The publication date for Black and White and Read All Over has come and gone, and I’m still astonished—and, at times, struggling—with this new world of publishing. To build word of mouth, we’re even giving the book away free on Kindle to start. Try convincing Random House to do that.
As more responses come in, I’m not surprised that the basic questions are asked: “What’s fact and what’s fiction?” and “When the history is so complete, why do you need fiction?”
As a storyteller, I’ll answer the first by saying, “I’ll never tell, and it’s beside the point;” and to the second, I’d say that pure history is never complete and doesn’t allow for imagination. No matter how many sources and footnotes are listed in one “defining” book of history that allow its provable deductions, inevitably another book will come along with new discoveries, new sources and footnotes, to alter or counter established historical fact, allowing all kinds of new conclusions. And how often does the historian chafe at the end of facts that lend themselves to obvious conjecture which he dares not allow himself? Fiction allows the storyteller that luxury and the reader that pleasure.
For instance, in Black and White and Read All Over, the transcript of the trial can be read from front to back with riveting interest in the law and the sexual, social and financial proclivities of the day. But the transcript does not explain the personal hells that Alice Jones and Leonard Rhinelander suffered, and the many “whys” of their extraordinary love affair any reader would demand.
I of course have to believe that my novel, respectful but free of historical strictures, will do so.
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