When I was in graduate school, I studied with the great historian Edmund S. Morgan. Professor Morgan used to warn his students about gonna-historians. A gonna-historian is a historian who is gonna write this book and gonna write that book, but who never actually writes any book. I was heading firmly in the direction of becoming a gonna-novelist until my course was altered by my wise, smart, and supportive agent, Simon Lipskar. He believed in this book when it was still only an idea, and his steady encouragement is a major reason it exists.
Simon arranged for me to talk to John Parsley. After a few minutes of our first conversation, I knew I wanted to work with John and his team at Dutton. I’ve been fortunate in my life as a writer to have had several truly wonderful editors. None is better than John. To him, Cassidy Sachs, the copy editors, the fact-checkers, the artists, and the rest of the Dutton team: Thank you.
I’m lucky to be able to park myself among two very different yet equally supportive sets of colleagues: the faculty and staff in the history department at Rice and at the University of Houston Law Center. I am especially grateful to Dean Leonard Baynes and Associate Dean Greg Vetter at UH, and to Carl Caldwell, Alida Metcalf, and Lora Wildenthal at Rice, for their steady support of my work. I also have the benefit and honor of working with a superb team of lawyers at both the Texas Innocence Network and the Juvenile and Capital Advocacy Project, including Christina Beeler, Katya Dow, Cassandra Jeu, Jeff Newberry, and Ingrid Norbergs. Charlette Jefferson and Lillian White provide unsurpassed administrative help.
I realize that the scene in Amadeus where Salieri discovers that Mozart’s manuscripts have no erasures is made up, but I still think of it every time I begin to count the number of people who made this book better. My wonderful and wonderfully loyal friends who freely shared advice, encouragement, insights, and occasional browbeating, include: Seth Chandler, my brothers Mark Dow and Stuart Dow, Abby Schusterman Dow, Jon Liebman, Deborah Musher, Sandy Guerra Thompson, and Ron Turner. I relied most of all on the keen eye and keener sensibility of Katya Dow, whom I’m also lucky to be able to call my wife. Our son, Lincoln, was more helpful than any high school kid should be when talking with me about the ethics of Inocente’s conduct and the mechanics by which he carried out his plan. Inocente’s familiarity with Pirkei Avot is a result of numerous energetic conversations around the Shabbat dinner table of my youth, presided over by my mom and dad, who knows pretty much the entire text, as well as the commentary, by heart.
I’m not going to express an opinion about whether Twain was right to urge authors to write what you know, or whether Twain even actually said it. What I will say is that while I do know a fair amount about capital punishment, this book is a novel, and so far as I am aware, Inocente, Sargent, Moss, Stream, and all the rest exist only in its pages.