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.

From Contra Costa Times:

HARRY POTTER AND THE BIG FAT PAYCHECK: The new Harry Potter book, still five months from publication, has already set a record: It will be the highest-priced children's novel in history. Scholastic Children's Books, the U.S. publisher of J.K. Rowling's best-selling series, has set the suggested retail price for "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" at $29.99.

The previous installment, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (2000), sold for a suggested price of $25.95.

A Scholastic spokesman cited increased costs for printing and paper and the book's anticipated length. At well over 700 pages, it's a third larger than the last Potter book.

JUST WHEN WE THOUGHT WE WERE OUT, THEY PULL US BACK IN!!!! Here come the Corleones again. Mark Winegardner, director of the creative writing program at Florida State University, has won a contest to continue the saga of Mario Puzo's fictional crime family. "The Godfather Returns" is tentatively scheduled to come out in the fall of 2004.

"There are many stories left to tell," said Winegardner, 41, a fiction writer whose previous subjects include baseball, Cleveland and organized crime.

In an e-mail sent last fall to literary agents, Random House editor Jonathan Karp wrote that he was looking for "someone who is in roughly the same place in life Mario Puzo was when he wrote 'The Godfather' -- at mid-career, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, who writes in a commanding and darkly comic omniscient voice."

Winegardner's books include the baseball novel "Prophet of the Sandlots" and "Crooked River Burning," a class-conscious story set in Cleveland. Like Puzo, he has a knack for writing about crime. Unlike Puzo, he's not Italian.

"I am, however, German-Irish like Corleone consiglieri Tom Hagen, and he did just fine in this world," Winegardner said.

Vatican gives thumbs up to Harry Potter's good vs. evil morals
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican is giving two thumbs up to the Harry Potter series.

The good vs. evil plot lines of the best-selling books are imbued with Christian morals, the Rev. Don Peter Fleetwood told a Vatican news conference Monday.

"I don't see any, any problems in the Harry Potter series," Fleetwood said.

He was responding to questions following the release of a new Vatican document on the New Age phenomenon, which he helped draft as a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Fleetwood was asked whether the magic embraced by Harry Potter and his pals at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was problematic for the Roman Catholic Church. Some evangelical groups have condemned the series for glamorizing magic and the occult.

"I don't think there's anyone in this room who grew up without fairies, magic and angels in their imaginary world," said Fleetwood, who is British. "They aren't bad. They aren't serving as a banner for an anti-Christian ideology.

"If I have understood well the intentions of Harry Potter's author, they help children to see the difference between good and evil," said Fleetwood. "And she is very clear on this."

He said British author J.K. Rowling was "Christian by conviction, is Christian in her mode of living, even in her way of writing."

Rowling's four Harry Potter titles have sold an estimated 192 million copies worldwide, and the books have been published in at least 55 languages. The first two books have been adapted into hit movies and a fifth book in the series is due in bookstores June 21.

The books chronicle the fictional adventures of young Harry and his wizard pals at Hogwarts as they battle Harry's nemesis, the evil sorcerer Voldemort.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

EDGAR AWARDS
- the short list

BEST NOVEL

Savannah Blues by Mary Kay Andrews (HarperCollins)
Jolie Blon's Bounce by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster)
City of Bones by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
Winter and Night by S.J. Rozan (St. Martin's Minotaur)
No Good Deed by Manda Scott (Bantam)

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR

Southern Latitudes by Stephen J. Clark (Penguin Putnam)
The Blue Edge of Midnight by Jonathon King (Penguin Putnam)
High Wire by Kam Majd (Random House)
Buck Fever by Ben Rehder (St. Martin's Minotaur)
Open and Shut by David Rosenfelt (Mysterious Press)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

Black Jack Point by Jeff Abbott (NAL-Onyx)
The Night Watcher by John Lutz (Pinnacle)
Out of Sight by T.J. MacGregor (Pinnacle)
Trauma by Graham Masterton (NAL-Signet)
Prison Blues by Anna Salter (Pocket Books)

February 4, 2003
Lifting the Lid on a Treasure Chest
By STEPHEN KINZER


AUSTIN, Tex. — During a rehearsal for "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the Barrymore Theater in New York more than half a century ago Marlon Brando dropped his address book.

"I beg you return this," he had written inside the cover. "I lost eight others already and if I lose this, I'll just drop dead."

The finder, however, did not return it. Today it is part of a collection of literary and cultural treasures here at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, part of the University of Texas.

Scholars know the Ransom Center as one of the world's pre-eminent research libraries, but until now the public has caught only fleeting glimpses into its rich chambers. That will change in April when the center opens its first galleries.

"The lid is coming off," said Thomas F. Staley, a James Joyce scholar who is the center's director. "We got tired of people telling us we're the best-kept secret in Texas."

With this unveiling a fascinating archive of modern life and literature is coming into view 45 years after it was founded. Though its holdings are appraised at more than $1 billion, much of its true value may lie in its ability to inspire the imagination.

The Ransom Center's labyrinthine stacks hide five million photographs, one million rare books, 60,000 works of art and a vast show-business archive. The collection includes touchstones of the modern age ranging from the first book printed in English — a history of Troy dated 1473 — to the sunglasses that Gloria Swanson wore in "Sunset Boulevard."

There are also handwritten manuscripts by Lord Byron, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac, a haunting self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, the beaded moccasins that D. H. Lawrence used when he lived in New Mexico, and heavily corrected musical scores by Ravel and Debussy.

For years the Ransom Center has been housed in an ugly, forbidding hulk of a building on the university campus. It has no display space of its own and has been forced to show what it could at other museums.

In a $14.5 million renovation, workers are now turning the building's entire ground floor into the showplace this collection has never had. The facade will be dominated by large glass panels, each bearing the etched image of a document or author from the collection.

Two items will be on permanent display: a Gutenberg Bible, one of five in the United States, and the world's first photograph, which was printed on a pewter plate by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1826. Mr. Staley called them the "vestal virgins" of this collection because they mark the beginning of two shattering cultural revolutions.

The collection's core is its 19th- and 20th-century American, British and French literature. It is a mother lode of modernism, as well as a repository for the first drafts, letters, manuscripts, libraries, scribblings and ephemera of more than 500 contemporary writers. For a while there were also some very old socks, found among the papers of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

"They're in the very top tier in the United States, which means they're top-tier internationally as well," said Barbara Shailor, director of the Houghton Library at Yale. "They don't specialize the way the Morgan Library or the Getty Museum do. They're strong overall. They excel in so many ways."

The opening show in the new gallery will be a selection of the center's most attention-grabbing pieces. That could include Edgar Allan Poe's hand-corrected copy of "The Gold-Bug" or a photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading "Ulysses."

The photographer who made that picture, Eve Arnold, has told researchers that "Ulysses" was not a prop, and that Monroe indeed read parts of it. Here she appears to be reading the end, perhaps passages in which Molly Bloom recalls her lifelong search for "real beauty and poetry" and her dread of "that awful deepdown torrent."

Curators at the Ransom Center say they observe rigorous standards of quality when considering which contemporary writers to collect. Among those they have recently added to their list are Jonathan Franzen, John Guare and Nick Hornby.

This selectivity has not confined curators within any discernible boundaries of style, theme or subject matter. The variety of their tastes, along with the depth of their pockets, is evident in the names written on the sides of blue and beige storage boxes that line the archive's corridors.

In the M corridor, for example, each name evokes a complex of emotions, a whole private world: Ross MacDonald, Terrence McNally, Bernard Malamud, John Masefield, Edgar Lee Masters, Peter Matthiessen, Somerset Maugham, Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, H. L. Mencken, Arthur Miller, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Christopher Morley. These boxes hold much of what humanity will ever know about their lives.

"There's nowhere like it in the U.S.A., and its only rival for 20th-century material in Britain is the British Library," said Ferdinand Mount, a former editor of The Times Literary Supplement of London who spoke at the Ransom Center recently. "I'm trying to wake up some zest from the British Library. They have the money but they're not as proactive. The Texas people are very quick."

Mr. Mount said the Ransom Center's purchases are "mostly to the delight of writers, who get to empty their attics and fill their bank accounts." Some other Britons, however, have grumbled about the number of British writers whose archives are now in Texas.

A London newspaper, The Independent, has watched what it calls "the great trans-Atlantic manuscript race" with dismay. It warned in one article that "in a generation's time, British scholars wishing to research the lives of our leading contemporary writers will be forced to travel to Texas." In another article it lamented that whenever a desirable archive appears on the market, "American institutions like the University of Texas can just call up an oil-rich benefactor and ask him to put a check in the post."

But The Independent did grudgingly admit that American curators "are not necessarily the villains of the story." It said they have succeeded because "they have simply been taking 20th-century literary and theatrical archives more seriously for longer than British institutions."

The founder of the Texas library, Harry Huntt Ransom, was a dominant figure at the University of Texas for several decades before his death in 1976. During the 1950's he set out to create what he called "a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state in the Union that started out as an independent nation."

Rather than compete for antique works with well-established libraries in Eastern cities and Europe, Ransom decided to focus on the contemporary age. Armed with multimillion-dollar budgets provided by the state and a few private donors, he and his successors plunged into the literary market with abandon. They bought entire collections as well as individual archives.

Ransom also broke with collecting orthodoxy by buying not just books and manuscripts but anything at all that belonged to the writers, cultural figures and others who interested him. This impulse brought in baubles like Anne Sexton's typewriter and Carson McCullers's cigarette lighter.

Although the Ransom Center no longer has the money to suck up every piece of literary memorabilia that appears at auction, as it once seemed to, it is steadily expanding its collection. Last year it bought the archives of Julian Barnes and Russell Banks, and was given a large French library that includes letters and manuscripts by Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, André Gide and Henry Miller.

The center also fervently embraces mass culture. Its largest acquisition of recent years was the archive of the film producer David O. Selznick, which filled several tractor trailers. It contains hundreds of thousands of photos and documents, plus artifacts ranging from storyboards for Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" based on designs by Salvador Dali to screen tests by Susan Hayward, Lana Turner, Paulette Goddard and Vivien Leigh for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind."

Mr. Staley, the center's director, is part scholar, part librarian and part treasure hunter. He was describing Joyce's literary habits to a visitor one recent morning when a prominent Texas art dealer telephoned. A moment after he picked up the receiver, his face lit up in jubilation.

"A home run!" he cried into the phone. "You don't mean it. Fabulous! That's what tenacity brings."

After hanging up, Mr. Staley begged indulgence to say no more, since "it still might not come off." He is reportedly pursuing a collection of portraits of British writers. A couple of days later he was scheduled to visit the New York studio of the photographer Richard Avedon.

"Acquisition never stops," he said. "The difference is that now we're finally going to be able to show off our collection in a real museum setting. We're going to give people that thrill that comes from the aura of the original."

C-SPAN host wants to get to know writers

By Sylvia A. Smith
The Journal Gazette

WASHINGTON - He asked what S&M sex is. He asked who Abraham Lincoln was. He asked Jimmy Carter to analyze his role as a father. He asks why authors dedicate their books to the people they did; where they write; what their parents think of the book.
When Brian Lamb sits down with an author for an hour on C-SPAN's "Booknotes," as he has weekly since 1989, the conversation has one point:

To teach someone something. On the best of days, that someone is Lamb.

"This is not a show done for intellectuals," the Hoosier native said. "A lot of people thought it was in the beginning. They started to hear me ask some very basic questions, and they'd say: 'Oh, my goodness, why is he asking those stupid questions?' "

So: Why is he asking those questions?

"I want to know the answer."

There's no way to tell how many people tune in to "Booknotes" at 8 p.m. Sundays, because C-SPAN, unlike commercial television, doesn't compile ratings. But Lamb has a sense that his questions strike a chord with viewers.

"People say to me: 'These are the same questions I want to ask.' It's because they're so basic," he said. "In this crazy television business, people think they have to ask the intellectual, erudite question that's going to make them look so bright. I don't care whether people think I'm bright or not. I really don't. I just don't care. I don't know how to describe it. I just don't care."

Thus, the questions that give viewers a peek inside the book and inside the author's psyche.

"He gets to the core of things in the simplest, least contrived sort of way," said Morton Kondrake, whose book about his wife, "Saving Milly: Love, Politics and Parkinson's Disease," was the subject of a June 2001 Booknotes.

Caryle Murphy, a Washington Post reporter whose book on Islam was featured Nov. 2, said Lamb's interviewing technique appears chaotic, "but it lends a surprise factor that a lot of people find interesting. ... You just wish there were more interviewers like him."

But there aren't. Lamb stands out among author interviewer on two counts. He reads the book, and he asks short questions that allow the author to talk - often at length. On one typical show last month, in fact, the "Booknotes" guest spoke 8,026 words. Lamb uttered 1,251.

"One of the things about interviewers in television is they abhor a vacuum," Lamb said. "Commercial television doesn't allow them to have a pause. Interviewers are almost trained putting words in people's mouths. They ask closed questions. They say to the guest: You think that George Bush is a great president, don't you? Well, we have just the opposite approach: What kind of president do you think George Bush is?

"That person can take that anywhere they want to. You're not prejudicing their answer. You're not forcing them to say, 'No, I don't think he's a great president.' It flows. They're not used to that."

Lamb readily acknowledges that C-SPAN's Joe Friday approach doesn't appeal to everyone. But its fans are diehards.

Fort Wayne real estate executive Albert Zacher watches "Booknotes" every Sunday night. If he's not going to be home, he tapes it.

Zacher's enthusiasm started years before he was offered a slot on "Booknotes," making him a rarity in the book world. Of the nearly 110,000 non-fiction books published this year, only 50 will be discussed on "Booknotes." Zacher's status is even more unusual because his book, a 329-pager on two-term presidents, was self-published, so he didn't have a public relations machine hawking it.

But when then-President Clinton referred to the book as one he was reading right after his own re-election in 1996, C-SPAN was on the phone to invite Zacher to talk about "Trial and Triumph: Presidential Power in the Second Term."

"There's nothing to compare to it," Zacher said of his hour-long interview. "It's the premier opportunity for an author."

In addition to the program being an oasis for authors who want to talk about themselves and their books - rather than robotically repeating sound bites - it's an almost guaranteed income booster.

Zacher's book sold out after his "Booknotes" appearance. So did "Carnegie," a biography by Peter Krass that was aired Nov. 24.

"There was a huge spike in sales," Krass said, noting that before his "Booknotes" interview, "Carnegie" was ranked about 2,000th on Amazon.com, where rankings are based on sales. After the program, he said, "it skyrocketed to 300."

Connie Doebele, senior executive producer of "Booknotes," said books on a president's nightstand often end up on the show because "people like to know what a president is reading."

Lamb makes the final decisions about which authors will be invited. "After all, he has to read the book," Doebele said.

It starts with the list of books that will be published in coming months - hundreds of biographies, historical accounts and books on public policy issues. Distributed by Publishers Weekly, a book industry publication, it's "Booknotes' " soup stock, but plenty of other ingredients make up the stew ladled out to viewers each week.

Lamb and the rest of the "Booknotes" team read book reviews, visit bookstores, listen to what their friends say, note the prize-nominated books, flip through the books that arrive in the mail. And of course, Doebele said, there's the lobbying from publishing houses and authors' press agents.

The culling process has some rules - only non-fiction, no self-help, no repeat authors, what's in the news.

"I don't read any books in advance," Lamb said. "We choose the books without reading them. I go to bookstores all the time. I read reviews all the time. It's just a way of life. I'm constantly looking for things I've never read and don't know anything about.

"For instance," he said of John McWhorter, whose interview will air Feb. 23, "we didn't do his big book ('Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in the Black America') back in 2000. I don't remember why. But he's a player now, and let's find out what he thinks. This book ('Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority') allows us to do that."

As for topics, "You've seen the threads: civil rights, Vietnam, Lincoln, the Revolutionary War, Civil War, a bunch on World War II. Wars make good books. I have changed some over the years. I don't do as many public policy books as I used to because you can't get your teeth into them. I often don't do sitting politicians because (their books are) nothing more than campaign vehicles to get on television shows," he said.

The interview with McWhorter fits a "Booknotes" niche in two ways: The book explores race issues, one of the key themes of "Booknotes" books, and the conversation probed past McWhorter's theories and into his personal background.

Lamb deliberately picks books about race issues "because we don't deal with it very well in this society. It's a great, low-key way to deal with it. People who are interested in it can listen to somebody complete a thought without being shouted at. ... This is a chance to talk about it. Then if you don't like it, fine, throw something at the TV. But at least you get to hear the completed sentence."

Lamb's on-camera demeanor has a just-the-facts-ma'am quality. It has nothing of the uber-empathy of, say, a Barbara Walters. But it's also void of the skepticism or judgment commonplace in a Mike Wallace interview.

"I'm a journalist, so I love it when we learn new things," he said. "But if you don't put people in a confrontational situation, they become themselves. They're not afraid to talk about themselves. I'm not trying to lower their barriers, I'm just trying to get to the person without being emotional about it. I don't want them to cry. We're not trying to get them to cry here. We're just trying to get them to tell us about their lives and why they do what they do."

They do.

The interview room is not unlike a confessional. It's a small space - about 12 feet square - that holds two chairs, a small table and some cameras that are manipulated from the control booth. The walls are wrapped in black velvet, and no one else is there except Lamb and his guest.

When he asks questions about an author's family, which have become a staple in the Lamb interview, the writers invariably drop whatever scripted comments they have (many acknowledge cramming before a Lamb interview). Their voices change. They become people instead of experts on some esoterica.

Sometimes - as it did with McWhorter - "you hit a note with them and bingo - there's the emotion of the moment," Lamb said. With McWhorter, whose parents had a stormy relationship and whose mother has been restricted by an aneurysm, "I had no idea what his family situation was. I had no idea what I was getting till it was over. I wasn't trying to get him there. I just instinctively asked him about his father."

When that happens, Lamb said, "you get an understanding about the person, and you then can decide whether you want to go buy their book. And if you want to buy their book, you have a dimension that you don't get from (other sources).

"This is one of my pet peeves of book publishers: They give you six lines in the book about the author. It drives me nuts. What in the world is that all about? Here you have somebody that's worked 15 years on their book, and you're getting six lines of their background. And then they tell you stupid things like they've written for The Washington Post, the New Republic, The New York Times and they've appeared on NPR and CBS morning news and the "Today" show. I don't care about any of that. Tell me where they were born, how many kids they have, are they married, where do they live, where'd they go to school."

As intriguing as the interview was, McWhorter will never be asked to repeat "Booknotes." Nor will Zacker, Murphy, Kondracke or the 700 other authors who have appeared on the program over the years.

There's an ironclad one-time-only rule.

"I stole the idea from Broadcasting magazine, of all things, the one-time rule," Lamb said. "Broadcasting magazine has a thing called the Fifth Estater. It's a profile they do on a person in the broadcasting business, and you only get one in your life. I always thought that was smart because there are lots of folk out there. Television is the worst at concentrating on only a thousand people out of 288 million, and that's all you see on a yearly basis. ... I wanted to build in a system that made sure we were constantly going to new faces. Isn't it just fabulous that after 14 years, there have been 705 people, all different people?"


Sylvia Smith is Washington editor for The Journal Gazette.

Bush wants to close book on library flap
By John Kennedy
Sentinel Staff Writer

February 2, 2003

Not long before it was revealed that Gov. Jeb Bush planned to close the Florida State Library, lay off the entire staff and move the collection to Florida State University, the governor issued a proclamation declaring February as Florida Library Appreciation Month.

Bush, who has said promotion of reading is a top priority of his second term, wants to shut down the state's main library and move almost 1 million books and historical items, including 16th-century maps, early documents on Walt Disney World and some of the oldest photos of Florida.

The budget-cutting move has drawn fire, and even FSU said it doesn't have space or money to house the items.

Parts of FSU's own collection are in warehouses, and the university wouldn't get any more money or staff to deal with the new collections.

Told last week that the flap doesn't seem to be going away, Bush answered, "So, stop writing about it."

The governor's proclamation praised the importance of libraries and said the month is "to encourage recognition of all of our Florida libraries that provide outstanding service to our communities."

Good thing he didn't proclaim "Florida Library Year."

Copyright © 2003, Orlando Sentinel

A kind of whimsy
By TOM VALEO
St. Petersburg Times, published February 02, 2003

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Kinky Friedman had no idea what kind of cover he wanted for his latest mystery, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch. He definitely did not want his name to be too big.

"Usually when you see an author's name in huge letters, you know it's probably a mediocre book," he says. "I mean, Danielle Steel's name takes up half the cover."

He also did not want his new mystery to look like a mystery, and he didn't want the cover to depict some meaningless detail from one scene. "If the girlfriend is wearing red boots in one scene, they'll put red boots on the cover and nobody knows what the hell it means."

So what did he want?

"I don't know what I like," Friedman says. "Some people can look at something and instantly say it sucks, but I can't."

So when New York freelance designer Brad Foltz got the assignment to create a cover for Meanwhile Back at the Ranch, he didn't get a lot of guidance from the author, and he knew the cover would be difficult. "There's a quirkiness to Kinky's writing that's tough to portray," says Foltz, who struggled with this problem when he created the cover for Friedman's earlier novel, The Mile High Club (which featured the author's name in huge letters, by the way).

Foltz flirted with a couple of obvious ideas. In Ranch, the "Kinkster" - a hip, irreverent private eye - works on three cases which he catalogs as "Moe," "Curly" and "Larry," so Foltz considered an image of the Three Stooges. "But we would have had to go to a lot of trouble to get the rights to an image," he says, "and the cover would have made it look like a Three Stooges book."

One of the cases involves a three-legged cat, so Foltz created a few sketches using that idea, but he discarded them all.

Finally he resorted to every designer's best friend - a stock photo agency. In bygone days Foltz would have called the agency, given them a few key words - "cat," perhaps, and "ranch." Then he would have waited for the agency to send a messenger to his apartment with some photographs pulled from its archives. Now that images have been digitized and placed on the Web, Foltz can roam the archives himself, free-associating key words as he explores. In this case, his searching led him to an image he never would have thought to request - a little boy in a cowboy suit, shooting his gun at the camera and grinning like a crazed demon. The image, while it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, seemed to embody the "Kinky-ness" he wanted, so Foltz downloaded it, manipulated the color, tinkered with the background and added a little cat to the boy's hat - a sly reference to the cat in the plot. On the back cover he added a picture of a toy cat.

Friedman loved it.

"The guy really hit it out of the park," he says. "There's something about that kid [on the cover] that is really grotesque. It's a mesmerizing little picture."

Friedman wasn't the only one who liked the cover a lot. The editors of Pages magazine named the cover the best of the year. "It's hard to top a chaps-wearing, gun-toting, mask-sporting baby in a cowboy hat," the editors commented. "It's just an excellent image that conveys the kind of whimsical, in-your-face, politically incorrect humor of the book," says Pages editor John Hogan. "We didn't conduct a big official vote, but it was unanimous."

- Tom Valeo is a writer who lives in Chicago. His e-mail address is tvaleo@aol.com.

© Copyright 2001 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.