I recently had a lengthy phone conversation with an award-winning investigative journalist who has had a long and distinguished writing career. During that discussion he twice referred to Greg Scarpa, Legendary Evil, as a “scholarly work.” I’m pretty sure it was meant as a compliment. In any event, I took it as one.
After hanging up I thought about the commercial appeal of works of scholarship beyond the academic world, beyond the world of scholars. I am familiar with many titles that have such an appeal, most of them histories and, like Legendary Evil, many biographies. The highly successful ones either have a built-in broad audience – such as World War II histories – or the ability to reach beyond a relatively narrow audience by virtue of formal and informal publicity that emphasizes the entertaining treatment of their subject. My sense is that the books that are both scholarly and entertaining fit nicely and successfully into the genre of narrative nonfiction, a term that was honestly unknown to me when I decided to undertake this project.
When I began working on Legendary Evil, I approached it in a way that was familiar to me from law school and graduate school. I went about methodically collecting, reading, and recording as much information as I could find about Scarpa. I was a hoarder. I took notes, copious notes, on everything I found, even those sources I eventually rejected. I created spreadsheets, some of which became unwieldy and of limited use. I created reading lists that eventually morphed into a bibliography. I regularly reviewed what I had acquired and theorized about what else I needed and where I might find it. I routinely searched for the most recent published takes on the subjects I planned to cover. And I kept careful track of the source of everything I might want to assert as a fact, critique as possibly flawed, or comment on in any way; the book’s more than 1,900 endnotes are evidence of that effort.
When I felt I had enough information to begin writing, I tried to keep in mind that I was not writing a masters thesis or a law review article. I was writing something that had a built-in audience but that had to be more than a work of meta research dryly reciting facts while analyzing and critiquing existing sources. Such a work would have a narrow appeal if it had any appeal at all. While I may not be the most objective critic, I think two items saved me from that narrow approach and appeal. First, the inner workings of the mafia and the FBI are fascinating to many. Hopefully, examining the retail operations of both institutions as they interacted took my task well beyond a dry, academic approach. Second, before writing Legendary Evil, I wrote eleven works of fiction. I would like to think that experience taught me a thing or two about how to tell a story in a way that holds a reader’s attention.
The reviews of Legendary Evil (discounting ratings not accompanied by reviews) are mixed but mostly positive. As I noted above, I am not an objective critic of my own work. I suppose the best way to tell if I succeeded in writing a scholarly work that is also entertaining will be how the book is ultimately received. Time will tell.
