now from the chambers in jackson is an author discussion on true crime stories throughout american history. [inaudible conversations] >> thank you for coming. true crime across america. i'm a graduate dean at the university and is happy to be here.

we have about 45 minutes for this session and then will leave about 15 for q and a. the sponsors for our panel. are stay with us? [applause] i'm happy to introduce our moderator for this session. he's not only an attorney -- i'm sorry. i skipped over this. he's over there. moderator is an associate professor at the university of mississippi and he's also at the southern journal and positive. >> thank you all for coming. we appreciate the presence of our guests on the panel here at the book festival. it's getting big and better every year. i will introduce briefly our guests and will carry on a

discussion and i hope you all have some questions for the panel towards the end. best-selling author of several books. her newest book is amazon's best book. maybe some of you read this, it captures the bill of that age and its gangsters. they also call her book a well researched and highly engaging work filled with intriguing infidelity, murder and headline catching courtroom drama. glad to have you with us. casey is author of curious

hours, which recent reviews in the commercial described as her ravishing debut. casey lives in the eastern shore of maryland. she is a graduate of harvard and one in advanced degree in theology. she's already winning all sorts of commercial appeal. the pacing of a thriller, serious hours reveals full possession of her gilts. then we have those of us were old enough to remember the tv show, the untouchables. [laughter] some of us remember that and more recently the film.

he worked as co-author with max of scarface. another era, it features a couple of familiar characters for those of us old enough to remember that. it's one of my favorite cities in chicago. no class of authority then. they call the book of gripping take on chicago's past. it reads like a novel. this is his first book. >> thank you. >> to set the stage for our discussion, i asked each of them to give a summary of what the

book is about and what attracted them to the subject. >> i'll answer the second part of your question and answering your first, i grew up not quite so much on the tv series but first loving tracy and finding my way to kevin costner. initially because it was reminding me of the comic strip i loved as a kid. it is based on the true story or at least it was supposed to be. the familiarity geographically make me want to know more about the story of elliott so i was a rare kid who would go to the

library and try to read as much as i could. it's something that interested me. and all of the books about al capone, a quickly presented me with this contradiction, i would seek on film presenting this great story with ellie is a hero and i would read nonfiction and it presented me with a different perspective. it had nothing to do with al capone but i also discovered that a writers whose fiction i already knew had written tracy but also some books about elliott and his career in a different image, closer to the hero that i knew from hollywood. they have a short afterward at the end talking about his

research. how surprised he was to go to where elliott's papers were kept in cleveland and would look at newspaper articles and discovered what was discounted about his career, specifically with regards to al capone. i loved his work and i got to know him, i was studying history at the university of michigan. eventually, we were complaining so often about how the story was misrepresented by hollywood and a lot of poorly founded accounts and eventually i said to max, we've got to stop complaining about this and do something about it. you are a master novelist, so we can write the nonfiction book that reads like a novel and do the story right. so that's the story. >> if anybody has watched the tv

series, boardwalk empire, there was a character named george, he was incredibly odd and cuckoo and he spoke of himself in the third person. nobody quite knew what to make of him, he stole everything he was in. he was a real person and the real george also spoke to himself as the third person. so many people wanted to kill remus. i'll give you my elevator pitch, he ended up becoming the most successful bootlegger in american history, he was also an inspiration. his wife imaging with whom he throw parties, ended up falling

in love with an agent who put him in jail. this is all true. so that started a very big triangle. in my book, he's one of the good guys. [laughter] i want to say thank you to curtis, he did me the favor of not reading my sub title and the truth is, i was reluctant, first two of the nouns. i grew up loving mockingbird, probably like a lot of you. i was always interested in that, went down in 2015 to write a story about a watchman. when i was reporting on that, i learned about this other book she tried to write. it was a true crime project.

a series of murders in a small town in alabama. >> thank you. correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think there's any simple character in any of your books that is still living. did anybody encounter any personal observation or talk to any of these characters? >> he was alive for the first year i was working on the book but for those of you who read it, i don't want to get bogged down on any one of the plots but the alleged murder was gunned down by a vigilante at the funeral of his last victim. that is still very much alive. i interviewed him for the book and i think i maybe had the

advantage where i feel like my story is contemporary compared to them. i was able to interview a lot of people who knew my central characters and other family members and a lot of folks in this town remember meeting harpreet because she worked on the book in the 70s and 80s. >> i want to ask how you were able to develop the characters, defined their personalities, not really knowing them. >> i did speak with family members. he was an employer in cincinna cincinnati. he owned 35% of all the liquor in the u.s. he had about a 40 million dollar porch, it's not a inflation.

i talked about the people who worked with him, they had stories and artifacts so i talked with them. the biggest piece was a 5500 page transcript at the library, which was invaluable. it gave incredible detail about his life, various people who knew him. bizarre works, one of my favorites was that george did not wear underwear. [laughter] was apparently a cause for great alarm at that time. is the sign of an unfound mind. just little things that by talking to relatives, but that wasn't the part of my research i would say. >> my co-author and i began with the understanding that these are mythic characters portrayed in

television series and we wanted to make them live and breathe as much as possible. both of them, especially him but especially al capone were very different. it came down to incorporating their voices as much as possible. neither lefty compromise, maybe we can talk about heroes, short and spare 21 page account of the component investigation. as much as possible, we tried to go back to that. fortunately the two of them gave a lot of interviews and you can pull their voices from that as much as possible.

because these two men died, they were both surprisingly young. the age of 26, and elliott is 27 and he's put in charge of the untouchables. they died very young. capone and 47. they spoke to a couple people who did that near the tail end of his life. ...

>> it's a great question and i'm sure there's some writers in the room, and if there aren't, i'm sure everybody has tried to launch about something the never met. a grandmother, great-grandfather, the patriarch of the town where you were been and raise expelled there's interesting methods for doing it. court transcripts, there's almost always employs reports or investigative record or trial transcripts so you get a sense of the person's voice, but then you just go rooting around like a pig for truffles, liking for any mention of the person in newspapers or magazines or any kind of contemporary coverage, and for all three of us 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 go and look and it's a pretty serious bib logograph and a note situation so you can see exactly how we put at the portraits together and who talked to and what documents we relied on.

>> each of you have again wayon the kind of journalistic approach of just the facts, ma'am, and have developed a really very colorful stories with strong character development, and i wanted to read a short passage from casey book that touches on a technique that truman capote likes to think he invented. casey referred to him, he thought he was the sort of marco polo of new journalism, and invented the first nonfiction novel, but this is what i think for purposes of our discussion, it's a good line that capote barriod the strategies of fiction writers in his nonfiction. rendering settings that were more than just datelines, crafting characters who are more than just quotations and physical descriptions, and identifying win his reporting or

imposing on it, moods and themes that made a story more than the sum of its parts, and certainly there is more of a -- you call it new journalism and magazine writing or the nonfiction books we read that they are more colorful and people tend to put themselves in the head-of-the characters and so and so may have thought such a thing if want to ask each of you hutch of our own imagination dare youy in crafting your story? casey, why don't i start with you. >> i was hoping could carve an answer from what these two. wear ucreatures with minds mindd imaginations and you spend time thinking but someone you start

to imagine things if think you have to be very careful when you writing a nonfiction book and want to very clear about the sourcing and where things come from, and if you do speculate, just want to flag that for readers but it's an interesting thing. we're gathered around this genre of true crime and it has different standards from other nonfiction genres, and it's been co-opted by podcasts and documentaries in a way that the boundaries are even more pourous between what is true and what is not and what is speculation and what is fact. i guess i'm probably on the conservative side of things, and i took my cue from harper lee, because part of the book it bowers relationship to the genre of true crime and she helped capote report "in cold blood" and she learned but the source dispel decisions he made so there's a her feelings but the genre and her thoughts and objections to some places it being goes in the 770s and

'80s. >> exactly what casey said. also, i was dealing a lot with the trial transcript, and the whole nature of trial is that somebody is lying. if not one person, several people are lying think whole nature of the said/she said. was very controversial -- i do what people say and what they lie about and at that time they omit is just as telling to them as a character and to the story itself what they say that is truthful. i like to flag it and just say this is what the person contended or what this person claimed. and i like to trust that the reader has some emotional intelligence to decide who is lying and i don't have to spell it out for you and sort of the end 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 open psyche and their own prejudices everybody brings to reading. >> this is one place in my case where i don't -- i didn't need the devil on my shoulder pulling me in that direction because i was work with a novelist who -- this would be the one sort -- one of the things that made the collaboration interesting and hopefully makes the book a little unusual. wasn't a dispute often timed but a tug of war between well we can say that, can't say that. his imagination having written a lot of historical novels would pull him more in that line and i would say, well, this is about as far as i can the can go. we have places where there's speculation and it's necessary speculation and it's sign posted as such. but just to give an example, there's a fame now -- the kevin

costner movie but a famous see in the untouchables where al capone kills someone with a baseball bat and that is one of the few things film that is actually -- has a basis in history. had been discounted by a lot of of revisionist historians and we were able to find contemporary evidence in newspapers and true time magazines, that the story had been spread very deliberately by the capone mob as way of engendering fare bus capone in other words in this position as much as he wanted to he boyfriend the he public he needed to be feared by his employees in order to main his hold on power. so letting people know if you try to cross him, you would end up beaten with a baseball bat is one way to do that. so that's an instance where we have the -- in the book we have the discovery of the bodies and then we say the story started going out on the gangland grape

vine and we till it the way it came down to us and can be pretty confident something like it happened, but that's an instance where you're dealing with people who aren't going to leave a record of multiple homicides so you're sort of left with the stories they told but themes. >> i'm going read you your account of that scene where de niro goes crazy in the movie but this is from your book. a body guard handed capone a baseball bat, which he gripped in hands as powerful as babe ruth's. while the stunned conspirators still seated were held at gunpoint, the boss began crushing his skull, red streamed down the man's face like a cracked egg, the screams of the two brave gunman awaiting the turns were cut off one at a time 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 bodyguard its 0 blasted away, and then there's a line so goes the story, with variations but chilling similarities. aren't you pulling your punch a little bit? >> well, again, this is an instance where we're very mindful that we're dealing with an account -- characters of a story that has been soing myologyize that sometimes people are to quick to discount the myths. i think there's a great basis of fact behind it in this case but at the same time, as as we talk but earlier issue did have to convince my co-author the book needed 150 pages of support note he would say can't we write a essay and call it's day and i

said no people need to see how well-founded this is so you can go back to the book and see the newspaper articles and true crime accounts. when you're dieted a history that dated to the '70s, having an image from true crime magazine from 1932, illustration of capone taking a baseball bat to these guys puts the lie to that quite strongly. >> you added credibility to the story by suggesting maybe it didn't happen exactly this way. you mentioned end notes. we talk but this before we went on. apparently new phenomenon with so much of nonfiction. all three of these books are chock-full of end notes, probably 30-40 pages, maybe more, the back of the book. if you wonder where they get that you can look in the back of the back, it's not in the academic footnotes that clutter

academic writing but it's there for you, and up until maybe 25 years ago, you really didn't have that requirement, and i think it's a good one, and i congratulate all three of these writers. it is very extensive footnotes in it. you have an author's note where you assure the reader that there are, quote, no invented dialogue in the bork and you provide a lot of attribution to your end notes so i thought i'd test it. >> oh, no. >> well, bear with me. this is the beginning of a chapter and it's the way writers try to develop a scene and asset scene. it begins, on the morning of november 29, 1922, preparing for an appearance been 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 condition template it what to -- contemplated what to wear. i she had her way she wouldn't 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, it's. said, come on, you obviously are making this up and damned if i don't look in the end notes and you got it from her own diorite library of congress. so, it's a good example of how these people have gone out of their way to assure that there is credibility in what you're writing about. >> if could just say one thing if the danger is only to tell stories that are so roughly documented and obviously only certain people of certain

meanedsed a access or -- had access to keep a diary and certain community stories were prioritized over others so i think the kind of attention to detail in the scrupulousness with which we all operate is important but equally important are those silents where the historical record may never give you enough to make a character and don't want to erase the people from the story, too. so i just want to make it sound like it's a gym of you can only make characters from this people who left a robust record behind, because there are real injustices in history and it's why often academics, aside from their own beeasesases are are bd by what remains of the historical past. >> academic historians put apart shelbyfoot. shell by foote and they cite a dramatic scene involving robert

e. lee in the battle of gettysburg, and the mississippi unit as decimated and had lee cantorring around on his horse like -- beating his chest and saying, my fault, my fault, all my fault, my men are lost. and the historians insist there's in other reference of that anywhere, and charged to put with making it up. and then we talked briefly about this. we were talking about another book that hadn't occurred to me but that's midnight in the garden of good and evil, which was wonderful book but came in for a lot of criticism because -- >> not really nonfiction. >> it's strong suspicion a lot of it is made up. it's interesting --

>> he massaged the time frame, too. so that was the big criticism. >> yeah. >> in our case, i referenced earlier that ness had a ghost-writer write an autobiography and became the basis of the tv show and the film and that's a book the -- be published vs. of the book "the unup toables" that came out after ness died in set 57 has been dismissed in a lot of the nonfiction write bought al capone and elliott ness and we set out to subject this to sort of scrutiny and try to verify because doesn't have footnotes, has a lot of invented dialogue and -- he can't know what people were wearing on a particular day necessarily. but if you take the incidents at are described in the become piecemeal their chronology is all messed up but take the incident described and compare them to the scrapbooks ness kept

and to other sources we were able to find, i was shocked, frankly, however of it checked out and how much of it we were able to talk about in our own book to put in the proper chronological order and with the additional context because we didn't use anything from that book we can't independently verify but we independently verified at least three-quarters of the stuff described in it. >> individual question for each of you about your book. casey, without giving away anything in your book, could you tell us what your best guess on why harper lee never got around to writing that book? >> i love it when someone cuts to chase. i spend hundreds of pages avoiding the question and book talks all the time. so, my book has a come of mysteries and some are in the true crime section about methods and why cases unfolded the way they did and that sort of thing,

and the stories that were told about the alleged murder at the time but the big mid-about the section of harper lee what helped to her own attempt to right about the case. some people who knee her say she finished it. and chose not to publish it and there's difference between what a writer might do for herself and what she might do for the reading public. so i want to honor these people who are real and knew her and her family and other people point to difficulties she faced in general when she was writing and in particular when it came to this case, and we're a panel full of writers and some of them are familiar and some of them are just things that other writers struggle with. harper lee has a drinking problem, suffered from depression, was real perfection gist and experienced writers block after mockingbird this project energized her and if you know anything but her work with

capote in kansas, she was really the key to that community and she had gone to this small town and gotten people to tell their stories and the same thing in the small town in alabama so she was energized and moved by the reporting but struggled with the writing. you can have all the fun the world reporting and gathering information and learning about a story but -- i'm sure the three of us did but you have to sit down to write it at some point and that's harper lee's troubles started. i you're interested in crew true crime here experience with the case would we interesting because you get to see the kinds of decisions we make all the time, who is a hero, who is a villain, how do we represent dialogue, what is a reliable source, how die handed handel the complexity of a story i thought what murder but is actually insurance fraud. wish there were one thing but if there had been, probably some would have figured out a way through it. instead it's a lot of different things that made it hard for her

to write in general and specifically this book. >> i can address this to eher brad or aabout and i'll get you-abbott and i'll get you next. in miss business we're familiar with prohibit base. -- prohibition. took us until 1966 -- >> just about to work, too. >> -- in the rest over untri -- huh? >> just when it started to work you got rid of it. >> so anyway, both of your books were about prohibition, was there anything -- you're about both about the criminal aspect of prohibition, would there is anything beneficial to this country about prohibition? >> anything beneficial if just wanted to say i don't think my book is about prohibition. it's sort of the backdrop -- >> but the king of the

bootleggers. >> i understands the factor contributing to prohibition, the christian temperate downtown has reasons for not wanting their husbands to drink and stopping domestic violence, lost paychecks, unstable communities, and i can certainly understand that but as we all know, time and time again history teaches us you cannot legislate vice. it just doesn't work. and i get we just spent over a decade figuring that out with prohibition. the grand experiment that failed. but so george reamus was brilliant because he knew prohibition would be a failure as did anybody who got into bootlegging but was able to exploit a loophole that was heir particular experience and made him so successful. a brown as a pharmacist and a lawyer, and he read the act and found the loophole that with a physicians preprescription you can boy, manufacture:for met dissan purposes.

of course nobody wag uses alcohol for medicinal services and he took full advantage of this and the country loved him for it. >> we always had our ways in miss this to -- >> there was actually -- one of my favorite things i do a slide show and there's a thing called cow shoes that bootlegs in rural areas who did moonshining in forests and meadows would wear these cow shoe and they were basically heels were made from wood carved to look like animal hoofs, and so they would cover their tracks if prohibition agent were trailing them how to a meadow they'd look for somebody's footprints and just see a bunch of hooves, and i kind of wish they'd come back in style. i'd like a pair. but people were -- the opinion is people were going find a way. people always going to find a way. >> fred, you talked about it briefly. your co-author and it's an odd

couple with a novelty and historian. how did it work to -- for the two of you to put together this very hoe he'ssive book? >> -- cohesive book. >> it's a difficult thing to describe to somebody who hasn't co-wherein a book. people want a clear dividing line, you wrote this, hoe wrote that but when a collaboration work, 2 plus 2 doesn't equal 5. the pairing brings something to the book that wouldn't have been there otherwise. generally as a sort of way of boiling it down i was responsible for writing the first draft her to part that have to to diswith eliot in the s and law enforcement more generally and he was more responsible for first drafting the part having to do with al capone and the grangester side -- gangster side of things we started to do alternating chapters but the story gets

messy in a good way ask that would be too distracting so let it naturally come together. but after having written those parts, we put the manuscript together and then aid it it back and forth to the point it did become one voice it and is difficult for me now to look at any particular page and say i wrote that or he wrote that because both of our fingerprinted are all over it. it was an odd coupling not just in terms of differing approaches but in terms of a couple of generations between us, and i won't say how many, but he -- what i think made it work -- the odd nature of that made it work. i'm coming at this a historian etch hit coming at it's as a novelist but we both knew what we wanted the back to read and to read and say, and so if he trusted me on the history aspect and i trusted him on the

story-telling aspects, that sort of push and pull gives the book i think energy that is unusual. >> each of you have wonderful characters in the book and very well-drawn. just wondering, each of you -- which character did you most enjoy dealing with? casey, why don't you start off. you had a wide range of -- >> kind of a facile way to think but characters and enjoyment. they're all interesting for different reasons and i think it's been my experience talking about the book that people are interested the them for different reasons. think, though, i wrote a book that's partly about a very famous novelist and a famously private one so i was aware over the public appetite for information about harper lee's life and for a satisfying emotional account of a writer who means so much to so many of

us. for that reason i felt most compelled i needed to spend more time with the alleged murderer in the work, reverend williams maxwell ask his lawyer, tom radny and i wanted the book to look at their lives and take their stories seriously because without them, there would be no story to tell about harper lee in this book, and without their stories, too, there would not be a satisfying explanation why it was so hart for her to write. seem other interested in religion and politics and those two characters were every bit as interesting but i tried to be democratic in the writing and the researching and thinking through the structure of the book. so i'll go with all three equally which is to say i refuse to answer the question. in panels like this the call i pocketing the tennis ball. serves me something nice but i pocketed the ten it in ball. >> i would say george reamous was the most bizarre character i have come across in history and i've come across a few.

the person i thick was most amidessed by on several different levels was the mable walker, she was a board walk empire namest cities. when president warren harding appointed her to be a sis stapes attorney general of the united states in 292, 1 women had the right to vote for nine months. she was 32 years old, five years out of law school and had never prosecutorred a single nice her career and suddenly she was in charge of thousands prohibition cases in country, including cases against george ream mouse and hat this hard scrabble upbringing, a favorite saying, life has few pet darlings, and her formative childhood event, her father bit -- one time she bit a pet cat's ear and to teach hear lesson her father pit her here back and she was in humanly tough and thick skinned and to

make mattered more difficult she was nearly deaf, and she had to spend an hour each morning arranging her error her hearing aid but a she didn't want to male colleagues to realize she was work if with that deficit but he bob inside justice department and the white house, all members of hardings' crooked ohio gang let put the little lady this going to be overwhelmed and won't know what she is doing and we can continue or cozy relationships and taking bribes but the shook her oath in the office of 1921 and started kicking butt. enjoyed that part and wish i could have person more time with her. one of those people i would have had liked to hang out with in real life. >> fred, before we start, you made -- maybe it's your co-author -- made capone at times seem like a very affable,

lovable rogue. >> yep. yes, absolutely. >> is that your intention. >> well, yeah. >> or suspect of his personality? >> sure. that's why i think it can be difficult to take which character is the most fun to write about or deal with because they were both so confounding and surprising. capone, as you said, was an extremely charming man and one of the things that was most surprising to me about them that eve never opinion they'red -- we have seen the up and coming capone in board walk empire, the ethic could opinion in the entouchables and other thing but the way -- when powers thrust upon someone as it was with him, it reveals character. some people are diminished by it. some people grow into it and he grows into it and matures from a street tough into a captain of industry, one who thinks he tooth be a captain of industry.

people say if he had been born into different issues would have been at the president of standard oil but i thought he was born politician. they talk about when he got into prison, spoiler alert, the first thing he does when he gets to the yard is walk around and shake eric's hands and say i'm al and if you need anything, come to me and i'll deal with it. convict 8400886. and he is always struggling because that is the undisciplined side of him. this brooklyn kid. always straining to just burst out of the surface and the disease affects his mind it becomes harder to keep that under control. >> did you havemer fun with capone that eliot ness? >> i don't know if i'd go that far. maybe my cao author would say that. personally if it had to pick a favorite character, it would be eliot ness because he was

surprising in so many different ways. >> dick tracy. >> he inspired dick tracy and he definitely leans into that public image but you're talking about a guy who was crashing beer trucks -- crashing trucks into could pope's breweries and yet was so interpersonally shy he can't ask one a stranger on the street for a restaurant recommendation. he couldn't think about approaching somebody, stranger, in that way. or here's somebody who turns down what if you adjust for inflation 1.5 million daz year in bribes. and yet lies because his age on the job application to back prohibition agent in order to qualify. someone who we remember as robert stack as the ultimate two-begun, pitiless federal agent, and yet who had some ideads about law enforcement that would be progressive even

for today's standards and as much as we owe hollywood for remembering even his name, the way the film's and the tv shows mischaracterized him as obscured what he stood for in life. we're finishing up a sequel but the rest of his life but hopefully we can bring some of what he actually wanted to stand for in real life back to the public's attention. >> thank you. we have 15 minutes left, and i would like to hear from you am surely you've got some questions and if you do, and you're able, we have the this podium right here in the center of the room so everybodying hear the question. so some of you are maybe fleeing the room but i hope some of you are coming up -- right there. great, thank you. >> i'm maggie. thank you for being here today. this has been an interesting talk.

my question is about your own biases. going into writing all of your books york dealing with larger than lifing myological. people. dow do you disentangle your thoughted about them in tower finished product. >> each of you. >> you want to start? >> i think there's the difference -- the thing with a narrative nonfiction, when jaw sayre narrative nonfiction, nonfunction yaw wont to read like a novel, want it to be a story. the key thing is details. narrative nonfiction write erred have to let the details be funny and poignant. and novelists bring their own voice. not say thaw nonfiction writers don't have a style or voice but those sort of emotional connections come through the details we unearth in our research, and i think that is

important for us, and another reason why we all just do deep diving and search forking truffles as i believe casey put it. i just don't think that you bring your -- you bring a bias but it's sort of comforted over with the details. i have many unlikeable women characters in my books and i always have a think -- i don't care if people are leakable. i u.s. care if they're interesting i lay everybody's works out there. lay it out there and let me people decide how they want to read that person and that's my approach to it. george reamus is also sort of an unlikeable person but many people are rooting for him at the end because the details present themselves as such. >> i think that's a great question and the truth is i was more attentive to it when it came to the nonfamous character in my book. but there's -- people think they who the harper lee and is love

her and worship her for good ropes or good intentioned reason but for me, one of the tricky things about my book and i think it was something very tricky for her, write bought an alleged black serial killer and it was black-on-black crime in the 19 '0s and was not from the community and did not know much about it and i think bias is a very important word nor any true crime writer. matters when you've choose the case you want to bring to the public conscious in how you frame them. and so for me one over the big moments was realizing the story had been toll to me as the story of a black man who perpetuated insurance fraud and recently there have been tremendous multibillion -- settlement for africa client word denied or sold substandard policies or paid too much and appear after paying a lifetime of coverage were denied it when they needed the burial insurance. so it was berndt to move beyond

the bias of the way the story had been told to me and frame the life insurance industry in that part of the book, and i tried over and over fend with different aspects of the story to do it so less to do with the famous character in the book and more to do with the systemic issues at work in any kind of crime story. >> i hate to be a broken record but it really does get down to the sources. my co-author and i made a conscious decision to go back into primary sources as much as possible. newspapers-court documents, federals files. i traveled to something like a dozen states in researching this book, out to wyoming, trying to cast as broad a get as public because i was -- growing up, loving dick tracy, i want to portray eliot ness as dick tracy and al capone as big boy but you have to be open to having you mind be changed to want to be

challenged. that's the most important thing. but what you find, and i'll just second what has already been said and say that the characters that come to you through the historical research are much more fascinating than the cardboard cutouts we get in popular culture. and that -- there are flaws and mistakes make them interesting. so with elliottness s you have someone -- i don't think create the untouchable image necessarily. the dick tracy image. but leans into it, and i think -- i talk about his shyness and becomes a shield for him, a bit of self-protection that later on in his career in the sequel we're finishing now, gets him interest trouble. and without getting too far hate of myself, there are places in the there where if you're dealing with somebody who is a

public servant, but who looking back now we can see had very, very dangerous blind spots, you need to address that. and talk about the ways in which he failed to serve all of the public all of the time and that's going to be a big part of this new book i'm so excited about. >> thank you y'all very much. >> questions. >> seeing none, i'm going to have one more before we -- >> i think we have one. >> good, thank you. >> fred, as a journalist i appreciate the research and the -- how much you have to rely on the factual record. i'm wondering did you have -- one thief subjects or incident that there just wasn't enough there for you do fully develop that as part of your story and did it fruits frustrate you or how did you cope with maybe a

lack of a record. >> good question. who wants to try it? >> i feel luke i confronted a very common ocurrent for true crime writers which is history remembers so much more about the perpetrator than the victims, and there are a few moments in my book where i'm con pick accusely telling -- conspicuously tellingout what i canned fine out bo some economically marginal black women in a small town in alabama, and all -- i tried to talk to people who knew them and tried to talk the journalists who covered the murders and there's a way to build out what you don't know but also a way to call attention to what we don't know and why we don't know it, and that's a particularly sharp contrast in my book between dish can tell you what was serve are harper lee's sister's birthday party when she was ten because her father owned the local newspaper it and was written up as front page news and i can't

do that because in so many black communities, some were lucky to have a newspaper but the archives are less accessible than the journal archive you-sea tonight and they're more discrepancy is with diggization and even when you can't know something it's important to be conspicuous why, so that is a silence in the historical record i felt pretty acutely and all i could do is tell you why i didn't know more and point to the cupid of discrepancy i think is an the case between victims and perpetrators, and we're a pretty polite true crime crowd. some could have stood up for the appetite the culture has for criminals and the grand o's stories but something -- grandiose stories and you have to think about your presenting the discrepancy in power and survivorship and that sort of thing. >> it's a good question brings

me back to mabel wibrandt. the most powerful woman in america at a time when people were not comfortable with women and power and she was very conscious of her image, as you can imagine. she wrote provide lilly about of all thank you time. diaries are full of notes how she hate that girly girly stuff and people make assumptions but her character because of the nature of her ambition, and because she was so public and also in charge of enforcing prohibition, which was news for 13 years. she was very careful how curated the facts she put out and there was a time when it was suspected she herself was having an fair with a prohibition agent who ran off with reamus' wife, and this is something she never addressed. there were letters from him to

her where it has very affection nat language and signoffs that would not have been necessarily proper for two colleagues at that time period, and also when it was discovered this prohibition agent was running off with reamus' wife, j.ed gar hoover was dying to property -- prosecute him and wilibrandt said now. make this assumption in the book and make it clear out my assumption that i think that she was so aware of the effect of -- if she went out and prosecuted a guile she called her ace of detectives can she publicly supported and got behind and said this one of our best men in the prohibition department it would set back her own career and the career of women in politics for decade and i think that is something that wailinged heavily on her mind but she --

when privately she would talk about permanent things but privately not comment on her public macnations which she was thinking about ore job if she thought it would be detrimental to her. that's something i wish i had more on. would have been great to find a hotel receipt with franklin dodge and mable walk are wilibrandt but that did not happen so i would want more about here. >> be in trying to put together what the ness and the untorchables actually did because that obviously has been misrepresented by hollywood, but the investigation that the untouchables were doing has been characterized as just going around, shuttering breweries and trying to cut off capone's income and i nowing but but no investigative work. certainly the cutting off his income was part of it but ended up being this much more serious -- essentially trying to put together a rico case decree

okayed boyfriend the rico law has been passed. the wreck teeth influence and krups organizations act that is the tool that gives federal law enforcement an effective means of battling organized time so the untouchables and q.ed gar hoover is a household name and before people know what g-men are. they're providing what federal law enforcement can be and what they can do. we that the difficulty of having to put together a lot of the work they with doing from the outside, from newspaper articles, from recollections that had been written 25 years after the fact, some educated guesswork because there wasn't a great source base of prohibition bury decree documents and literally two months after the hard cover over the book came out, the -- a copy of the complete case summary case report that the untouchables come build which one of ness'

men kept illegally turned up and, so our first thought is, this is the document with all the answers. this would have made my life so much easier had it turned township years ago. did we get anything wrong and fortunately we discovered that a lot of our supposition and speculation turned out to be wayneed. so what we were able to do nor -- for the paperback is to put exceptions in there and see in the untouchable's own words what they were doing. one of the tasks we hope the book would achieve was in showing you where necessary st. and the unup toables fit in the history of the development of employing in the united states, and i think this is a major document that make this case for them being quite significant. >> you have hear from three very good authors who produced three very good books and i think you

have heard how responsibly they have hailed it and there's a lot of fun if commend to you all three of their books and thank you all so much for joining us. >> thank you for having. >> thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversation] >> that was an author's discussion on true crime. we're live from the mississippi book festival in jackson, mississippi miss.