have many unlikable women characters in my books. I always have a thing about sano care if people are likable, just care if they are interesting. I dont try to cover over anyones work. I just laid out there. We laid out there and sort of let the people decide how they want to read that person. Thats why george remus at also sort of m an unlikable person bt many people are rooting for him at the end because the details prevented him as such. I think thats a great question and the truth at i was more attentive to it when it came to the non famous character in my book. He gave graphical portraits to harper lee. They thinkwh they move who she t in sheet they love her and they worshiped her for all sorts of good reasons are good intentioned reasons but for mehe rhonda the tricky things about my book and i think it at something tricky for her to. She was writing about eight and a legend black serial killer. She was not from that community and she did not move much about it. I think bias is the very important true crime writer. It matters when they are choosing w the kinds of cases yu want to bring to the public consciousness. It matters and how you frame them. For me, rhonda the big moments was realizing the story had been told to me is the story about a black man who perpetuated a lot of insurance flight fraud bullet turned out that fraud we both ways and the live Insurance Industry at the time. Only recently have the brain that needser tremendous multi billiondollar clients for africanamericans that were charged is it too much or sold substandard policies or even pay for a lifetime of coverage but then was the night it when they need it it on the other side. So atey important for me to move beyond the bias avoid the way the story has been told to me and frame the live Insurance Industry in that part of the book. I tried over and over again its some different aspects of the story to do that. So i lift to do its that kind of famous character in the book in more detail its the systemic issues that work in any kind of crime story. I hate to be a broken record but it really does get down to the sources. My coauthor and i mayday conscious decision to go back to the primary sources and much as possible almond newspapers and federal files in court documents. I traveled in a like a dozen states all the way out to wyoming. Trying to run that is much as possible because i was very mindful of exactly what they are talking about. Begin growing up growing up loving dictate tracy. On some level im going to want betrayal. You have toen be open to having your mind be changed into want to be challenged. Thats the most important thing. What you find in all just second what at already been said. The characters that come through you through Historical Research are much more fascinating than cardboard cutout that we get often times in popular culture. And that, there are flaws and mistakes are often what makes them interesting. So its eliot ness, you have someone who i dont think it creates the untouchable image necessarily, you move the tracy image. E we leans into it. I talk his shine and it becomes a shield for him. A bit of self protection that later on in his career in the sequel that we are just finishing out ends up getting him into trouble. And that went out getting is it too far ahead of myself, there are places in there, where if you are dealing its a buddy who is the public servant, but who at looking back now, we can see that very dangerous blind spots. You need to address that. And talk aboutut the ways in whh he failed to serve all of the public all of the time. Thats going to be a big part of his new book i am so excited about. Thank you all very much. Host questions. I have one more before we stop here. Thank you. As journalist, i appreciate the research and how much you had to rely on the factual record. Im wondering if any of you, did you have a character are subject or an incident that there just wasnt enough there for you to fully develop that as part of your story y. Did it frustrate you in some way or how did you cope its baby and lack of a record. I feel like i confronted a very common occurrence which at history remember so much more about the perpetrator than the victims. There are few moments in my book where im conspicuously telling you what i cant find out about in particular some economically marginal black women in a small town in alabama. N all i can do, i try to talk to people who knew them it in the journalist to cover those markers at the time and theres a way to build out what you dont move. But theres also a way to call attention to what we dont move and why we dont move it. Thats a particularly sharp contrast to my book between, i can tell you what was served at harper lees Sisters Birthday Party when she was ten years old. Because her father owned the local newspaper it was written up as on front page news. I cant do that because in so many black communities, some are lucky to have a newspaper but evenap in the archives are less accessible than the white mineral archives that you can go in search today. Theres even more discrepancies now its digitization. I think even we do cant move something, its important to note and be conspicuous about why. Thats a silence in the historical record that i felt acutely in all i could do was tell you why i didnt move more. And. To it again k to the kind of discrepancy between the victims and perpetrators, i think were pretty polite true crime crowds. We convince someone more rambunctious at to what it stood up for that appetite, the culture has four criminals in these kind of grandiose stories about them but at something i think any responsible writer has to think a lot about. How they are presenting the discrepancy in power and survivorship andbo that sort of thing. Think for the question. Good question. Reasoning back to mabel. I think she was such a prominent and powerful woman in america. That is i would people were not comfortable its women in power. I thought she was very conscious of her image image as you can imagine, she wrote privately about this all of the time. Her dire at full of notes about how she hates that girly girly stuff. People made all sorts of assumptions about her character because of the nature of her ambition. Because she was a public and also in charge of enforcing prohibition which of course was news for 13 years. She was very careful about how she curated the fact that she put out. There was a time when it was suspected that she herself was having an affair its prohibition agent who ended up running off its remus his wife. This at something she never addressed. There are letters from him to her where it has sort of very affectionate language and signups that wouldve not been necessarily proper for two colleagues at the time. Also when it was discovered this prohibition agent was indeed running off its remus his wife and doing all sorts of things dealing its bad things. J edgar uber was dying to prosecute the sky. He actually cared about having a probation agent and will brent told him no. To me it was a sign and make this assumption in the book, i make it clear that it at my assumption. Then i think she was so aware of the effect that she went out and prosecuted a guy that she publicly called her protective comments publicly supported and got behind it said this rhonda our best men, in the prohibition departmentt that will affect yor own career and the career of other women for decades to come. It weighed heavily on her mind. She was given some careful and in private too talk about personal things but privately she would not comment about her public machination of what she was thinking about her job she thought it was going to be deferent detrimental to her if she got out. Something i wish i had run. It would be great to find a hotel receipt its franklin and mabel his name on it. [laughter] but that did not happen. I think it was just bought more about her. We and trying to put together what the untouchables actually did, because that obviously has been misrepresented by hollywood. Thee investigation that the untouchables were doing, at often been characterized as at going around trying to cut off capone his income and many annoying him. But not doing any thing in significant investigative work. Cutting off his income was part of it. But it up being much more, essentially trying to put together a rico case. Decades before the ricoh lot had been passed. Racketeering and corrupt Organization Act which ended up being the tool that is finally gives federal Law Enforcement and effective means back and combat crime. The untouchables before j edgar uberan at really a house hold ne and before people move what g men are. The untouchables are providing this new understanding of whatdi federal Law Enforcement can be and can do. We had the difficulty of having to put together a lot of that. A lot of the work they were doing from the outside, from newspaper articles, from recollections that admin written 25 years after the fact. Some educated guesswork because there was a great source base of prohibition documents unfortunately. Literally, two months after the hardcover of our book came out, a copy of the complete case summary report that theab untouchables compiled, which rhonda missus men apparently kept illegally, turn up. Our first thought at all my gosh, this at the document its all of the answerr read this wouldve made my live so much easier. If it turned up two years ago. Doing anything wrong. We were able to discover that a lot of our speculation turned out to be warranted. So what we were able to do for the paperback in june was to put some excerpts from it in there. You can sort of see the untouchables and works its they were doing. But really i think, rhonda the tasks we hope the t book would achieve was in showing you where the untouchables really fit in history of the development of placing in the United States. I think this is the major document that makes the case forum being quite significant. Youve heard from three very good authors that have produced three very good books. I think youve heard how responsibly theyve handled it. There are having all three books. Thank you so much for joining us. [applause]ha [inaudible conversation]. Good evening everybody. They give for joining us tonight. On behalf of the bookstore, i am pleased to present duncan white presenting his book cold warriors. It is sponsored by mast humanities which supports literature, philosophy and other