Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author Discussion On True American Cr

[applause] im happy to introduce the moderator for the session. Hes not only im sorry, i skipped over. The moderator is curtis wilkie, associate professor of journalism at the university of mississippi, and hes also a fellow at the university over the center for southern journalism and politics. If you will take over. Thank you. And thank you all for coming. We appreciate the presence of the guests on the panel here at the mississippi book festival it is Getting Better and better every year. Im going to start off by introducing very briefly overcast and we will carry on a discussion i hope that you will have some questions for the panel towards the end of the hour. Karen is a bestselling author of several books, and her newest eden park is aof pick for august. Maybe some of you read it said it captures the bill of the age and the gangsters. They also call her but a well researched highly engaging work filled with intrigue, infidelity and headline catching courtroom drama. Its good to have you with us. Casey is the author of furious power which a recent review described as her ravishing debut within eastern shorere of maryland, shes a graduate of harvard and one an advanced degree in theology from the other oxford as a rhodes schol scholar. She is already winning acclaim for her book the commercial appeal and with exquisite prose and pacing of a thriller it reveals a major talent in the full procession of her guilt. Then we have all the fuss if the those of us old enough to remember the untouchables working as a coauthor with max allan of scarface and be untouchable and it wouldnt miss if another tale that grows out of the prohibition era that features a couple of familiar characters that are old enough to remember and it is set in one of my favorite cities in america, chicago. Chicago magazine calls the book, quote, a gripping take that reads like a novel. A doctoral student in American History at princeton and this is his first book also. May 2. Sorry. Forgive me. To set the stage for the discussion and ask each of them to get a capsule summary of what the book is about and what attracted them to the subject. The second part i grew up not so much on this tv series but first loving dick tracy and then finding my way to the Kevin Costner Robert Deniro film that came out in 1987. Initially loving it i think because it was it reminded me of the comic strip i loved as a kid that was based on a true story or was supposed to be. Not far from chicago that familiarity geographically made me want to know more about the story so i was the kid that would go to the library and try to read as much as i could get something interested me. Thee books that i pulled about aalpha poem and theralcatel ant that many at the time but quickly presented me with a sort of contradiction that i see in the film presenting a great story for every Nonfiction Books i read presented me with a quite a different i perspective dot he was a glory hound, somebody who took credit for other peoples work and have nothing to do with al capone but i also discovered that a writer whose fiction i already knew had written dick tracy h and some other books abt elliott and his career in presenting a i very different afterward at the end talking about his research into this worse is that hes used and how surprised he was to go to where the papers are kept in clevela cleveland. He would newspaper articles and discover so much of what had been discounted about the career specifically with regards to our capone turned out to be a verifiable fact. And i loved his work and i got to know him. I was studying history at the university of michigan doing what would become my first book about the World Broadcast and eventually we were complaining so often about how the story had been misrepresented by hollywood as poorly founded accounts and eventually i said weve got to stop complaining about this and do something about it. Youve are a master novelist so we can write the proverbial book and do the story right and according to the chicago magazine at least they succeeded so that is the story. If anybody here has ever watched the tv show boardwalk empire, there was a character that was incredibly innovative and spoke of himself in the third person with all of these confusing exchanges. Nobody quite knew what to make of him andnd i wanted to deal wh the real person and he was and he also spoke of himself in the third person and said things like so many people want to kill remus. His brain exploded which was a particularly bizarre one and i will give you my elevator pitch. He ended up in 1921 becoming the most successful bootlegger in history. He was also an inspiration for the novel the great gatsby. His wife threw parties and ended up falling in love with a very prohibition agent that put him in jail and this is all true, so that started a love triangle. There was a murderer and a sensational trial and then in my book j. Edgar hoover is one of the good guys. [laughter] i just want to say thank you to the festival for having me. Murder, fraud and the last try d with harper lee. I grew up loving mockingbird like a lot ofab you did and id always been interested in harper lees wife and i went down to watch the watchmen the surprising announcement and when i was reporting on that i learned about the other but she tried to write and it is a true crime project so that is the story of the book and the last is harper lees life into what made her a writer and interested in the case and ultimately made it hard for her to write her own book about it. Correct me if im wrong, but i dont think theres any central character in any of yout books but still living. Did anybody encounter a personal observation or talk to any of these characters . Did you ever talk to harper lee at all . For those of you that have read it, i dont want to get bogged down in the plot of the story but the murder in my book was gunned down by a vigilante and that vigilante is alive and i was able to interview him for the book and i think that maybe i had the advantage at the moment i feel like my story is contemporary compared to these guys but i was able to interview a lot of people who knew my central characters. A lot of them cooperated. I want to ask each of you how you were able to develop the characters to define personalities not really knowing them. I did speak with some family members. He became the biggest employer in cincinnati with people during prohibition just in that city and out one point, 35 of all of the liquor in the United States and hav had about a 40 million fortune in 1921 which wasnt a deficit for inflation. So, i actually talked to a lot of the people that worked with him and they had stories and artifacts and so i was able to talk with them but the biggest piece of Brain Research is a transcript i found a University Law library which was invaluable and it gave incredible detail about his life on various people that knew him and bizarre quirks. One is that he didnt wear underwear. [laughter] it was the sound of an unsound of mine suggests little things. But that wasnt a sign of my research i would say. In our case, my coauthor and i began with the understanding that these are characters that have been per trade in Television Series and we wanted to make them live and breathe as much as possible. Ourat sort of watchword is to se what its like to be in the room with these guys because especially elliott also alcatel and they were so different from robert and Robert De Niro and it reveals that has portrayed them and it came down to and incorporating their voices as much as possible. Neither really left a compromised biography maybe we can talk about, but he wrote a very sort of short 21 page account in the investigation thatt then gets spun into the book that becomes the basis of the tv series, so as much as possible we try to go back to that quote and give youo his words. Fortunately the two of them did a lot of interviews that you can pull the voices from that as much as possible. I because they were both resurprisingly young, he takes e debate over the chicago mob at the age of 26 and elliott is 27 when he is put in charge of what we now know as the untouchables, and they died very young. Capone and 47 and bass and 57. I was able to speak to a couple of people that did know him near the tail end of his life and one in particular he referenced. I asked what portrayal was most authentic to the man he knew and he didnt really answer the question but he said that part at the end where he throws a man off the edge of the building would never happen. He hated guns and violence and this is what you would expect. We can incorporate their voices into the book and that is how we tried to make them live and breathe again. There are some in double characters in the book. I particularly like. Is a great question and im sure there are some writers in the room and im sure everybody here has tried to learn about somebody theyve never met. Grandmother, great grandfather, patriarch of the town where you were born and raised. There are interesting methods for doing it. When you write about true crime theres all these Police Records or trial transcripts so you get a sense of the persons voice but then you just go around looking for any mention of the person in newspapers or magazines or any kind of contemporary coverage and i think that for all of us were talking before hand about being clear about the message was as important as the final product so for all of us we can go and look at it as a pretty serious note section so you can see aactly how we have put these portraits together and who we talk to and what documents we rely on. Youve gone beyond the approach and have developed a colorful story with a Strong Character Development and i want to read a short passage from the book that touches on a techniq technique. He likes to think that she invented a case that he referred to, sort of a marco polo of journalism but for the purpose of the discussion it is a good line. He borrowed the strategy rendering the settings for moree more than just state lines crafting carriers that were more than quotations in fiscal descriptions and identifying what is in the reporting he moves into things that make the story more than some o the sum e parts and certainly its more of a trend to new journalism in magazine writing and Nonfiction Books that we read that people tend to put themselves in the heads of their characters and a want to ask each of you how much of your own imagination dare you use in crafting your story . We will start with you we are all creatures with minds and ideas and imaginations and when you spend so much time thinking about someone, you do start to imagine you have to be very careful when you are writing a Nonfiction Book and they want to be very clear about the forces and where things are coming from and if you do speculate, which some People Choose to you want to flag that for the readers but its an interesting thing and began to gather around the true crime of standards from others and its been coopted recently by podcasts and documentaries in a way that the boundaries are even more between whats true and whats not and with speculation and whats fact. So i guess i am probably on the conservative side of things. Part of the book is about her relationship to the genre of true crime and she has helped reporting on cold blood so she knew a lot about the source material into th and the decisie has made so theres a little bt of commentary about her feelings about the genre and her thoughts and objections to some of the places it was going in the 70s and 80s. Exactly what casey said. Also, i was dealing a lot with the transcript as they mentioned and the nature of the try always somebody is lying. The whole nature he said she said. I do think that what people say and what they lie about and admit is just as telling as a character and the story itself to what they see as truthful so i dont like to omit it but i like to flag it and say this is what the person contended with this is what the person claimed. And with those crime magazines and to spread deliberately as a way to engender fear. And to be loved by the public by his employees and you will be beaten with a baseball bat. And that they started to go outhe when it came down to us. And thats the instance you are dealing with people that will not leave a record with multiple homicides. But this is from the book. That enhances babe ruth. And then he crushed his goal. And one is by similar blows. And capote worked him over for a while each clinging to consciousness. With the awaiting clutch of bodyguards. And then there is a line, so goes the story with variations but chilling similarities. This is the instance where and to mind with the characters that has been so mythologized. Sometimes people are so quick to discount the myth. That we had to convince the source notes that we need to show a the work and then you could go to the back of the book to see what we pulled out. And to and having an image from a true crime magazine from 1932 illustration, puts a lie to that quite strongly. There is some credibility to your story buty suggesting maybe it didnt. Happen exactly as you mentioned in the endnotes. We talked about this befor before, apparently it is a new phenomenon with a nonfiction. So if you are wondering where they get that and you can see its not in the academic footnotes but it is there for you up until 25 years ago but you have an authors note. That there is no inconvenient dialogue in the book you provide a lot of retribution in the endnotes. I thought i will tasted on test it this is the beginning of a chapter on the morning of november 29 appearance before the United States Supreme Court the assistant attorney general has a cameo role in the book she contemplated what to where she had her way she wouldnt think more than her first day on the job. Its a good example that those stories that are so richly documented. And to prioritized over others and with that attention to detail with that scrupulousch notice and equally important are the historical record will not get enough to make a characteroo i dont want to make it sound you can only make characters from those t people there are injustices at history and academics aside. And with the civil war trilogies. If there are no footnotes and to have a dramatic scene weve one involving robert elee at the battle of gettysburg. And when they were decimated and on around on his horse and to say he is beating his chest and they say there are no others anywhere. And then we talked briefly. We were talking about what had not occurred to me which was wonderful book that came in for a lot of criticism. Its not nonfiction. That is the big criticism. And in our case, i referenced earlier that there is a ghostwriter of an autobiography. And that is the version of the book the untouchables in 1957 and has been disparaged and dismissed in the nonfiction writing and one of the things my coauthor and i set out to do initially isub to be subjected to scrutiny. It has a lot of invented dialogue. You cannot know what people were wearing on a particular day. But if you take those that are described in the book piecen mail one piecemeal and you compare them and other sources we could find, i was shocked frankly how much of that checked out and talk about in our own book in Chronological Order because we didnt do anything and then to do that at the threequarter selfdescribed. So what is the best guess that she ever got around to writing. And cut to the chase and to avoid that question. There are a couple of mysteries and the true crimebo section. And chose not to publish it. There is a difference between what a writer might do and there is a is that that point to the difficulties that she faced in general when it came to the case. And a panel full of writers and they are familiar and other things that other writers struggle with. Suffering from depression on depression and was a perfectionist and experienced Writers Block throughout the years. And it hadiz energized her if you know anything about her work with capote in kansas she was the key of the community and then did the same thing in the small town in alabama. And i make this point in the book you can have all the fun in theor world and then you have to sit down and write it and that is where harpers lees trouble started. If youre interested in true crime. Its interesting because and to be duly represent dialogue and a reliable source. And then i wish i had a straightforward answer but if it happened she would figure out a way through f it but instead its a lot of Different Things for her to write in general and specificallyar this book. I can address this. And in mississippi we are familiar with prohibition. It took us until 1966. Just when it started to work you got rid of it. [laughter] ,o was there anything with those criminal aspects of prohibition anything about this prohibition . Anything beneficial i just want to say i dont think my book is about prohibition. It isrohi the backdrop. But understand those factors that contribute and that certainly has valid reasons for not wanting the husbands to drink. But as we all know time and time again history teaches us you cannot legislatively fight. I guess we just spent over a decade figuring that out with prohibition. With a grand experiment and knew that prohibition with be a failure to explain the loophole that particular experience that made him so successful and he read the act to sale that the loophole positioned himself medicinal purposes. And then to take advantage of this and the country love them for it and one of my favorite things i do a slideshow. And the heels were made from wood and to trail through a meadow and jesse a bunch of herbs. [laughter] i wish they would come back in style i would like a pair. How did you put this together and a very cohesive book and then to describe somebody in the book because with a clear dividing line of you wrote this and you wrote that but when a collaboration works ngat two plus two does equal five. And the pairing to bring something to the book that would not be there otherwise. Generally boiling it down i was responsible for writing the first draft and Law Enforcement more generally. He was more responsible for the part to do with al capone and the gangster side. We started to do alternating chapters but we found that would be too distracting and naturally come together so after having written those and then to the point and it is difficult for me to look at any to say that the fingerprints are all over it. And with a couple of gen