[inaudible speaking] the panel is titled American History, renegades and sponsored by the Mississippi Library commission. Tracy carr, with the library commission, was in the room for the very first organizational meeting of the festival we couldnt do this without the Mississippi Library commission or libraries from all over the state so thank you very much for your support. We are in the room today courtesy of foreman watkins law firm, our gratitude to them. Our panelists are tom craven, eric j dolman and Peter Houlihan. You can purchase copies of their books from vendors outside and you can find the times are authors will be signing in your program. We will hear from our panelists for about 40 minutes then open the floor to questions. Please come to the podium in the center of the room to ask your questions. Help me welcome our moderator for this panel, kitty blunt director of Mississippi Department of archives and history. [applause] thank you. Im going to tell you about these guys and then we will start the conversation. Tom craven was a reporter for the New York Times and editor of weekly newspapers before turning to writing fulltime. Four of his books have been New York Times bestsellers dodge city the heart of everything that is, healtheast typhoon and the last stand of fox company. While bill was published by st. Martins press february 2019 and this november harpercollins will release all blood runs red. In sag harbor new york. Eric j dolan in the middle is the author of 13 books including leviathan, the history of whaling in america named one of the best Nonfiction Books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times in the boston globe the book also won the 2007 john lyman award for u. S. Maritime history. His most recent book, before black slaves, was brilliant begin. The history of the american lighthouse. Dolan lives in marblehead massachusetts with his family. And on the end Peter Houlihan is a freelance writer in his career as an emergency medical technician hes written a number of articles related to his profession including the impact of ptsd on first responders. Hes written a number of book reviews for the hearst papers is a native of Southern California he now lives in Fairfield County connecticut in norco 80 is his first book. Im going to ask each of you to say a few words about your book and give us an overview and then will come up with some questions. Thank you for telling me. [laughter] can you hear me . You got that in at the right time. Thank you. I will talk very briefly about my book while bill which is about while Bill Hitchcock. It was a book i had no intention of writing. It sort of snuck up on me. I had done a book that came out a couple years ago called dodge city about white hurt and Matt Masterson when they were young lawmen together in dodge city kansas and when the book came out it was successful and ive been working on a different book a world war ii story but my editor looking at the bottom line said is there another iconic western figure you can think of who may be deserves to have some treatment . I said the name that popped into my head was while bill because it was a name i think we all recognized while Bill Hitchcock. We all recognize that name but the only thing you might think about him was he was a gunfighter i said if thats all he was a gunfighter and not really that interested i said let me do some research. The book that came out of that portrays while Bill Hitchcock as a gunfighter, fervent abolitionist, spy behind confederate lines during the civil war, deputy u. S. Marshall, marshal of hayes city in abilene kansas, he was a broadway performer star of the theater on broadway. And of course he was a gambler who finished up his career in deadwood south dakota. One other thing i will add on very briefly one of the joys of working on the book as i discovered he so often did associated with calamity jane. They were big love affair. Some of you go back to the movie the planes. But the love of his life and the woman he eventually married and the woman agnes lake, one of the most remarkable women of the 1800s she was one of the major search. Impresarios in the country. The rival of barnum and bailey and the ringling brothers and nobody knows who she is. She had an amazing career and she and hickok fell in love it took them a few years. It was one of the unexpected pleasures of the book to portray this remarkable person was literally lost in the midst of history. Thank you. Thank you. First id like to give a shout out to john evans of the myriad books because hes one of the reasons im here he read my book enjoyed it and asked the mississippi book festival if theyd invite me down so i like to thank him for doing that and id like to think the mississippi book festival for inviting me to come down and it got really hot this morning im not used to it and from the north. I want to tell you a little bit about how this book began as well. Usually i just go to libraries and read a bunch of books and i try to figure out something im interested in and then pitch it to my agent hopefully hes on board and pitch it to the publisher. But this book i did something quite different. I got my two teenage children in the room i had three or four ideas and started telling them what i wanted to write about and when i mentioned pirates, both of their eyes lit up and they said, dad thats it you have to write a book about pirates. I got very excited because although ive written plenty of books neither of my kids have read any of them. [laughter] i have to report since my daughter might see this my daughter just graduated from college and she actually read black lives blue waters she said she enjoyed it. My son a freshman in college has only agreed to read it perhaps by the time hes 50 years old. And one for two. But black lives blue waters about the pirates of the golden age. Which stands in the late 1600s through about 1726 and there have been a lot of books about pirates and my book as to that literary leverage but with a slight twist. I focus on the pirates that either operated out of the american colonies or slandered ships along the american shore. Really the book goes into sections before 1700 and after 1700. Before 1700 pirates in the colonies were welcomed with open arms because here the colonies were on the edge of empire they were starved of currency they didnt like how england was treating them and pirates were coming from the caribbean and also from the red sea. They were going there and attacking muslim ships or muggle ships and bringing riches back to the colonies. Governors were getting paid off to get the letters of mark to go off and when they came back to the colonies with their money they were reintegrated into those colonies. England shut down the piracy about 1700 then after the war the spanish succession which ended in 1713 pirates came roaring back and thats the type of piracy that most of you no doubt are familiar with. Thats when blackbeard was upon the seas. I always find it funny that blackbeard is the most outsized part of the one most people have heard about but he was only a pirate for about a year and and a half he didnt have a particularly successful career and when he died they cut his head off and hung it on the bouts of this loop before the british Navy Lieutenant took it back to williamsburg. The book has a lot of hangings in it. Its got a lot of death and destruction. But it also really is a book about American History that just uses pirates as a backbone to tell that story. I had a lot of fun writing the book and researching it. We have a cowboys and we have pirates and ive got bank robbers so other than vampires you got for of the main stage of things that have remained in the fascination. My story is about a group of young men led by a bornagain christian with strong and times beliefs who attempted to take over robbery of the Security Pacific Bank in norco california outside los angeles on may 9, 1980 that turned into one of the most violent events in american Law Enforcement history. When it was over there was three dead and 15 wounded included should summon sheriffs deputies. There were 32 police cars either disabled or destroyed by gunfire or explosive devices being thrown by the bank robbers. A Police Helicopter that was shot down over San Bernardino county. The scope of this is really what attracted me to it. Im a native Southern California and i grew up right near where this happened. The sheer scope of the event is really what drew me to it. These are five heavily armed young men. They are shooting civilian grade civilian version the military grade weapons theyve made homemade fragmentation grenades that can launch out the barrels of their shotguns. As luck would have it and a lot of bad planning the minute they stepped outside of the bank they came headtohead with the Riverside County sheriffs deputy and it just erupted into a wildfire fight in a crowded Southern California intersection on a friday afternoon in which over 100 rounds over 500 rounds were fired and then into a running gun battle through the suburban streets of riverside and San Bernardino county onto a crowded interstate highway where they were throwing up fragmentation grenades shooting down the Police Helicopter and ended up 6500 feet up on a fire road clinging to a mountainside in the San Gabriel Mountains above los angeles. Where the road is washed out and the four surviving bank robbers, i dont want to give too much of it away, ambushed the pursuing police. It was really the scope of this and i think a wider context that it fits into is the bank robbery epidemic that swept through Los Angeles Area beginning write about 1980 and then extending into the middle of the 1990s, which is one of the backdrops on it. The impact for today have a lot to do with the way local Police Forces are armed and the way that they deal with posttraumatic stress disorder. Great. This room is full. All of these people chose to come to this panel over many other panels including spring core justice so let me ask yall, why do readers enjoy books about bad guys . Violent stories . Renegades . What you think the appeal is . Pirates . Im not casting aspersions. [laughter] for a very base perspective there is nothing more gripping or dramatic then to read about a horrific act. It just grabbed your attention. Its sort of like white people rubbernecking there on a highway and theres an accident . In many different forms going back as long as we recorded history and certainly before that. So maybe there is something very animalistic about it wanting to read about it. I also think theres an aspect in the sense that you can read about these acts and hope we none of you would want to perpetrate but you could put yourself in that perspective and think what it wouldve been like and maybe better them than me. You hear a lot of people getting killed or robbed or some the bad is happening and not happening to you. But there is no doubt that death, destruction, horrific acts of violence attract your attention like almost no other topic. [laughter] i also think when you take a hard look at someone who does something almost unimaginable, and my case these were five young men no criminal records who threw away their lives and the lives of a lot of other people. Theres also the fascination with how someone gets to that point where they take a step like that or in the case with pirates or mythological figures like wild bill, i voiced thought there is a fascination with what other steps gets someone more like me or us or you to somebody who is doing something extraordinary and almost unimaginable. Just to add, i think in the case of wild bill, is a romanticism about the lone gunman in the person living a life and most of the People Living a life that we dont live. He was a unique figure the ever tight for mail was 55 height. And tall muscular lean, he had buckskin in the summer euro, he wore two guns, one each side he could chew accurately with either hand. And up until the day he died he was undefeated heavyweight gunfighter. He lived a life where he roamed all over the place and had different kind of adventures on the prairie and in the plains. For most of us we dont have that or have that life. And this feeling of im going to read the story and live this life for the next 360 days because i know when i put the book down i gotta mow the lawn. [laughter] i gotta get the laundry back. All three of you they were waiting two nights later and his father had taken them to the next station along the way. It was not surprised in the civil war broke out and he joined the union army and he saw the early battles of the war but he became a spy and he always had through his whole life coolness under pressure. In the one thing that made him effective, he had a belief that the bullet had not been manufactured that could kill him. So when confronted and gun battle he believed that he was going to persevere and he did. But in the civil war, he actually infiltrated Senior Office of staff to listening as if theyre strategizing in the union lines. There is another aspect that made him a reggae gated at any point pray he could been unmasked and shot. Once was found out and put to be shot dead at don he escaped back to the union line. There is a renegade aspect in doing a job most people cannot do effectively or did not want to because there would be no trial if youre found it be immediate death. I definitely think that running a haven for runaway slaves on the underground railroad is a different version of taking justice into your own hands. The fascinating connection, you all have any thoughts . There are two things, the era in which this took place had a big impact and as i mentioned the leader, the young man who put this big robbery together was a bornagain christian with a very heavy and time belief and theology saved in the book of revelations and im certainly not suggesting that those lead to big robbery but in the case of George Wayne Smith he came out of Orange County california where in the 1970s were there were ministries that were aggressively evangelical and youth ministries and the book of revelation rapture and in time theology. And he began to believe that that was going to happen soon. And when george looked out at the world and tried to match up Current Events with prophecies there was a lot to see in the 1970s. Not the least of which was a very real threat of nuclear obliteration. So george was really preparing to be able to survive events and he became heavily armed into a fortress along with his roommate and took part in the bank robbery. The other is that not too many people know that los angeles is a Bank Robbery Capital of the world and for many years and decades its only recently changed, one out of every four Bank Robberies in the United States takes place within the jurisdiction of the l. A. Field office of the fbi. There are a number of reasons but the main one is freeways. You rob a bank next to the freeway and you jump on a freeway and five minutes later and the good old days of los angeles you are 5 miles away and probably cruising sidestreet of a Different Police jurisdiction. 1980 was the beginning of that and by 1990s there were 2600 Bank Robberies in that region, 14 a day at their height 28 and monday. So it is Fertile Ground for Bank Robberies and when people go looking for money, quick money in los angeles they usually look more so at banks than they do in other areas. Ithose are two aspects of the ea in which it took place. One of the things that history taught me is that the root of a lot of action is money, lack of money, desire for money in the way that that plays out in black lives, blue waters prior to 1700 the american colonies was a very small place on the outskirts of empire, treated by the mother country who viewed it as a source of good and starved of currency and even back then in late 1600s there was the echoes of what would later become the pride during the american revolution, no taxation without representation, all that sort of stuff. A lot of resentment. Even the piracy was against the law in the late 1600s the colonies decided that they would and could profit from it. When it was claimed down in 1700 it came back in the 17, and played a central role because 1715 the american colonies were larger, more prosperous, merchants were more powerful group in england was treating them a little bit better and all of a sudden the pirates instead of going and attacking spanish in the caribbean or attacking muslim ships halfway around the world and bringing heathens money back to the colonies, the pirates of the 1715, 1720s, they were attacking english and colonial of course, merchant ships along the american coast. So now it was the colonies whose ox was being gored. So where they welcomed pirates before and wanted their money now it was ruining their own bottom line and they teamed up with the mother country and waged an allout war against pirates that ultimately ended in 1726 with the last hanging of pirates and boston. So i really think its critical. In almost every book ive written certainly money has been a key factor in determining peoples motivations, why they did what they did and affect how things turned out. I want to talk about how it feels writing about characters, people really who you might not necessarily like, respect or identify with and