Elizabeth Sims was asked to write about “the bookstore wars from the point of view of the chains” by the American editor of LOGOS: The Journal of the World Book Community, a quarterly published in the UK by Colin Whurr. This is the piece she wrote. It was published as the lead article in LOGOS volume 13, issue 2, released in July, 2002. It was accompanied by a response written by Andy Ross, owner of Cody’s Books in Berkeley, California.

Note: This is long.

Store Wars: the Case for the Chains

by Elizabeth Sims

©Elizabeth Sims. All rights reserved.

During the winter of 1993-94, I managed a Borders Books & Music store in suburban Chicago. One day one of my assistants caught up with me on the sales floor. “You’re going to love this one,” she said. “A customer just told me that somebody somewhere went to a chain store and asked if they carried The Shipping News. Guess what the clerk said?”
“’Let’s check in periodicals’, right?” The book had come out two weeks ago.
“Right.”
Oh, boy, I thought, we’re going to be hearing that one for a long time.
And, in fact, if I’d had a jelly doughnut—and eaten it—for every time I heard that story since, I’d be sought after by every freak show in the nation.
It doesn’t matter whether the story is true; I’ve little doubt that it is, in spite of the fact that the particulars—which chain? which clerk?—instantly dissolved into apocrypha. What matters is that the story summarizes what many independent booksellers and their supporters believe: The superstore companies are loaded with philistines. Aren’t you glad we’re pure?
The story has been a touchstone for many, and, though by now quite stale, still is.

*****

Twenty years ago, the book business was virtually non-competitive. If you wanted to open a bookstore in America, you rented a space you liked, you bought some inventory, and you hung up your sign. Your shop was small, you drew customers from your neighborhood, and you made a modest living selling merchandise you liked very much.
You rarely advertised, except in the phone book. You never thought about competing with the store on the other side of the neighborhood or across town, never thought about being an aggressive marketer, because aggressive marketing wasn’t nice. You got into bookselling because you liked to read and talk about books, not because you wanted to exhaust yourself writing press releases and analyzing cash flow and pushing hot sellers and beating the other guy.
For customers in those days, shopping for books was a pretty sedate, and limiting, experience.
Tom and Louis Borders opened a small used book shop in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After a while they began to sell new books, moving to larger quarters. Seeing their sales rise every time they increased their inventory, they wondered just how big an inventory they could build, while keeping precise track of it, and making their buying more responsive to customer desires.
Louis, the mathematical one, came up with a computer program that helped them do this. It was clunky at first, but over time it became a powerful engine of efficiency.
Barnes & Noble emulated the Borders inventory system, ringing their own changes on it as they went along. These systems today are incredibly sophisticated, increasing by powers of ten the effectiveness of their human masters, the buyers.
It has never been recognized sufficiently that the highly customized inventory control system is what revolutionized bookselling, not pretty carpets and hanging plants. It is the most critical key to the success of the superstore chains. In the 1980s the typical bookstore carried 5,000-10,000 titles, about all the inventory a sole proprietor could keep in memory or a card file. Borders and Barnes & Noble, using their potent inventory systems, began opening stores with 75,000-100,000 titles. Customers went wild for the huge inventories, to say nothing of other services like special orders at no extra charge, free gift wrapping and washrooms.
As the superstores gradually expanded their operations, most independent booksellers simply watched. They watched, but did nothing. And most allowed themselves to be caught absolutely flat-footed by this new competition. Well, yes, I know that some small book shops in other parts of the country have closed, after the superstores came to town, but that won’t happen to me. My customers are loyal.
They somehow ignored that paramount axiom of retail: there is no such thing as a loyal customer. Customers will patronize you as long as you meet their needs, whatever those needs are. If someone else comes along and does what you do, only better, your customers become their customers.
I don’t know why so many independent booksellers take tremendous pride in being naive about the nuts and bolts of business. One independent bookseller protested to me, after a panel discussion, “I’m a book lover, not a businesswoman!”
A few years ago a publisher’s representative commented to me over dinner, “The problem nobody talks about is that most independent booksellers are crappy, crappy business-people.”
I had the unusual experience of working for a respected independent as it morphed into a large chain. Having been an avid customer of Tom and Louis Borders’s first store in Ann Arbor, I went to work for them 1987, starting as a floor clerk in the second Borders they opened, in Birmingham, Michigan. I built a career there, eventually becoming regional director for the West Coast. I left the company in 1997 to follow my dream of being a writer. Now my living is still tied directly to bookstores, and I like it that way.
As a Borders spokeswoman I gave interviews and participated in panel discussions and radio debates. I’ve been insulted and despised by some independent booksellers, and regarded as a curiosity by others.
When Borders was a small outfit, we conducted a simple survey asking customers to rate characteristics of book stores according to importance: price, selection, service, location, special events, ambiance, etc. Quite consistently, customers rated selection highest in importance.
Thus when I read an item in Publisher’s Weekly about an independent book shop owner in southern California who announced he was going to meet the competition of a new Borders by remodeling his store, I knew he had set the clock ticking on himself. He thought his inventory and services were fine the way they were, and he assumed the only difference between himself and Borders was customer comfort. After borrowing heavily to remodel, then seeing little or no increase in sales, he shut down, vociferously blaming Borders.
Is that really who was to blame?
I have a magazine article from 1995 in which an independent book shop owner was asked whether her sales were up or down since a Borders opened very nearby. She noted that sales were neither up nor down in her small store, but grumbled that she and her staff were “working three times harder, though.”
Working three times harder? What had they been doing before Borders showed up? Well, this: when I visited that store while the Borders was under construction, two of three staff members were seated, not doing much as far as I could tell. That was too much help to have on hand on a weekday afternoon in a store that size. I identified myself and spoke with the owner, a very nice woman who appeared to know her inventory well. She told me she was concerned about the new competition, but evidently had no plans to meet it. I wanted her to know that our staff would make a point of referring customers to her store in the event Borders didn’t have what they wanted.
Some months later, I was told that customers coming into her store carrying Borders bags were asked to leave. In addition, I was told by the Borders managers that they had approached her to try to do some special events cooperatively, and were turned down.
That store is closed now, and Borders was blamed by one and all.
So it was no surprise to me to be asked, during an interview for a television program, whether I felt guilty about being a Borders executive, guilty about what Borders had “done to the independents.” Perhaps not hiding my anger very well, I answered no, that I was proud of the fine stores we’d built, proud of the millions of customers we’d pleased over the years.
It is the independents who should feel guilty. Guilty of taking their customers thoroughly for granted. Guilty of not seeking to improve their stores until, for many, it was too late. Guilty of refusing to expand their services. Guilty of refusing to spend money to compete and to accept the temporarily lower profit margin such measures would bring. Guilty of refusing to carry books they didn’t like, whether such books were romance novels, computer how-tos, finance guides, or what have you.
Ask your favorite independent booksellers what percentage of their sales come from discounted titles on the bestseller lists. Ask them what their returns rate is. Ask them what their overall turn rate is, and turn rate by subject. Nine out of ten won’t know. It’s not hard to acquire these statistics, it just takes some effort and attention to detail. Numbers like those can help an owner make more intelligent decisions about inventory, can help a store exploit strength and bolster weakness.
Ask if they’ve ever read a book on economics. Ask when was the last time they cast a savage eye on overhead, from the cost of cleaning supplies to printer cartridges to cat food, to their lease itself, and challenged themselves to find cheaper ways to get good business done.
The best independents withstood the challenge of the chains by focusing on their inventory, their costs, and their space, just as the chains did. Some expanded their space to accommodate more inventory. Others chose to limit and customize their inventories to achieve greater depth than ever before, using newly available software that interfaced with digital cash registers. Others moved their stores to more favorable locations. Many began discounting books. Some focused, as well, on hosting more frequent author readings and other special events. All found ways to better control their expenses. And their customers are much the happier for it.

*****

For the independents the worst is certainly over: the growth spurt of the chains is now slowing in America. Superstores have coexisted with independents for going on two decades. But where America was ten years ago, more or less, Europe is now. Superstores are springing up in the U.K. and elsewhere, and the debate has begun.
Mind you, as far as customers are concerned there is no debate. More books, more choices, more services—that settles it, no matter who runs the store. The debate is not about whether superstores are inherently better or worse than independents. On the contrary, I’ve come to understand over the years that the debate is about nothing so much as ideology. It is difficult to find common ground in this argument about business, because most independent booksellers do not consider themselves capitalists. They do not consider themselves capitalists because they think capitalism is about power and greed. They think it is about the abuse of the weak by the strong.
It is about none of those things. Capitalism is about individual choice. Customer choice, merchant choice. Millions of individual choices are made every hour in the marketplace: choice is what makes it all work.
Some independent booksellers are uncomfortable with this. No wonder: millions of customers with the freedom to choose is a frightening thing, if you doubt your ability to convince them to buy from you.
So this ideological debate, such as it is, turns on independent owners making accusations against the chains, and the chains ignoring those accusations.
A wide palette of charges have been employed, endlessly voiced, massaged, tweaked, and voiced again. When a perceived adversary disregards your complaints and insinuations, you feel more certain and increasingly righteous. You begin to believe that you really are a victim. The role of victim has always offered a considerable level of comfort and sense of self-righteousness.
So much for a general approach to this matter. Let’s look at the specific charges leveled against the chains. The following is by no means an exhaustive list of the particular denunciations, but it includes all of the most common.

1. The chains only succeeded by copying the independents. If Borders and Barnes and Noble wished to copy independents, they would have opened vastly different stores than they did. They would have established a handful of stores with large inventories, a larger number with middle-sized inventories, but mostly small shops. Some of them would do special orders; others wouldn’t; yet others would do special orders if they were for a publisher they already had an account with; and lastly some that would do any special order anytime, as long as the guy who handled it wasn’t on vacation or off sick. Some that would take personal checks, ones that wouldn’t. Shops that wouldn’t carry books on hunting or guns, but would carry every word that Wittgenstein ever wrote. Staffs would range from the super-friendly to the surly and/or condescending.

2. The chains situate their stores to do maximum damage to the local independents. To believe this you must believe that independents are the center of the bookselling universe. You must believe that the indies were the obsession of the chains, subjects of intense scrutiny and fascination, and fit for imitation. By analogy, you must believe that Henry Ford created the assembly line in order to ruin the lives of harness makers. Never will independent booksellers believe the truth, which is that the big chains carefully appraise the sites selected by each other, while the location of independents is almost always irrelevant.
Borders contracted demographic surveys for each town in which they considered placing a store; Barnes & Noble undoubtedly did the same. There is no value in assuming that existing independents have placed their stores optimally. Chains seek to place their stores where the best concentration of potential customers is. Having located such a district, the trick is finding appropriate retail space.
Furthermore, when deciding to build a store that will have to do $5m to $12m of business per year to justify its investment, what sense could it possibly make to deliberately plop it next to an independent doing no more than $250,000 per year, using that as the only criterion?
But if an ideal space opens up in the desired area, and it happens to be near an independent, it is not the chain’s job to keep that shop in business.

3. The chains spied on independents. A distinct, and beloved, variation on the center-of-the-universe theory. So many independents believe they’ve been the subject of espionage that if all the corporate spies required to do such Herculean work were placed end to end, they’d reach coast to coast at least once.
One successful independent in northern California published a piece in its newsletter suggesting that it was spied on before the Borders store opened a few towns over. The piece described a cadre of men in suits looking around the store, making comments and studying things carefully, and suggested that the men were Borders operatives, clumsily revealing themselves to be the nasty corporate spies they were. As the ranking Borders executive on the West Coast at the time, I can tell you that not only did we not have any men in suits on the payroll, but the idea of spying on another store was out of the question. We took great pride in our stores, considered Borders to be the best in the business, and so expected others to be spying on us.

4. With the big chains, buying power gets concentrated into a few hands, and that’s dangerous for a free press. This is the one argument that, on the surface, appears to have some teeth. Of course, nobody wants the caprice of some cubicle-bound drone to dictate whether a writer will have a career, or be found beneath the dark waters of a lonely canal, a suicide whose frustrated death should be blamed on Borders.
The reality is that as long as there is a multitude of authors, publishers, readers, and sellers in the market, bookstore buying cannot lapse into sloppiness or be driven by corporate whim or ideology. If a chain were to lapse in some way, a significant hole would develop in its ability to serve a heterogeneous market, one into which its competitors will be more than happy to jump and scoop up that market share for themselves, be they other chains or a slew of sharp independents.

5. The chains use/used crooked business practices. Since the dawn of the chain bookstore era, the chains have been accused of thievery. This makes perfect sense if you share the Steinbeckian belief with many independent booksellers that any large corporation is, by definition, immoral. (See capitalism, above.)
In 1998 the American Booksellers Association (ABA) filed a lawsuit against Borders and Barnes & Noble, charging that the two companies had exacted special, and hence illegal, deals on prices of books and on cooperative reimbursement. This was supposed to be the capstone of a series of book business lawsuits, the one that would finally give the chains their comeuppance and show the world what kind of stuff the ABA was made of.
The ABA membership was eager to believe that the chains used tremendous leverage to strong-arm publishers into doing business their way. Curiously, at the same time, the ABA appeared to believe that publishers couldn’t wait to jump into bed with the chains, that everything was wink-wink and “let’s fleece the little guys.”
The basic question that was never asked is: What leverage?
When you run a chain of hardware stores, you buy nails by the boxcar-load from manufacturers. The fact that more than one company produces nails is something you can use to bargain with. “We need three boxcar-loads of galvanized roofing nails. The ABC company is giving us twelve for a penny; can you beat it? If you can, you get our business.” This is leverage.
But booksellers have no such bargaining power, no matter how big they are. If you want a book by a particular author you can only buy it from one publisher.
Which prompts the next question: Why would publishers be willing to give up profits? The obvious answer is, they weren’t. “If you want the latest Tom Clancy or P.D. James or Don DeLillo for cheap, go see if you can buy it from some other publisher.”
It was only after years of negotiating, years of building relationships with publishers, years of inventing ways to make it more economical for publishers to do business with them, that the chains began to receive better terms.
It is not illegal to negotiate for better terms, nor is it illegal to get them. And, on the publishers’ end, it is not illegal to sell the same merchandise to different customers on different terms. There are any number of tangibles that can justify charging different prices to different customers, largely based on publishers’ internal costs.

A few specifics on the lawsuit, which went to trial in 2001:

a) The ABA produced an expert witness who testified that the savings extended to the chains by publishers were not cost-justified. But the case was settled before the witness could be either cross-examined by defense counsel, or challenged by defense witnesses.
b) The ABA, whose members comprise 18 percent of the retail, or trade book market, pointed to many injuries allegedly suffered by them due to the competitive free market, but not one injury done to consumers.
c) The ABA spent three years and at least $18 million to press this suit, from which they received a cash settlement of $4.7m, reached after presenting about a third of their case, over six days of trial. The chains, which paid $2.35 million apiece, made no agreement to change their business practices. Aside from cross-examination of all but one of the plaintiffs’ witnesses, there is no record of the defense case, because there was no need to present it. $2.35 million is not paltry, but in plain fact it amounted to a nuisance settlement for each chain, paid simply to save further legal costs in defending against the suit. A Borders executive told me the suit had had no impact whatsoever on the way Borders does business.
d) Avin Domnitz, CEO of the ABA, told me, however, that the suit was “tremendously successful at leveling the playing field.” He meant that the ABA takes credit for the fact that a number of publishers, in the years after the suit was filed and before the trial, made terms and coop programs more appealing to independent booksellers.
Really? The ABA’s litigation was that influential? Mightn’t one reasonably suppose that the cause was the years of negotiation by the chains, now filtering down to the independents?
e) Some ABA dues-payers wondered whether their organization spent their $18 million wisely. So do I. How might the ABA have used that money in a more businesslike way? They might have issued low-interest loans to member stores that wished to expand. They might have organized collective buying and distribution arrangements for their members. They might have developed strategies to negotiate with publishers for coop funds for the collective benefit of the members. Tough work, to be sure.

6. Many chain stores aren’t profitable, but are kept open in order to crush the independents. This one lives on and on. I was in an independent book shop last fall to speak to the owner about my forthcoming novel. During our talk I mentioned that I once worked for Borders. She launched into a tutorial on the sins of my former employer. “The chains,” she told me, “have cash flow, but they’re not profitable. They keep stores open—many stores—in order to drive the independents out of business.”
I said, “Well, Borders stores are profitable. I saw the balance sheets for every store every month until I left the company.” I tried to explain that the chains do not have mountains of cash to hide ongoing failure. They’re expected by shareholders to turn a profit. It is true that Borders and Barnes & Noble regularly post losses. But that is because they are still expanding. If a chain has 200 stores and wants to build 40 more this year, it must show the bank that the 200 are making money, in order to qualify for the loans needed to build the 40 more. Businesses do not get additional funds if they can’t show they are making their business work. The overall financial picture becomes a loss because the expenses of opening 40 new stores outstrip the profits made by the 200 existing. That is why the chains’ stock is regarded by shareholders as a growth stock. If they someday stop growing, their shareholders will expect a continuing stream of dividends, as opposed to an increasing stock price.
I could tell this shop owner didn’t believe me, but she politely changed the subject to the rafts of crooked deals she’d heard the chains make with publishers. When I attempted to refute this assertion too, she reassured me comfortably, “Well, it didn’t happen at your level.” The ABA could, if it wished, have put an end to this rumor-mongering, since it had subpoenaed detailed profit-and-loss statements of both chains during the discovery phase of its case against them.

7. The chains steal/stole customers from the independents by offering discounts, and independents can’t really afford to discount. The Borders brothers began giving 10 percent off most hardcovers when they were a single store. In 1985, the year they opened their second store, they began giving 30 percent off New York Times hardcovers as well. They were able to do this and remain profitable because their business practices were sound.
The charge that the chains sold books cheaply to entice hordes of customers away from indies is yet another self-deception fabricated by the independents. The percentage of total sales represented by discounted books sold by the chains runs to about three percent bestsellers, and 10-11 percent discounted hardcovers. Thirteen to 14 percent of total book sales is hardly enough to have seduced book buyers into buying 86-87 percent of their purchases at full list price from the chains.

8. Remember, some chains stopped selling The Satanic Verses when the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was announced. They can’t be counted on to carry controversial books. This is an oft-repeated, half-baked factoid. Here is what happened. After the Ayatollah announced his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, some book chains were sent bomb threats for carrying the novel. Borders did not pull the book, though I know that the store I was working in at the time received at least one threat by telephone. Waldenbooks, at the time owned by Kmart, sent word to its managers in large urban areas that they could use their own discretion as to whether or not to pull the book from display, but not from inventory. The stores that chose to pull it from display returned it to the shelves after no more than two weeks.
How good are independents at carrying controversial titles? The biggest and arguably most controversial American book of 1995 was Newt Gingrich’s To Renew America. While it was on the bestseller lists, I was surprised to walk into a large Los Angeles independent and be greeted with a prominent sign announcing, “NO NEWTS!” Just to make sure, I asked whether the sign meant what it appeared to mean, and was told that yes, the store had decided not to carry the book.
It shouldn’t be surprising that independent book store owners tend to lean to the left politically. I’ve seen many more instances of independents using their stores as platforms for their political or ideological views, from the posting of slogans and advertisements and opinions, to the choices of front-of-store titles.
The Turner Diaries is by any standard a controversial book. A bizarre reactionary tract vaguely akin to Mein Kampf and portions of Ayn Rand and Swift, it was used as a notional guide by Timothy McVeigh in his preparation for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma. It is reasonable to suppose that it is read and taken literally by other wackos. It is also purchased and read by people who are interested in it for other reasons.
I called stores around northern California, where I live, looking for the book, and found that of the three large general independents I called, none carried it as a regular item, though all would order it on request. But the three Borders stores closest to those independents do carry it as a standard in-stock item. Why? Because it sells, to the tune of a thousand copies per year in Borders stores.
Independent booksellers are not champions of controversial titles. They are champions of the correct controversial titles.

*****

The ABA leadership has spent enormous amounts of energy and money fostering in its membership—and anybody else who would listen—the belief that independent booksellers are victims. And the association has cast itself as the avenger, seeking to take away the benefits their competitors worked long and hard for instead of forging its own way.
Is this situation likely to change? After all, the victim role is extremely popular with independent booksellers. Not with all, but with dismayingly many. It makes them feel superior. It buys them sympathy. But the bind into which these independents have firmly strapped themselves, with the help of the ABA leadership, is this: how do they maintain the comfort of feeling blameless for their own troubles, yet gain the gumption for unflinching self-examination, which is the bedrock of being a strong competitor?
If the indies admit that the playing field has been level all along, then if they haven’t prospered, it’s their own fault. Such a conclusion is unbearable for those who have invested heavily in self-pity.
The chains, however, in their efforts to drive their stock prices ever higher, are compromising some of the essential practices that made their businesses great. They have become mammoth corporations, far larger than any of us envisioned in the early days. In organizations of such size, size itself takes on a life of its own, and it will sap the soul of the business if not attended to.
High standards of in-store presentation, which are expensive to maintain, are relaxed, even forgotten. Labor gets squeezed. Home-office departments turn into fiefdoms fighting for prominence. Leadership becomes averse to risk. It doesn’t have to be this way, but when leadership chooses to be driven by quarterly earnings instead of by customers, it does happen. And irresolute leadership will destroy a company—slowly, painfully, and thoroughly.
Yes, when the chains were new and dynamic, many of their weaker competitors fell by the wayside. But the wayside is also where surprises can hide, ready to ambush a competitor who has grown more ponderous than agile.
Both chains and independents have things to learn. It’s a great time to be selling books.

Borders Books & Music has chosen the winners for the 2002 annual Original Voices Awards. The awards were given in four categories:

Fiction: The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster (Holt)

Nonfiction: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan)

Children's Picture Books: Mrs. Biddlebox by Linda Smith, illustrated by Marla Frazee (HarperCollins)

Intermediate/Young Adult Books: Abarat by Clive Barker (HarperCollins)

Borders' Original Voices monthly program features the works of more than 200 contemporary authors and illustrators from around the world, both innovative and ambitious books from new and emerging talents as well as works that represent a new direction for established authors.

Madonna adds children's writer to her CV
Monday March 3, 2003
The Guardian

After Sophie Dahl's illustrated romance and Ethan Hawke's road novel, Madonna becomes the latest celebrity to turn her hand to fiction. The singer/actress has written a series of children's books to be published by Penguin, it was announced today.

The first of the five illustrated books, designed for ages six and upwards, is called The English Roses, and will be out in hardback in September. Each book will feature artwork from a different illustrator.

Penguin chairman John Makinson said: "Madonna is an artist with a universal appeal and these books will touch children of all backgrounds everywhere in the world."

Penguin has picked up the English language rights to the stories from New York-based Callaway Editions. The founder of Callaway Editions, Nicholas Callaway, said that Madonna had "drawn on a lifelong passion for, and deep familiarity with, literature and children's books," while Francesca Dow, managing director of Puffin, Penguin's children's list, promised a "colourful cast of characters and gentle humour".

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

The Ghost of Miss Truman
From the November 18, 2002 issue: Sometimes the real mystery is the author.
by Jon L. Breen
11/18/2002, Volume 008, Issue 10

Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume
Writing for a Living
by Donald Bain
Barricade, 239 pp., $22.95

Murder at Ford's Theatre
by Margaret Truman
Ballantine, 326 pp., $24.95

A BIZARRE PHENOMENON first observed in the 1940s became a crime-fiction epidemic by the 1990s. Famous entertainers, athletes, and presidential relatives began sitting down at the typewriter to bang out mystery novels.

Or so they would have us believe. In truth, nearly every one of those celebrities made a deal through an agent or book packager, collected a nice advance for the use of the name, and left to a professional ghostwriter all the actual writing.

Ghostwriting is a time-honored practice, and most readers surely realize that movie stars and baseball players have help with their memoirs--just as all politicians these days have help with their speeches, campaign literature, and policy statements. But the dissemination of novels that are ghostwritten seems somehow more blatantly deceptive and ethically questionable.

Look, for example, at the new memoir by the veteran ghostwriter Donald Bain, who has written, under his name or others, some eighty books. In "Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume," Bain entertainingly describes his experiences as an officer in charge of censoring American Armed Forces Television in Saudi Arabia, as a jazz musician, and as an airline public-relations flack in a happier and more free-wheeling era of air travel.

But the most intriguing topic in the book is ghostwriting. Bain's first major success, "Coffee, Tea, or Me?" (1967), presented the comical amatory adventures of two stewardesses who appeared in public as the authors, Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones. Three sequels followed, plus similar faux first-person accounts of nurses, office temps, teachers, and actresses, always with attractive young women recruited to front the books for publicity purposes. Bain also wrote the autobiography of actress Veronica Lake, crime fiction signed by the actor David Toma and the ex-cops Nick Vasile and Mike Lundy, and the "Murder, She Wrote" novels in ostensible collaboration with "Jessica Fletcher," the fictional character played on television by Angela Lansbury.

There's no doubt that readers can be extraordinarily naive. About the cover photos on the "Murder, She Wrote" books, Bain reports, one fan wrote in to say it was "amazing how much Angela Lansbury looked like Jessica Fletcher." But when the ostensible author is a real person--and the book itself is a novel--readers don't seem unreasonable in expecting that the person whose name appears on the cover actually wrote the book.

Employing a ghostwriter on a work of fiction is never more dubious than when the putative author really is a writer. Brett Halliday (creator of Mike Shayne), Leslie Charteris (creator of the Saint), and Ernest Tidyman (creator of Shaft) all turned to ghosts to carry on the exploits of their famous characters. The Ellery Queen team employed other writers to turn out paperbacks that were very different from the genuine Queen novels. One case of posthumous ghosting, "Chains of Command" (1999)--credited on the cover to William Caunitz, who died in 1996, but written almost entirely by Christopher Newman--precipitated a class-action suit by readers who believed they had been defrauded.

Celebrity mystery novels, like other ghostwritten books, differ in the way the actual writer is or is not credited. In the most honest method, arguably not ghostwriting at all, the celebrity makes the writing professional a full collaborator, as in the recent "Blue Moon," signed in equal-sized print by bandleader Peter Duchin and Edgar Award-winning novelist John Morgan Wilson.

The second method doesn't admit the ghostwriter's existence to the world at large but at least tips off others in the writing and publishing trade. Many of the novels attributed to "Star Trek"'s William Shatner credit in the acknowledgments the assistance of science-fiction humorist Ron Goulart. Actor George Kennedy's paperback mysteries offer thanks to Walter J. Sheldon. A more subtle variation is to dedicate the book to the real author, as actor George Sanders did for Craig Rice and Leigh Brackett, the authors of the two 1940s crime novels published under his name. (Bain used the same method to give himself credit on the "Coffee, Tea, or Me?" books.)

The third method is for the celebrity mystery to eschew the slightest hint of a ghostwriter's presence. Great pains were taken to suggest that the earliest successful example of a celebrity mystery novel, Gypsy Rose Lee's "The G-String Murders" (1941), was the stripper's own work, though it has long been attributed to Craig Rice. The opera singer Helen Traubel's "The Metropolitan Opera Murders" (1951) was actually the work of Harold Q. Masur. Though the television personality and show-business all-rounder Steve Allen had a legitimate track record as a writer, his mystery novels of the 1980s and 1990s were all ghostwritten, first by Walter J. Sheldon and then by Robert Westbrook.

PERHAPS THE MOST CURIOUS subgenre of recent decades is the mystery novel written by the children of presidents. You can see neatly represented in them the three methods of dealing with a ghostwriter. The most recent to enter the field, Susan Ford, credits a co-author, Laura Hayden, for this year's "Double Exposure: A First Daughter Mystery."

Elliott Roosevelt, whose first novel featuring his mother Eleanor as sleuth was "Murder and the First Lady" (1984), didn't offer a shared byline but gave his ghostwriter a nod via a note in his early books, crediting William Harrington as "my mentor in the craft of mystery writing [who] has given me invaluable assistance with the First Lady mysteries." After Elliott Roosevelt died in 1990, his publishers added to his jacket biography for "A First Class Murder" (1991) the claim: "A hard-working and prolific writer, he left behind a number of already-completed Eleanor Roosevelt mysteries."

By 1998's "Murder in the Map Room," they were still touting "a number of unpublished manuscripts to be enjoyed by readers in the years to come." (A Booklist reviewer dryly noted that Roosevelt had become "one of the mystery genre's most prolific dead authors.") Harrington, ironically, would finally be credited as the author of a Roosevelt book, "Murder at the President's Door" (2001), only after his own death.

Margaret Truman, the longest running and most commercially successful of the presidential offspring fronting mysteries, offers no hint in any of her books, beginning with "Murder in the White House" (1980), that she has a ghostwriter, a collaborator, or even a literary mentor. Her "Capital Crimes" novels, which usually use as background Washington, D.C., landmarks (the Kennedy Center, the National Cathedral, the Pentagon, the National Gallery, the Library of Congress, etc.), provide plenty of historical tidbits and tourist information. They are far from distinguished detective fiction, but they do rank as above-average celebrity mysteries.

The latest, "Murder at Ford's Theatre," is soundly crafted and professionally paced. The headline-inspired plot concerns the murder of a senatorial intern evocatively named Nadia Zarinski. The stock characterizations sound like casting notes, but at least it's easy to tell the people apart. The author employs familiar strategies to puff up the page count: potted biographies of characters and repetitious dialogue (as when the cops report to their superior investigative details that are still fresh in the reader's mind). Truman's amateur sleuthing team of law professor Mackensie Smith and his gallery-owner wife Annabel are sometimes likened by generous reviewers to Nick and Nora Charles. They share the stage with an odd-couple police team, a Jewish detective who's also a Lincoln buff and his African-American partner.

The writing is usually efficient but flavorless. Occasionally--in the deadly combination of authorial haste and editorial sloppiness typical these days of books considered to have a ready-made readership--it descends into clunky archaism ("Klayman had proved his mettle on more than one occasion, facing down dangerous situations with steely resolve and audacious fearlessness"), clumsy genre references ("The strange case of the murdering midget. Sounds like a Holmes novel"), ponderous banality ("Sunday, as everyone knows, is a day of rest, except for those in jobs demanding their presence"), and faulty syntax ("Seemingly social brunches offer both eggs Benedict as well as the scrambled eggs of negotiation").

ARBOR HOUSE'S Donald Fine, Truman's publisher at the time of her first mystery, swore she had no ghostwriter, but there was a clue from the beginning: Though widely and favorably reviewed, the novel was not nominated for the Edgar Award for best first novel by an American author, nor, according to Allen J. Hubin, a member of the committee, was it even submitted by the publisher.

Hubin's "Crime Fiction III: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749-1995," the most authoritative source on mystery authorship, identifies Donald Bain as Margaret Truman's ghostwriter, based on intelligence from reliable publishing community sources. Bain has flatly denied it, both to Hubin and in an e-mail to me: "I do not ghostwrite Margaret Truman's murder mysteries."

But what does Bain's autobiography have to say? A note at the end of "Every Midget Has an Uncle Sam Costume" claims that "contractual obligations prohibit Donald Bain from publicly taking credit for an additional twenty novels." Elsewhere in the book, he partially contradicts this, writing that "some of my best work appears in an eighteen-book series ghostwritten over the past twenty years for a well-known person. It would be professionally inappropriate for me to take public credit for this series, although I'm not under contractual obligation to conceal my involvement." ("Murder at Ford's Theatre" brings the total of Truman's novels to nineteen.) Obligatory or not, Bain's denial fulfills his duty as an honorable ghostwriter. In the same chapter, he excoriates, for ghostwriting unprofessionalism, Lucianne Goldberg, who publicly claimed credit for the novel "Washington Wives" (1987) out of anger over putative author Maureen Dean's interviews.

IF BAIN IS Truman's ghost, he won't admit it, but he provides enough clues to support a strong circumstantial case. He states his involvement with the series "for a well-known person" began in 1980 and continues, "I've been writing novels in this series ever since, a book a year, most of them well reviewed and appearing on many bestseller lists throughout the country." How many other candidates for a frequently bestselling book-a-year mystery series beginning around 1980 are there?

Bain writes that he disagreed with a young editor over "a husband-and-wife team of characters [created] for a book in a series I was ghosting. My characters were in their fifties, erudite, physically fit, and madly in love." Though the editor thought them too old, "The characters stayed and went on to become particular favorites of critics and readers of the series." That sounds very much like Margaret Truman's Mackensie and Annabel Smith. In researching the coffee-table book "Caviar, Caviar, Caviar" (1981), Bain learned of the underground trade in Iranian caviar, smuggled into the United States via Copenhagen. He writes, "I later used what I'd learned as the basis for a crime novel I went on to ghost for a well-known person." The plot of Truman's "Murder on Embassy Row" (1984) involves caviar smuggling.

Recognizing that the ghosting of fiction presents a greater ethical dilemma than nonfiction, Bain asks, "Is a book buyer cheated when buying a novel not written by the person whose name appears on the cover? Is it fraud? I don't think so, though my bias is understandable." Perhaps his bias is, in fact, understandable--but he goes on to add: "In most cases, the consumer gets a lot better book than if the nonwriting collaborator had tried to do it solo." This will not do. The book is sold on the premise that a celebrity wrote it, and there is no excuse for such a pretense other than deceiving the consumer.

Still, one might ask, where's the harm? The journeymen writers doing the actual work undoubtedly realize more profit from being celebrity ghostwriters than they could from novels under their own names. The idea that the inflated money the celebrity and ghostwriter get would otherwise go to more deserving but less famous professional writers is clearly specious. The deceptiveness of attributing a book to a person who didn't write it is minor next to the credits for doing nothing that feature in many major motion pictures. And what does the deceived reader care, if the novel is a good read that appears to draw on the celebrity's area of expertise?


THE ANSWER IS that there are several harms. The books, more even than most commercial fiction driven by the marketplace rather than the artistic impulse, are rarely good mystery fiction. The celebrity publicity machine attracts readers that might otherwise be drawn to better books. While the big advance might not have gone elsewhere, some of the bookstore display space, public-library buying, and newspaper review attention certainly would. The public impression that anybody can write a book erodes the professional respect accorded to real writers. And finally, in the unlikely event a celebrity author actually writes a novel, no one in the cynical book world will believe it.

Bain writes, "I'm often asked when talking to groups about my career: 'How can you stand to see someone else's name on a book that you've written?'" He finds it easy to answer: He makes a good living writing for others, and he takes pride in doing the best work he can on every project. Most professional writers would agree. Writing is such a hard way to make a living, it's tough to blame the ghostwriter for going where the money is.

The parallel question for celebrity novelists is, "How can you stand to see your name on a book somebody else wrote?" That should be harder to answer, but, sadly, it probably isn't.

A frequent reviewer of mysteries for The Weekly Standard, Jon L. Breen is the winner of two Edgar awards.

© Copyright 2002, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Novelist Sheldon Still Writing at 86
Wed Feb 26, 2:35 PM ET

By BOB THOMAS, Associated Press Writer

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. - He quit college after one semester, can barely hunt-and-peck on a typewriter and has never touched a computer keyboard. Yet 86-year-old Sidney Sheldon has written 16 novels and is spending most of his waking time writing three more books.

Well, "writing" is a misnomer. Sheldon talks books. He dictates to his secretary, Mary Langford, who happens to be a court reporter. She runs the machine's tape through a computer and it emerges as a portion of the manuscript.

"Isn't science amazing," Sheldon marvels.

The dictating technique stems from Sheldon's early struggle to gain a foothold in Hollywood, in the mid-1930s. As a young hopeful from the Midwest, he was unable to get inside the studios. At the time, studios employed young people to outline new books for busy executives to consider and Sheldon decided to try out for a job as a reader. He compressed John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" into a few pages and sent them to every studio.

The only reply came from David O. Selznick, who wanted a book synthesized for the screen by 6 p.m. Sheldon took two streetcars and a bus to get to the MGM studio, where a relative worked as a secretary. He persuaded her to take his dictation as he skimmed through the book. He delivered the manuscript to Selznick's office shortly before 6 and won his first movie job.

Today, Sheldon is working on three projects: a novel, "Are You Afraid of the Dark?"; a memoir, "The Other Side of Me"; and a collection of short stories, "Sidney Sheldon's Miracles and Other Mysteries."

"I've finished the first draft of the autobiography, and I'll be turning the novel in by June," he reports. "Then I'll go to work on a rewrite of the autobiography. Meanwhile, I'm doing research for the 'Miracles' book."

Sheldon holds up two folders half-filled with sheets of paper, the novel so far. "When I'm finished, I'll have seven of these folders totally filled," he says. The first draft will go through a dozen rewrites. Some writers hate rewrites, not Sheldon, "because every time I rewrite, the book gets better," he says.

He works all day, seven days a week. "I have no hobbies," he explains. "I could do two books a year easily. But I won't. I'd rather have (a book) as good as I can make it."

Sheldon lives in a white stucco compound with a red-tile roof beneath the rocky peaks behind Palm Springs. It started as a single house, then he added another house on one side of the original. When Kirk Douglas (news) decided to sell his house on the other side, Sheldon bought it.

The result is a cluster of houses, two swimming pools and several guest cottages, including one where Sheldon and his secretary work. The grounds are handsomely designed with palms, flowers and velvety lawns. There's a house where his wife, Alexandra, does her arts and crafts. The Sheldons also retain their West Los Angeles home, which they use for refuge from the punishing desert summer.

Sheldon didn't try novels until he was 52, but he's been writing words — and even some music — most of his life. His first sale came when he was a boy of 10 in Chicago: a poem to a children's magazine, Wee Wisdom. Emboldened, he sent short stories to other magazines but was rejected.

Awarded a one-year scholarship to Northwestern University, he had to drop out after a semester to help support his family during the Depression. He worked as a theater usher, shoe salesman and checkroom attendant at a night club. The club's band leader played one of the boy's songs, and he set off to find his music-writing fortune in New York's Tin Pan Alley.

No luck. But he found his calling when he ushered at a Manhattan movie house.

"Day after day I saw movies with glamorous sets and beautiful people, and I was living in one room at the YMCA and making less than $17 a week," he recalls. "Finally I said, `That's what I want to do: I want to write for Hollywood.'"

While reading at Universal Studios, he and another writing hopeful, Ben Roberts, sold several B-picture scripts to Republic Pictures.

The pair served together in the Army Air Corps during World War II, yet found time to turn out scripts for such Broadway shows as "The Merry Widow," "Jackpot" and "Dream With Music." Sheldon later won a Tony for the Gwen Verdon hit "Redhead."

After the war, he submitted a movie script to Selznick titled "Suddenly It's Spring." The producer bought it and gave it a new title, which Sheldon thought was terrible. "The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer" — starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy (news) and Shirley Temple (news) — was a big hit and won Sheldon an Academy Award.

His other screenplays included the musicals "Annie Get Your Gun," "Easter Parade," "Anything Goes" and "Jumbo." Sheldon turned to television in 1963, producing and writing many of the scripts for "The Patty Duke (news) Show" (1963-1970) and "I Dream of Jeanie" (1965-1970).

"It never once occurred to me that I could write a novel," he says. "I was doing Broadway, screenplays, television. But a novel? No.

"I got an idea that was so introspective, it entered the character's mind. I didn't know how to do that in a dramatic form. So I gave up. But it was so strong in my mind that I came back to it. That was my first book, 'The Naked Face,' about a psychiatrist whom someone was going to murder."

"The Naked Face" wasn't a big seller, but it won an Edgar, the mystery writers' equivalent of the Oscar, and became a feature motion picture starring Roger Moore (news). The next book, "The Other Side of Midnight," went through the roof_ 52 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. It was made into a not-so-successful movie starring Susan Sarandon (news).

The string of best sellers continued. Because of Sheldon's background as a screenwriter, the books are fashioned in dramatic scenes, making them highly readable and easily converted to theatrical or TV movies (11 have been). The story lines vary, but a recurrent theme is the strong-willed woman who finds herself in jeopardy.

A major asset of Sheldon's novels is authenticity.

"I never write about any restaurant in the world unless I have had a cup of coffee in that restaurant," he declares. "I have been to 90 countries, and everywhere Alexandra and I go, we do research. I take notes and she takes photographs."

Sheldon, an imposing man with a round, ruddy face and slightly thinning white hair, seems to possess unlimited enthusiasm for his craft. "Writing novels is the most fun I've ever had," he insists.

"It gets harder. When you acquire a certain reputation, people expect to enjoy your books, and you don't want to disappoint them. Yes, I worry about repeating myself. But each character is so distinctive that I don't think that will happen."

Is it really only Thursday? Big news day for sure. Where to start...at the beginning, of course.

Last night ATONEMENT by Ian McEwan won the National Book Critics Circle award for best fiction of 2002.

Oprah Winfrey announced the rebirth of her bookclub. For now she's calling it, "Traveling with the Classics." Her plan is to read and discuss 3-5 classics a year, and to visit the location of each book. If anyone can put classics on the bestseller list, it's Ms. Oprah. Not that the NY Times would allow that anyway...should be interesting though.

The American Booksellers Association announced their shortlist for the 2003 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards. The nominees for adult books are -
Adult Fiction:
Atonement by Ian McEwan (Nan Talese/Doubleday)
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (Harcourt)
Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Harcourt)
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Little, Brown)
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (Viking)

Adult Nonfiction:
Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz (Holt)
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (Random House)
My Losing Season by Pat Conroy (Doubleday)
Population, 485 by Michael Perry (HarperCollins)
Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs (St. Martin's)

Paperback:
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai (Anchor)
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (Perennial)
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall (Vintage)
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (Anchor)
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (Penguin)

All I can say is I'm glad I don't have to vote. I couldn't even come up with a top ten for 2002, never mind choosing the one best book. On the other hand, I have read almost all of the fiction books nominated, which was really surprising for some reason.

On the road again: Ian Rankin and George Pellecanos are going on tour together. RESURRECTION MEN is my give-away this month, and keep an eye out for the next contest....

Finally, a very sad day with the passing of Fred Rogers. His legacy of love should live on for years to come. I'm posting this from John Lee of Suburban Tribe because he said what I feel and said it eloquently:

...and one Goodbye.
Posted on February 27, 2003

I'm sure that more than a few Internet message boards and office water coolers are brimming with jokes about the death of Fred Rogers today. However, I'm man enough to admit that it makes me a little sad to see this humanitarian leave us. Mr. Rogers never tried to sell children a new toy or distract them for half an hour with violent, mediocre animation. He spoke to children on an adult level, while imparting to them the importance of treating yourself and others with love and respect. He was a big advocate of introducing children to the arts, and he was also a masterful storyteller who encouraged the use of imagination.

I hope PBS continues to rerun Mr. Roger's Neighborhood for a very long time. Even better, I hope at some point someone sees fit to release Mr. Roger's Neighborhood in a DVD archive for a very low price so that Fred Roger's legacy can be passed on within and between families for as long as possible.

JK Rowling to feature in The Simpsons

JK Rowling is to make a one-off appearance in The Simpsons.

Homer and his family meet up with the Harry Potter author in a special episode set in London.

Lisa Simpson turns out to be a Potter fan and questions the millionaire.

Sir Ian McKellen also appears in the episode - and is first hit by falling scaffolding, then struck by lightning.

The Simpsons go to see him perform on stage in Macbeth, but bring him bad luck by saying the play's name aloud - a theatrical superstition.

A spokesman for the cult US cartoon told The Sun: "The Simpsons bump into JK Rowling outside a bookshop and they talk all about Harry Potter.

"We're very excited about the episode and rest assured every British cliche will be trotted out to get a laugh."

Read any good books lately?
By David Sexton, literary editor, Evening Standard

Book reviewers always have one question, at the point of accepting a commission: "How long is it?" They are not hoping, as buyers of mass-market fiction usually are, that it's a really good substantial read. They are praying that the book is not too long.

Reviewing books is not a particularly well-paid form of journalism and it takes time. A book of any more ambition than a thriller can't be read for review at a rate of more than 40, or at most 60, pages an hour. Some books are only 120-pages long and can comfortably be digested in a couple of hours. Others, though, are 400, or 600 pages, or, in some dreadful instances, even more, and they can easily take days to get through.

The reviewer's fee, however, usually remains the same. So, shocking as it may seem, the truth is that some reviewers skip some books. And there are a few who skip through all the books.

They have to be good to get away with it. The more conscientious reviewers enjoy a privileged position. They are able to see the book before anybody else. So they can perform a useful task by simply describing it to a readership which has not had that advantage. What's more, while it is not so easy as you may think to have complete and certain knowledge of a longish text, it's a doddle compared to acquiring complete and certain knowledge of the outside world, which most other journalists have to attempt. The whole thing is right there, on your desk. You can check your facts until you are sure. Some books even have an index.

Yet, believe it or not, there are reviewers who just throw away such a head start. In the States, one such has just come to grief. In the New York Times Book Review, a professor of creative writing, Beverly Lowry, reviewed a book by one of the people involved in the Whitewater affair, The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk by Susan McDougal. An Arkansas newspaper columnist, Gene Lyons, soon spotted that Lowry's review contained a basic error about whether or not the author eventually testified in court (she did).

"Yo, Beverly. Next time, read the damned book," he urged, arguing that "assuming minimal competence, Lowry simply cannot have done so".

Read the complete article at the London Evening Standard

February 16, 2003
A Writing Life
By JOANNA SMITH RAKOFF

On the corkboard above Beth Ann Bauman's desk, a washed-out photograph hangs from a tack: Ms. Bauman, age 2, stares out at the camera, her blue eyes stubborn and searching, her mouth pressed into a resolute line. "I love how stoic I look," she said, fingering the edge of the picture.

At 38, Ms. Bauman knows something of stoicism. Like so many young men and women over the years, she came to New York to be a writer. For the past decade, she has lived in a West Village studio and worked as an $11-an-hour temp to support herself, barely. She has watched her friends publish books, have babies, buy houses, get tenure.

She has spent her days sending faxes and watering plants for lawyers and junior vice presidents in the city's anonymous office towers, among them the World Trade Center, in a 105th-floor office of Cantor Fitzgerald where she worked until just a few days before the attack of Sept. 11. Her nights were spent at her desk working on draft after draft of stories about funny, smart young women, many of them New Yorkers, in various stages of life.

Finally, those nights have paid off, and Ms. Bauman has become one of those few writers whose labors see daylight. Next month, her first book, a collection of stories titled "Beautiful Girls,'' will be published by MacAdam/Cage, a small San Francisco firm. The stories have been nearly 10 years in the making, a period in which Ms. Bauman has sacrificed much of her social and financial life.

For the rest of this (very long) article on being published for the first time, go to the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/nyregion/16FEAT.html?tntemail0

February 12, 2003
Recounting Obsession With a 1972 Author
By ELVIS MITCHELL


In the author's photograph on the dust jacket of the 1972 novel "The Stones of Summer," Dow Mossman is lean and rangy with a defiant mustache and a look of conviction. The producer and director Mark Moskowitz has, by comparison, friendlier facial hair but an ingratiating and determined manner: he's going to find Mr. Mossman. It's what his film "Stone Reader" is all about: the director's search for a writer whose single work is still a touchstone in his life.

Mr. Moskowitz, who stars in the film, has the go-getter stride of a second baseman; he looks as if he could scramble off the base and make the right play. You'd never guess from looking at him that he could create a loving and lovely filmed ode to obsession.

In 1972 Moskowitz was inspired by a book review in The New York Times to read "The Stones of Summer," a first novel by an author who disappeared, never to be seen or read again. He put the book down, but the fate of its vanished author haunted him and ultimately led to a documentary as quest.

Amusingly, Mr. Moskowitz presents himself in the movie's opening as if he's selling himself, to his director of photography and the audience. Since he makes his living as a director of political-campaign commercials, it's all too fitting that he would start the film working to win the audience over. (Accompanying "Stone Reader" to the 2002 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where it won both the Grand Jury and Audience Awards, he was as proud as a consultant who led his candidate into the Oval Office.)

"I couldn't get into it," Mr. Moskowitz said of the novel, confessing that it took several attempts before he finally immersed himself in its rhythms years later. A Mossman quotation that opens the film states, "This dream is my fiction entirely," and "Stone Reader" is Mr. Moskowitz's dream entirely.

"I can't find anyone else who's read the book," Mr. Moskowitz says, though he ensures that this state of affairs will continue by buying up every copy of "Stones of Summer" he finds on the Internet. (When a friend mentions this to him, Mr. Moskowitz counters, "Nobody's read it anyway.")

He carries a beat-up, coverless paperback copy of the book around with him; it's seen so much wear that the rubber band holding it together has begun to cut the yellowed pages in half. And much of the documentary is bound by a rubber band: the director's enthusiasm. (At 128 minutes running time, it has to be, although the version I saw at Slamdance was 140 minutes.)

As the filmmaker begins his footwork, he finds other readers who were initially thwarted by favorite novels. One of them is the literary critic Leslie Fiedler, who died last month at 85. He talks in a magnificently cantankerous way about his long courtship of Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep," which for years was considered a long-forgotten one-shot masterpiece. A wisp of a smile plays above the thundercloud of a beard that surrounds his face when Fiedler tells the camera he won out. He disarms Mr. Moskowitz's wonderment over Mr. Mossman's singular achievement by asserting, "It's more typical for a writer to write one book and stop."

Fiedler, however, doesn't smite the director's restlessness. In rural Maine, Mr. Moskowitz finds John Seelye, whose review spurred him to buy the book. After a lively, encouraging conversation about books, Mr. Seelye acknowledges that he has no idea of Mr. Mossman's whereabouts. On the subject of Mr. Moskowitz's search, Mr. Seelye sounds an ominous, discouraging chord, "He might just turn on his heel and walk away."

Fiedler tells the camera, "The act of writing a book is the act of falling in love, with yourself and the audience."

That pursuit is obviously also a part of filmmaking for Mr. Moskowitz, and it's plainly visible in "Stone Reader," a filmed chronicle of the way books stack up, literally and metaphorically, in people's lives. He interviews a friend about a childhood fixation with the Hardy Boys mysteries, and "Stone Reader" is just such a clear-eyed chase. Like the Hardy Boys books, this film is enchanting and diverting but not resonant.

The best thing about "Stone Reader," which opens today at Film Forum, is that it will provoke discussions of the alarming number of authors — like my favorite, Ralph Ellison (who comes up in the film) — who lighted a single fire in their lifetimes. The warmth of the conversations keep them alive. As Mr. Seelye tells Mr. Moskowitz about maintaining an author's legacy, "The strongest way is word of mouth." It will have to be. An end-title card says, "To date, Dow Mossman's 'The Stones of Summer' remains out of print and is almost impossible to find."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Whodunit? Suddenly Nobody Cared
By ELLEN PALL

Every novel creates a universe, a place where certain kinds of things happen, certain rules apply. There are no drive-by shootings in the academic New York mysteries of Amanda Cross. The streetwise N.Y.P.D. detectives in Ed Dee's procedurals never call their mothers.

But in the collision of worlds that was Sept. 11, 2001, the little universes of New York mystery writers took a punch to the gut. Plots in progress were sent reeling; characters, many of them police officers, had to change. Wedded to the city, local mystery writers had to deal with the day's events professionally no less than personally.

As Mr. Dee put it, "Nine-eleven was the 800-pound emotional gorilla for a writer."

With weekly deadlines, writers of New York-themed television shows like "Law and Order" were forced to start dealing with Sept. 11 long ago. But because of the slow pace of publishing, the first New York mysteries written (or revised) post-attack are just starting to appear, among them "The Bone Vault," the fifth in Linda Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper series; "Small Town," by Lawrence Block, author of the Matthew Scudder series; and Evan Hunter's latest 87th Precinct novel, "Fat Ollie's Book," written under the pen name Ed McBain.

Along with others due in the next few months, these books present a weird, historic snapshot of the imagination, a study in how writers deal with adjusted visions of New York.

The results vary enormously. Some authors put Sept. 11 at the center of their mysteries; others reflect it only in the details of daily life. Many hurried to tell readers where their characters were that day. Others are still wondering themselves.

In early September 2001, S. J. Rozan, who normally writes about the private investigators Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, had just started writing her first stand-alone novel, a book about dirty real estate dealings in Harlem. (That September, a number of established writers of mystery series were lucky enough to be working on stand-alones, books with nonseries characters whose tones can differ substantially from their series. Stand-alones gave these authors unusual latitude to change timelines, characters and locales, plus an extra year or so to puzzle out how Sept. 11 would fit into their continuing characters' worlds.)

The Harlem book disappeared completely.

"After Sept. 11, it was for two reasons completely unwritable," Ms. Rozan said. "One was emotional: Whoever that woman was who dreamt up that book, she was gone."

The second was practical.

"The land grab in Harlem that I had in mind was not the issue," she said. "At that point, it was possible the entire real estate market would collapse."

The book Ms. Rozan wound up writing instead, called "Absent Friends," confronts Sept. 11 head on, telling four intertwined stories related to the death of a firefighter in the north tower of the trade center. Still unfinished, it focuses not on real estate but on what the author describes as "the nature and uses of truth, and the nature and uses of heroism."

Mr. Block, too, was at work on a stand-alone in the summer of 2001. "Small Town" was to be a big, multiple-viewpoint tale of New York. In part because of the attacks, he stopped writing for nine months. "The hundred pages I'd written reflected a pre-9/11 city, which was utterly changed," he said. "My immediate reaction was that I was just done with the book altogether."

But when he felt ready to write again, he found that the characters still interested him.

As with Ms. Rozan, his decision to put 9/11 at the center of his plot - it is too much a part of the mystery to say more - exposes him to the charge of exploitation, a charge most authors are eager to avoid. But, Mr. Block asked, "How can one write books that don't reflect the universe as it keeps revealing itself to us?"

For Donald Westlake, the answer is: You can't and you can. Mr. Westlake's comic criminal mastermind, the perennially luckless New York burglar John Dortmunder, is one of the fortunate few who will never know the planes hit.

"I think it's better for series characters if they live in a timeless cocoon," Mr. Westlake said, explaining why Sept. 11 will never figure into his Dortmunder series. "If Bertie Wooster and Jeeves were all of a sudden in an air raid, they're not the same people."

Nevertheless, Mr. Westlake found to his own surprise that "Money for Nothing," the comic non-Dortmunder novel he has been working on for the past year, has deep creative roots in the attacks. "It's a book without tall buildings or airplanes or terrorists," he said. Yet in its own way, "it's about the World Trade Center. It's a comic novel with dread."

Because New York is never named as such in Mr. Hunter's 87th Precinct series - the books take place in a nameless city suspiciously like New York - his challenge was somewhat different. "I have to walk a very careful line," he said. "If I say, 'The twin towers in New York,' the reader will say: 'What are you talking about? This is New York.' "

In "Fat Ollie's Book," the trade center attacks are mentioned only briefly, as a factor keeping the whole nation on edge. But there are many mentions of anthrax, long lines at airports, and people suddenly dressing in patriotic red, white and blue.

For writers tied to series overtly set in New York, timelines of new books suddenly demanded careful thought. In November 2001, Irene Marcuse sat down to plot the fourth book in her Anita Servi series, about a Manhattan social worker turned sleuth. "But projecting into the spring of 2002," she asked herself, "who knew what the world would look like?"

SHE wound up restricting "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge" to the New York of October 2001, complete with garbage trucks used as barricades and surreally polite New Yorkers. The book will be published this fall.

Jim Fusilli had already finished his second Terry Orr book, "A Well-Known Secret," in August, 2001, and given it to the publisher. But his story was supposed to take place in April of 2002, and his protagonists live just blocks from ground zero. After Sept. 11, Mr. Fusilli took back the manuscript to sketch in flashbacks to 9/11 and streetscapes of a decimated neighborhood. The book was finally published in November 2002.

Other authors had still other responses. With the fourth in his series just gone to press, Keith Snyder posted an additional chapter on his Web site. Jonathan Harrington, stunned after witnessing the destruction of the towers, turned back to an earlier form, poetry. And at least one book that just wasn't working before Sept 11 suddenly found its direction.

Peter Blauner was a year into his fifth thriller, set in the New York suburbs. But the tale wasn't coming together. "There was this feeling of dread hovering in the background that didn't seem justified," he said.

Yet even without rewriting, after Sept. 11, the book read differently.

"There was a scene in which one of the characters thinks back on how he got the job he's about to lose, and he remembers meeting his potential employer at Windows on the World," said Mr. Blauner, whose book will be published in May. "That's just a throwaway line on September 10th. It means something very different on Sept. 12."

The title of the book? "The Last Good Day."

Ellen Pall is the author of the New York-based Nine Muses Mysteries series. The second, "Slightly Abridged," will be published in April by St. Martin's Minotaur.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL
by SCOTT TUROW
Coming to terms with capital punishment.
The New Yorker, Issue of 2003-01-06
Posted 2002-12-30

When Joseph Hartzler, a former colleague of mine in the United States attorney's office in Chicago, was appointed the lead prosecutor in the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, he remarked that McVeigh was headed for Hell, no matter what. His job, Hartzler said, was simply to speed up the delivery. That was also the attitude evinced by the prosecutors vying to be first to try the two Beltway sniper suspects. Given the fear and fury the multiple shootings inspired, it wasn't surprising that polls showed that Americans favored imposing what Attorney General Ashcroft referred to as the "ultimate sanction." Yet despite the retributive wrath that the public seems quick to visit on particular crimes, or criminals, there has also been, in recent years, growing skepticism about the death-penalty system in general. A significant number of Americans question both the system's over-all fairness and, given the many cases in which DNA evidence has proved that the wrong person was convicted of a crime, its ability to distinguish the innocent from the guilty.

Ambivalence about the death penalty is an American tradition.When the Republic was founded, all the states, following English law, imposed capital punishment. But the humanistic impulses that favored democracy led to questions about whether the state should have the right to kill the citizens upon whose consent government was erected. Jefferson was among the earliest advocates of restricting executions. In 1846, Michigan became the first American state to outlaw capital punishment, except in the case of treason, and public opinion has continued to vacillate on the issue. Following the Second World War and the rise and fall of a number of totalitarian governments, Western European nations began abandoning capital punishment, but their example is of limited relevance to us, since our murder rate is roughly four times the rate in Europe. One need only glance at a TV screen to realize that murder remains an American preoccupation, and the concomitant questions of how to deal with it challenge contending strains in our moral thought, pitting Old Testament against New, retribution against forgiveness.

I was forced to confront my own feelings about the death penalty as one of fourteen members of a commission appointed by Governor George Ryan of Illinois to recommend reforms of the state's capital-punishment system. In the past twenty-five years, thirteen men who spent time on death row in Illinois have been exonerated, three of them in 1999. Governor Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in January, 2000, and five weeks later announced the formation of our commission. We were a diverse group: two sitting prosecutors; two sitting public defenders; a former Chief Judge of the Federal District Court; a former U.S. senator; three women; four members of racial minorities; prominent Democrats and Republicans. Twelve of us were lawyers, nine with experience as defense attorneys and eleven—including William Martin, who won a capital conviction against the mass murderer Richard Speck, in 1967—with prosecutorial backgrounds. Roberto Ramírez, a Mexican-American immigrant who built a successful janitorial business, knew violent death at first hand. His father was murdered, and his grandfather shot and killed the murderer. Governor Ryan gave us only one instruction. We were to determine what reforms, if any, would make application of the death penalty in Illinois fair, just, and accurate. In March, 2000, during the press conference at which members of the commission were introduced, we were asked who among us opposed capital punishment. Four people raised their hands. I was not one of them.



For a long time, I referred to myself as a death-penalty agnostic, although in the early seventies, when I was a student, I was reflexively against capital punishment. When I was an assistant U.S. attorney, from 1978 to 1986, there was no federal death penalty. The Supreme Court declared capital-punishment statutes unconstitutional in 1972, and although the Court changed its mind in 1976, the death penalty did not become part of federal law again until 1988. However, Illinois had reinstated capital punishment in the mid-seventies, and occasionally my colleagues became involved in state-court murder prosecutions. In 1984, when my oldest friend in the office, Jeremy Margolis, secured a capital sentence against a two-time murderer named Hector Reuben Sanchez, I congratulated him. I wasn't sure what I might do as a legislator, but I had come to accept that some people are incorrigibly evil and I knew that I could follow the will of the community in dealing with them, just as I routinely accepted the wisdom of the RICO statute and the mail-fraud and extortion laws it was my job to enforce.

My first direct encounter with a capital prosecution came in 1991. I was in private practice by then and had published two successful novels, which allowed me to donate much of my time as a lawyer to pro-bono work. One of the cases I was asked to take on was the appeal of Alejandro (Alex) Hernandez, who had been convicted of a notorious kidnapping, rape, and murder. In February, 1983, a ten-year-old girl, Jeanine Nicarico, was abducted from her home in a suburb of Chicago, in DuPage County. Two days later, Jeanine's corpse, clad only in a nightshirt, was found by hikers in a nearby nature preserve. She had been blindfolded, sexually assaulted several times, and then killed by repeated blows to the head. More than forty law-enforcement officers formed a task force to hunt down the killer, but by early 1984 the case had not been solved, and a heated primary campaign was under way for the job of state's attorney in DuPage County. A few days before the election, three men—Alex Hernandez, Rolando Cruz, and Stephen Buckley—were indicted.

The incumbent lost the election anyway, to a local lawyer, Jim Ryan, who took the case to trial in January, 1985. (Ryan later became the attorney general of Illinois, a position he is about to relinquish.) The jury deadlocked on Buckley, but both Hernandez and Cruz were convicted and sentenced to death. There was no physical evidence against either of them—no blood, semen, fingerprints, or other forensic proof. The state's case consisted solely of each defendant's statements, a contradictory maze of mutual accusations and demonstrable falsehoods. By the time the case reached me, seven years after the men were arrested, the charges against Buckley had been dropped and the Illinois Supreme Court had reversed the original convictions of Hernandez and Cruz and ordered separate retrials. In 1990, Cruz was condemned to death for a second time. Hernandez's second trial ended with a hung jury, but at a third trial, in 1991, he was convicted and sentenced to eighty years in prison.

Hernandez's attorneys made a straightforward pitch to me: their client, who has an I.Q. of about 75, was innocent. I didn't believe it. And, even if it was true, I couldn't envision persuading a court to overturn the conviction a second time. Illinois elects its state-court judges, and this was a celebrated case: "the case that broke Chicago's heart" was how it was sometimes referred to in the press. Nevertheless, I read the brief that Lawrence Marshall, a professor of law at Northwestern University, had filed in behalf of Cruz, and studied the transcripts of Hernandez's trials. After that, there was no question in my mind. Alex Hernandez was innocent.

In June, 1985, another little girl, Melissa Ackerman, had been abducted and murdered in northern Illinois. Like Jeanine Nicarico, she was kidnapped in broad daylight, sexually violated, and killed in a wooded area. A man named Brian Dugan was arrested for the Ackerman murder, and, in the course of negotiating for a life sentence, he admitted that he had raped and killed Jeanine Nicarico as well.

The Illinois State Police investigated Dugan's admissions about the Nicarico murder and accumulated a mass of corroborating detail. Dugan was not at work the day the girl disappeared, and a church secretary, working a few blocks from the Nicarico home, recalled a conversation with him. A tire print found where Jeanine's body was deposited matched the tires that had been on Dugan's car. He knew many details about the crime that had never been publicly revealed, including information about the interior of the Nicarico home and the blindfold applied to Jeanine.

Nevertheless, the DuPage County prosecutors refused to accept Dugan's confession. Even after Cruz's and Hernandez's second convictions were overturned in the separate appeals that Larry Marshall and I argued, and notwithstanding a series of DNA tests that excluded Cruz and Hernandez as Jeanine Nicarico's sexual assailant, while pointing directly at Dugan, the prosecutors pursued the cases. It was only after Cruz was acquitted in a third trial, late in 1995, that both men were finally freed.



Capital punishment is supposed to be applied only to the most heinous crimes, but it is precisely those cases which, because of the strong feelings of repugnance they evoke, most thoroughly challenge the detached judgment of all participants in the legal process—police, prosecutors, judges, and juries. The innocent are often particularly at risk. Most defendants charged with capital crimes avoid the death penalty by reaching a plea bargain, a process that someone who is innocent is naturally reluctant to submit to. Innocent people tend to insist on a trial, and when they get it the jury does not include anyone who will refuse on principle to impose a death sentence. Such people are barred from juries in capital cases by a Supreme Court decision, Witherspoon v. Illinois, that, some scholars believe, makes the juries more conviction-prone. In Alex Hernandez's third trial, the evidence against him was so scant that the DuPage County state's attorney's office sought an outside legal opinion to determine whether it could get the case over the bare legal threshold required to go to a jury. Hernandez was convicted anyway, although the trial judge refused to impose a death sentence, because of the paucity of evidence.

A frightened public demanding results in the aftermath of a ghastly crime also places predictable pressures on prosecutors and police, which can sometimes lead to questionable conduct. Confronted with the evidence of Brian Dugan's guilt, the prosecutors in Hernandez's second trial had tried to suggest that he and Dugan could have committed the crime together, even though there was no proof that the men knew each other. Throughout the state's case, the prosecutors emphasized a pair of shoe prints found behind the Nicarico home, where a would-be burglar—i.e., Hernandez—could have looked through a window. Following testimony that Hernandez's shoe size was about 7, a police expert testified that the shoe prints were "about size 6." Until he was directly cross-examined, the expert did not mention that he was referring to a woman's size 6, or that he had identified the tread on one of the prints as coming from a woman's shoe, a fact he'd shared with the prosecutor, who somehow failed to inform the defense.

This kind of overreaching by the prosecution occurred frequently. A special grand jury was convened after Cruz and Hernandez were freed. Three former prosecutors and four DuPage County police officers were indicted on various counts, including conspiring to obstruct justice. They were tried and—as is often the case when lawenforcement officers are charged with overzealous execution of their duties—acquitted, although the county subsequently reached a multimillion-dollar settlement in a civil suit brought by Hernandez, Cruz, and their onetime co-defendant, Stephen Buckley. Despite assertions by DuPage County prosecutors that Jeanine Nicarico's killer deserves to die, Brian Dugan has never been charged with her murder, although Joseph Birkett, the state's attorney for the county, admitted in November that new DNA tests prove Dugan's role with "scientific certainty." In the past, Birkett had celebrated the acquittal of his colleagues on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice and had attacked the special prosecutor who'd brought the charges. He continues to make public statements suggesting that Cruz and Hernandez might be guilty. An ultimately unsuccessful attempt was made to demote the judge who acquitted Cruz, and last year, when the judge resigned from the bench, he had to pay for his own going-away party. In the meantime, the prosecutor who tried to incriminate Alex Hernandez with the print from a woman's shoe is now Chief Judge in DuPage County.



If these are the perils of the system, why have a death penalty? Many people would answer that executions deter others from committing murder, but I found no evidence that convinced me. For example, Illinois, which has a death penalty, has a higher murder rate than the neighboring state of Michigan, which has no capital punishment but roughly the same racial makeup, income levels, and population distribution between cities and rural areas. In fact, in the last decade the murder rate in states without the death penalty has remained consistently lower than in the states that have had executions. Surveys of criminologists and police chiefs show that substantial majorities of both groups doubt that the death penalty significantly reduces the number of homicides.

Another argument—that the death penalty saves money, because it avoids the expense of lifetime incarceration—doesn't hold up, either, when you factor in the staggering costs of capital litigation. In the United States in 2000, the average period between conviction and execution was eleven and a half years, with lawyers and courts spewing out briefs and decisions all that time.

The case for capital punishment that seemed strongest to me came from the people who claim the most direct benefit from an execution: the families and friends of murder victims. The commission heard from survivors in public hearings and in private sessions, and I learned a great deal in these meetings. Death brought on by a random element like disease or a tornado is easier for survivors to accept than the loss of a loved one through the conscious will of another human being. It was not clear to me at first what survivors hoped to gain from the death of a murderer, but certain themes emerged. Dora Larson has been a victims'-rights advocate for nearly twenty years. In 1979, her ten-year-old daughter was kidnapped, raped, and strangled by a fifteen-year-old boy who then buried her in a grave he had dug three days earlier. "Our biggest fear is that someday our child's or loved one's killer will be released," she told the commission. "We want these people off the streets so that others might be safe." A sentence of life without parole should guarantee that the defendant would never repeat his crime, but Mrs. Larson pointed out several ways in which a life sentence poses a far greater emotional burden than an execution. Because her daughter's killer was under eighteen, he was ineligible for the death penalty. "When I was told life, I thought it was life," Larson said to us. "Then I get a letter saying our killer has petitioned the governor for release."

Victims' families talk a lot about "closure," an end to the legal process that will allow them to come to final terms with their grief. Mrs. Larson and others told us that families frequently find the execution of their lost loved one's killer a meaningful emotional landmark. A number of family members of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing expressed those sentiments after they watched Timothy McVeigh die. The justice the survivors seek is the one embedded in the concept of restitution: the criminal ought not to end up better off than his victim. But the national victims'-rights movement is so powerful that victims have become virtual proprietors of the capital system, leading to troubling inconsistencies. For instance, DuPage County has long supported the Nicarico family's adamant wish for a death sentence for Jeanine's killer, but the virtually identical murder of Melissa Ackerman resulted in a life term with no possibility of parole for Brian Dugan, because Melissa's parents preferred a quick resolution. It makes no more sense to let victims rule the capital process than it would to decide what will be built on the World Trade Center site solely according to the desires of the survivors of those killed on September 11th. In a democracy, no minority, even people whose losses scour our hearts, should be entitled to speak for us all.



Governor Ryan's commission didn't spend much time on philosophical debates, but those who favored capital punishment tended to make one argument again and again: sometimes a crime is so horrible that killing its perpetrator is the only just response. I've always thought death-penalty proponents have a point when they say that it denigrates the profound indignity of murder to punish it in the same fashion as other crimes. These days, you can get life in California for your third felony, even if it's swiping a few videotapes from a Kmart. Does it vindicate our shared values if the most immoral act imaginable, the unjustified killing of another human being, is treated the same way? The issue is not revenge or retribution, exactly, so much as moral order. When everything is said and done, I suspect that this notion of moral proportion—ultimate punishment for ultimate evil—is the reason most Americans continue to support capital punishment.

This places an enormous burden of precision on the justice system, however. If we execute the innocent or the undeserving, then we have undermined, not reinforced, our sense of moral proportion. The prosecution of Alex Hernandez demonstrated to me the risks to the innocent. A case I took on later gave me experience with the problematic nature of who among the guilty gets selected for execution. One afternoon, I had assembled a group of young lawyers in my office to discuss pro-bono death-penalty work when, by pure coincidence, I found a letter in my in-box from a man, Christopher Thomas, who said he'd been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, even though none of the four eyewitnesses to the crime who testified had identified him. We investigated and found that the letter was accurate—in a sense. None of the eyewitnesses had identified Thomas. However, he had two accomplices, both of whom had turned against him, and Thomas had subsequently confessed three different times, the last occasion on videotape.

According to the various accounts, Chris Thomas—who is black, and was twenty-one at the time of the crime—and his two pals had run out of gas behind a strip mall in Waukegan, Illinois. They were all stoned, and they hatched a plan to roll somebody for money. Rafael Gasgonia, a thirty-nine-year-old Filipino immigrant, was unfortunate enough to step out for a smoke behind the photo shop where he worked as a delivery driver. The three men accosted him. Thomas pointed a gun at his head, and when a struggle broke out Thomas fired once, killing Gasgonia instantly.

I was drawn to Chris Thomas's case because I couldn't understand how a parking-lot stickup gone bad had ended in a death sentence. But after we studied the record, it seemed clear to us that Thomas, like a lot of other defendants, was on death row essentially for the crime of having the wrong lawyers. He had been defended by two attorneys under contract to the Lake County public defender's office. They were each paid thirty thousand dollars a year to defend a hundred and three cases, about three hundred dollars per case. By contract, one assignment had to be a capital case. The fiscal year was nearly over, and neither of the contract lawyers had done his capital work, so they were assigned to Thomas's case together. One of them had no experience of any kind in death-penalty cases; the other had once been standby counsel for a man who was defending himself.

In court, we characterized Thomas's defense as all you would expect for six hundred dollars. His lawyers seemed to regard the case as a clear loser at trial and, given the impulsive nature of the crime, virtually certain to result in a sentence other than death. They did a scanty investigation of Thomas's background for the sentencing hearing, an effort that was hindered by the fact that the chief mitigation witness, Thomas's aunt, who was the closest thing to an enduring parental figure in his life, had herself been prosecuted on a drug charge by one of the lawyers during his years as an assistant state's attorney. As a result, Thomas's aunt distrusted the lawyers, and, under her influence, Chris soon did as well. He felt screwed around already, since he had confessed to the crime and expressed remorse, and had been rewarded by being put on trial for his life. At the sentencing hearing, Thomas took the stand and denied that he was guilty, notwithstanding his many prior confessions. The presiding judge, who had never before sentenced anybody to death, gave Thomas the death penalty.

In Illinois, some of this could not happen now. The Capital Litigation Trust Fund has been established to pay for an adequate defense, and the state Supreme Court created a Capital Litigation trial bar, which requires lawyers who represent someone facing the death penalty to be experienced in capital cases. Nonetheless, looking over the opinions in the roughly two hundred and seventy capital appeals in Illinois, I was struck again and again by the wide variation in the seriousness of the crimes. There were many monstrous offenses, but also a number of garden-variety murders. And the feeling that the system is an unguided ship is only heightened when one examines the first-degree homicides that have resulted in sentences other than death. Thomas was on death row, but others from Lake County—a man who had knocked a friend unconscious and placed him on the tracks in front of an oncoming train, for instance, and a mother who had fed acid to her baby—had escaped it.

The inevitable disparities between individual cases are often enhanced by social factors, like race, which plays a role that is not always well understood. The commission authorized a study that showed that in Illinois, you are more likely to receive the death penalty if you are white—two and a half times as likely. One possible reason is that in a racially divided society whites tend to associate with, and thus to murder, other whites. And choosing a white victim makes a murderer three and a half times as likely to be punished by a death sentence as if he'd killed someone who was black. (At least in Illinois, blacks and whites who murdered whites were given a death sentence at essentially the same rate, which has not always been true in other places.)

Geography also matters in Illinois. You are five times as likely to get a death sentence for first-degree murder in a rural area as you are in Cook County, which includes Chicago. Gender seems to count, too. Capital punishment for slaying a woman is imposed at three and half times the rate for murdering a man. When you add in all the uncontrollable variables—who the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are, the nature of the judge and the jury, the characteristics of the victim, the place of the crime—the results reflect anything but a clearly proportionate morality.

And execution, of course, ends any chance that a defendant will acknowledge the claims of the morality we seek to enforce. More than three years after my colleagues and I read Chris Thomas's letter, a court in Lake County resentenced him to a hundred years in prison, meaning that, with good behavior, he could be released when he is seventy-one. He wept in court and apologized to the Gasgonia family for what he had done.



Supporters of capital punishment in Illinois, particularly those in law enforcement, often use Henry Brisbon as their trump card. Get rid of the death penalty, they say, and what do you do about the likes of Henry?

On the night of June 3, 1973, Brisbon and three "rap partners" (his term) forced several cars off I-57, an interstate highway south of Chicago. Brisbon made a woman in one of the cars disrobe, and then he discharged a shotgun in her vagina. He compelled a young couple to lie down in a field together, instructed them to "make this your last kiss," and shot both of them in the back. His role in these crimes was uncovered only years later, when he confessed to an inmate working as a law librarian in the penitentiary where he was serving a stretch for rape and armed robbery. Because the I-57 killings occurred shortly after the Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional, Brisbon was not eligible for the death penalty. He was given a sentence of one thousand to three thousand years in prison, probably the longest term ever imposed in Illinois.

In October, 1978, eleven months after the sentencing, Brisbon murdered again. He placed a homemade knife to the throat of a guard to subdue him, then went with several inmates to the cell of another prisoner and stabbed him repeatedly. By the time Brisbon was tried again, in early 1982, Illinois had restored capital punishment, and he was sentenced to death. The evidence in his sentencing hearings included proof of yet another murder Brisbon had allegedly committed prior to his imprisonment, when he placed a shotgun against the face of a store clerk and blew him away. He had accumulated more than two hundred disciplinary violations while he was incarcerated, and had played a major role in the violent takeover of Stateville prison, in September, 1979. Predictably, the death sentence did not markedly improve Brisbon's conduct. In the years since he was first condemned, he has been accused of a number of serious assaults on guards, including a stabbing, and he severely injured another inmate when he threw a thirty-pound weight against his skull.

Brisbon is now held at the Tamms Correctional Center, a "super-max" facility that houses more than two hundred and fifty men culled from an Illinois prison population of almost forty-five thousand. Generally speaking, Tamms inmates are either gang leaders or men with intractable discipline problems. I wanted to visit Tamms, hoping that it would tell me whether it is possible to incapacitate people like Brisbon, who are clearly prone to murder again if given the opportunity.

Tamms is situated near the southernmost point of Illinois, farther south than parts of Kentucky. The Mississippi, a wide body of cloacal brown, floods the nearby lowlands, creating a region of green marshes along orange sandstone bluffs. Tamms stands at the foot of one of those stone outcroppings, on a vast, savannalike grassland. The terms of confinement are grim. Inmates are permitted no physical contact with other human beings. Each prisoner is held twenty-three hours a day inside a seven-by-twelve-foot block of preformed concrete that has a single window to the outside, roughly forty-two by eighteen inches, segmented by a lateral steel bar. The cell contains a stainless-steel fixture housing a toilet bowl and a sink and a concrete pallet over which a foam mattress is laid. The front of the cell has a panel of punch-plate steel pierced by a network of half-inch circles, almost like bullet holes, that permit conversation but prevent the kind of mayhem possible when prisoners can get their hands through the bars. Once a day, an inmate's door is opened by remote control, and he walks down a corridor of cells to an outdoor area, twelve by twenty-eight feet, surrounded by thirteen-foot-high concrete walls, with a roof over half of it for shelter from the elements. For an hour, a prisoner may exercise or just breathe fresh air. Showers are permitted on a similar remote-control basis, for twenty minutes, several times a week.

In part because the facility is not full, incarceration in Tamms costs about two and a half times as much as the approximately twenty thousand dollars a year that is ordinarily spent on an inmate in Illinois, but the facility has a remarkable record of success in reducing disciplinary infractions and assaults. George Welborn, a tall, lean man with a full head of graying hair, a mustache, and dark, thoughtful eyes, was the warden of Tamms when I visited. I talked to him for much of the day, and toward the end asked if he really believed that he could keep Brisbon from killing again. Welborn, who speaks with a southern-Illinois twang, was an assistant warden at Stateville when Brisbon led the inmate uprising there, and he testified against him in the proceedings that resulted in his death sentence. He took his time with my question, but answered, guardedly, "Yes."

I was permitted to meet Brisbon, speaking with him through the punch-plate from the corridor in front of his cell. He is a solidly built African-American man of medium height, somewhat bookish-looking, with heavy glasses. He seemed quick-witted and amiable, and greatly amused by himself. He had read all about the commission, and he displayed a letter in which, many years ago, he had suggested a moratorium on executions. He had some savvy predictions about the political impediments to many potential reforms of the capital system.

"Henry is a special case," Welborn said to me later, when we spoke on the phone. "I would be foolish to say I can guarantee he won't kill anyone again. I can imagine situations, God forbid . . . But the chances are minimized here." Still, Welborn emphasized, with Brisbon there would never be any guarantees.



I had another reason for wanting to visit Tamms. Illinois's execution chamber is now situated there. Unused for more than two years because of Governor Ryan's moratorium, it remains a solemn spot, with the sterile feel of an operating theatre in a hospital. The execution gurney, where the lethal injection is administered, is covered by a crisp sheet and might even be mistaken for an examining table except for the arm paddles that extend from it and the crisscrossing leather restraints that strike a particularly odd note in the world of Tamms, where virtually everything else is of steel, concrete, or plastic.

Several years ago, I attended a luncheon where Sister Helen Prejean, the author of "Dead Man Walking," delivered the keynote address. The daughter of a prominent lawyer, Sister Helen is a powerful orator. Inveighing against the death penalty, she looked at the audience and repeated one of her favorite arguments: "If you really believe in the death penalty, ask yourself if you're willing to inject the fatal poison." I thought of Sister Helen when I stood in the death chamber at Tamms. I felt the horror of the coolly contemplated ending of the life of another human being in the name of the law. But if John Wayne Gacy, the mass murderer who tortured and killed thirty-three young men, had been on that gurney, I could, as Sister Helen would have it, have pushed the button. I don't think the death penalty is the product of an alien morality, and I respect the right of a majority of my fellow-citizens to decide that it ought to be imposed on the most horrific crimes.



The members of the commission knew that capital punishment would not be abolished in Illinois anytime soon. Accordingly, our formal recommendations, many of which were made unanimously, ran to matters of reform. Principal among them was lowering the risks of convicting the innocent. Several of the thirteen men who had been on death row and were then exonerated had made dubious confessions, which appeared to have been coerced or even invented. We recommended that all interrogations of suspects in capital cases be videotaped. We also proposed altering lineup procedures, since eyewitness testimony has proved to be far less trustworthy than I ever thought while I was a prosecutor. We urged that courts provide pretrial hearings to determine the reliability of jailhouse snitches, who have surfaced often in Illinois's capital cases, testifying to supposed confessions in exchange for lightened sentences.

To reduce the seeming randomness with which some defendants appear to end up on death row, we proposed that the twenty eligibility criteria for capital punishment in Illinois be trimmed to five: multiple murders, murder of a police officer or firefighter, murder in a prison, murder aimed at hindering the justice system, and murder involving torture. Murders committed in the course of another felony, the eligibility factor used in Christopher Thomas's case, would be eliminated. And we urged the creation of a statewide oversight body to attempt to bring more uniformity to the selection of death-penalty cases.

To insure that the capital system is something other than an endless maze for survivors, we recommended guaranteed sentences of life with no parole when eligible cases don't result in the death penalty. And we also outlined reforms aimed at expediting the post-conviction review and clemency processes.

Yet our proposals sidestepped the ultimate question. One fall day, Paul Simon, the former U.S. senator who was one of the commission's chairs and is a longtime foe of the death penalty, forced us to vote on whether Illinois should have a death penalty at all. The vote was an expression of sentiment, not a formal recommendation. What was our best advice to our fellow-citizens, political realities aside? By a narrow majority, we agreed that capital punishment should not be an option.

I admit that I am still attracted to a death penalty that would be applied to horrendous crimes, or that would provide absolute certainty that the likes of Henry Brisbon would never again satisfy their cruel appetites. But if death is available as a punishment, the furious heat of grief and rage that these crimes inspire will inevitably short-circuit any capital system. Now and then, we will execute someone who is innocent, while the fundamental equality of each survivor's loss creates an inevitable emotional momentum to expand the categories for death-penalty eligibility. Like many others who have wrestled with capital punishment, I have changed my mind often, driven back and forth by the errors each position seems to invite. Yet after two years of deliberation, I seem to have finally come to rest. When Paul Simon asked whether Illinois should have a death penalty, I voted no.