Joan Acocella from the New Yorker explores how Little Women got big… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

It is doubtful whether any novel has been more important to America’s female writers than Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” the story of the four March sisters living in genteel poverty in Massachusetts in the eighteen-sixties. The eldest is Meg, beautiful, maternal, and mild. She is sixteen when the book opens. Then comes Meg’s opposite, fifteen-year-old Jo: bookish and boyish, loud and wild. Jo writes plays that the girls perform, with false mustaches and paper swords, in the parlor. Next comes Beth, thirteen: recessive, unswervingly kind, and doomed to die young. She collects cast-off dolls—dolls with no arms, dolls with their stuffing coming out—and nurses them in her doll hospital. Finally, there is Amy, who is vain and selfish but, at twelve, also the baby of the family, and cute, so everybody loves her anyway. The girls’ father is away from home, serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. Their mother, whom they call Marmee, is with them, and the girls are always nuzzling up to her chair in order to draw on her bottomless fund of loving counsel. Next door live a rich old man and his orphaned grandson, Laurie, who, when he is home from his Swiss boarding school, lurks behind the curtains to get a look at what the March sisters are up to. Jo catches him spying on them, and befriends him. He soon falls in love with her.

These characters are not glamorous, and the events are mostly not of great moment. We witness one death, and it is a solemn matter, but otherwise the book is pretty much a business of how the cat had kittens and somebody went skating and fell through the ice. Yet “Little Women,” published in 1868-69, was a smash hit. Its first part, in an initial printing of two thousand copies, sold out in two weeks. Then, while the publisher rushed to produce more copies of that, he gave Alcott the go-ahead to write a second, concluding part. It, too, was promptly grabbed up. Since then, “Little Women” has never been out of print. Unsurprisingly, it has been most popular with women. “I read ‘Little Women’ a thousand times,” Cynthia Ozick has written. Many others have recorded how much the book meant to them: Nora and Delia Ephron, Barbara Kingsolver, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Stephenie Meyer. As this list shows, the influence travels from the highbrow to the middlebrow to the lowbrow. And it extends far beyond our shores. Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and A. S. Byatt have all paid tribute.

The book’s fans didn’t merely like it; it gave them a life, they said. Simone de Beauvoir, as a child, used to make up “Little Women” games that she played with her sister. Beauvoir always took the role of Jo. “I was able to tell myself that I too was like her,” she recalled. “I too would be superior and find my place.” Susan Sontag, in an interview, said she would never have become a writer without the example of Jo March. Ursula Le Guin said that Alcott’s Jo, “as close as a sister and as common as grass,” made writing seem like something even a girl could do. Writers also used “Little Women” to turn their characters into writers. In Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend,” the two child heroines have a shared copy of “Little Women” that finally crumbles from overuse. One becomes a famous writer, inspired, in part, by the other’s childhood writing.

Long before she wrote “Little Women,” Alcott (1832-88) swore never to marry, a decision that was no doubt rooted in her observations of her parents’ union. Her father, Bronson Alcott (1795-1888), was an intellectual, or, in any case, a man who had thoughts, a member of New England’s Transcendental Club and a friend of its other members—Emerson, Thoreau. Bronson saw himself as a philosopher, but he is remembered primarily as a pioneer of “progressive education.” He believed in self-expression and fresh air rather than times tables. But the schools and communities that he established quickly failed. His most famous project was Fruitlands, a utopian community that he founded with a friend in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843. This was to be a new Eden, one that eschewed the sins that got humankind kicked out of the old one. The communards would till the soil without exploiting animal labor. Needless to say, they ate no animals, but they were vegetarians of a special kind: they ate only vegetables that grew upward, never those, like potatoes, which grew downward. They had no contact with alcohol, or even with milk. (It belonged to the cows.) They took only cold baths, never warm.

Understandably, people did not line up to join Fruitlands. The community folded after seven months. And that stands as a symbol for most of Bronson Alcott’s projects. His ideas were interesting as ideas, but, in action, they came to little. Nor did he have any luck translating them into writing. Even his loyal friend Emerson said that when Bronson tried to put his ideas into words he became helpless. And so Bronson, when he was still in his forties, basically gave up trying to make a living. “I have as yet no clear call to any work beyond myself,” as he put it. Now and then, he staged a Socratic “conversation,” or question-and-answer session, with an audience, and occasionally he was paid for this, but for the most part his household, consisting of his energetic wife, Abba, and his four daughters, the models for the March girls, had to fend for themselves. Sometimes—did he notice?—they were grievously poor, resorting to bread and water for dinner and accepting charity from relatives and friends. (Emerson was a steady donor.) By the time Louisa, the second-oldest girl, was in her mid-twenties, the family had moved more than thirty times. Eventually, Louisa decided that she might be able to help by writing stories for the popular press, and she soon discovered that the stories that sold most easily were thrillers. Only in 1950, when an enterprising scholar, Madeleine B. Stern, published the first comprehensive biography of Alcott, did the world discover that the author of “Little Women,” with its kittens and muffins, had once made a living producing “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” “The Abbot’s Ghost or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation,” and similar material, under a pen name, for various weeklies.

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Insects are having a literary moment according to Heather Hansman at Outside Online… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Reading Buzz, Sting, Bite, ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson’s exploration of the many ways insects contribute to the world, feels like being led into the woods by a zany, slightly obsessive aunt. “Check this out! Come look over here!” she seems to say at every turn. It’s an ambitious book—about half the animal kingdom—written by an academic, but it avoids the slippery slope of boring, teachy prose by leaning into the weirdness of the bug world.

Sverdrup-Thygeson writes like a scientist but in a spare, charming way: full of detail but not flowery. She starts with specifics about her love of being outside, then pulls back into what she learned when she started noticing the minutiae of all the ways bugs provide for us, from honey to drugs. A fungicidal antibiotic derived from the leaf-cutter ant, for instance, can treat yeast infections.

The book is stuffed with the kind of trivia that wouldn’t be out of place at a bar (bees can recognize human faces! cockroaches can be used to search bomb sites!), but it’s also a deftly woven treatise on why we need insects and why they need us to survive. She looks at pollination, soil biology, predator control, and natural poison to delineate what bugs are good for, what we’ve done to them, and what we stand to lose as their numbers decline, as they’re doing worldwide.

Of course, it’s not all worker-bee ingenuity. In all their unseen wonder, bugs have dark, selfish motives, too. In what might be the bones of a good future horror movie, Timothy C. Winegard’s The Mosquito goes deep into the history of that one particular bug. Winegard is a historian, and he threads the bug through human history, from ancient Egypt to recent battles with the West Nile virus. He calls the mosquito the world’s deadliest predator and builds a long-tail case for how much it’s impacted the ways we build civilization, fight with each other, and try to survive. Female mosquitos have killed 52 billion people, almost half of the humans who ever lived. (Males are just driven by nectar and sex, Winegard says. No comment, we say.)

That’s the point of both of these books. They want you to pay attention to the tiny details we so often take for granted. Insects help demonstrate broader underpinnings of society and the ways that we’re always at the mercy of nature, even when we think we’re running the show.

Taken together, the books are a reminder that the human and insect worlds are interconnected and fragile—recent reports have found that the bug population in Europe has dropped by as much as 75 percent. They also show that we’re not the most important thing in the natural world. The things that have adapted to annoy us might survive best in an increasingly human-altered ecosystem.

Buzz, Sting, Bite ends with a call to kill our self-centeredness, even just a little. “If we could just stop navel gazing for a second we would see that this is about more than mere utility value.… Many would say that we humans have a moral duty to rein in our dominance of the earth and give our millions of fellow creatures a chance to live out their tiny, wonderful lives, too.”

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The successful writing duo talk with CrimeReads on keeping a partnership going, their new tale of Donner Party horrors, and the end of the world…Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

If you’ve spent time in a bookstore’s horror or scifi section, or follow the world of techno-thrillers, you’re probably a huge fan of the collaborative writing duo Preston & Child. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have been writing together for over 20 years, ever since the release of 1996’s Mount Dragon, and many books and multiple series later, they’re still going strong. Their latest thrilling endeavor, Old Bones, takes us into a fictional lost camp of the Donner Party as treasure hunters and archaeologists compete to find a stash of gold coins while using some very real science to analyze the site and its gruesome artifacts. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child—or Doug, and Linc, as they charmingly refer to one another—were kind enough to answer a few questions via email about their latest book, their impossible-to-categorize oeuvre, and how the world’s most likely to end.

CrimeReads: Let’s start with the basics—y’all are a highly successful writing duo that has managed to work together for decades. How do you keep the collaboration fresh and interesting?

Lincoln Child: In a strange way, the more books we write, the easier it gets to work together. We ironed out the kinks a long time ago, and we respect each other as much or more now than when we first became friends. If there were going to be serious ego or other issues, they would have surfaced a dozen or more books back. (We also know how difficult—albeit satisfying—it is to write solo novels.) One side effect of this is that just about every part of the joint writing process is enjoyable, including working out new storylines and characters, etc. We both have voracious curiosities, be it about historical mysteries or strange new technologies, and since we have different interests this gives us a very deep well to draw from. Also, we are committed to never growing stale or writing the same book over and over again, as (alas) sometimes seems to happen with extended series, and so—although we challenge each other throughout the entire writing process—perhaps the most effort and back-and-forth occurs during deciding on what to write next. Hence the freshness. I hope.

Douglas Preston: The most important point that Linc makes is that we trust each other’s judgment and taste. If Linc tells me something I’ve written is pure garbage, after I have thoroughly damned him to hell, I have to accept that he’s right—that’s why he’s my partner, because I trust his taste, and expect him to break the bad news to me about something I’ve written, or vice versa…

Your works can veer quickly from horror to humor and back again. How do you balance humor and action in your works?

LC: Although we of course hoped it would be a success, we were nevertheless as surprised as anyone when Relic, our first book, was ultimately published in hardcover and then picked up by Hollywood. We take great pride in our books, but we have also learned to never take ourselves too seriously. I think all, or almost all, of the best horror stories have veins of humor running through them to a greater or lesser degree. It’s those lighter moments that give the audience a moment to breathe…but also let down their guard. Look at Hitchcock.

DP: The great Irish writer Patrick Kavanaugh once said that tragedy is merely underdeveloped comedy. In my opinion, a humorless thriller is only half a book. Even Shakespeare’s darkest tragedies are salted with comedy and even farce.

Old Bones is about the search for the Lost Camp of the Donner Party—while most of our readers would be familiar with the Donner Party, I’m not sure how many know about the Lost Camp; could you tell us a bit about the inspiration for the novel?

DP: The tragedy of the Donner Party is certainly one of the most horrifying episodes in the settling of the American west, in which members of an emigrant caravan became snowbound in the mountains of California, with many of the survivors eventually eating their dead friends and relatives. There were several camps of Donner Party members. The wagon train was strung out at the time they were stranded, miles apart. These camps have been excavated over the years, with very interesting results. For fictional purposes, we posited a third camp that hadn’t been found and excavated. The novel is about the discovery of that particular camp and its excavation—and the horrors that ensue, far worse than mere cannibalism.

What’s the craziest research story y’all have? Did you spend a winter camping out in the mountains for verisimilitude? Is there a lost third co-author of the book still up in the mountains?

DP: I spent some time backpacking in the Sierra Nevada of California, so I had a good sense of the landscape and setting. As for the craziest research we’ve ever done, it wasn’t for this book, but for a novel entitled Gideon’s Sword. I made a guerrilla landing on Hart Island, in Long Island Sound, for research. Hart Island is owned and run by the NYC Department of Corrections, and it is where prisoners bury the bodies of indigent and unclaimed corpses found in New York City—the largest Potter’s Field in the world, with over a million graves. I was caught by prison guards and just barely escaped without being arrested.

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Kayla Kibbe from Inside Hooks looks at the growing influence of Barack Obama, literary tastemaker… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Although it’s been around for over 50 years and has published everybody from Norman Mailer to Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow and Zadie Smith, the New York Review of Books’ most famous moment crossing over from highbrow semi-monthly magazine that publishes Nobel Prize winners and Supreme Court justices into the mainstream came in 2015 when the President of the United States interviewed Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson. Forget the current political landscape, that sort of setup in nearly any year or decade during the modern era seems far fetched. Obama’s questions were … really good. It came across very clearly that the guy really did read and get a lot out of his subject’s work. He was engaging enough that nothing in the conversation might lead the reader to believe somebody on his team had a hand in coming up with the questions.

Books were sort of Obama’s thing. Throughout his time in the Oval Office, he recommended hundreds of books, often naming his picks in reading lists shared on Facebook. Two years post-presidency, Obama is still spreading the literary love, and his reading lists remain an influential and much-celebrated aspect of his post-White House presence. Last week, the Obama dropped his 2019 summer reading list, sharing his diverse picks of writers and titles in a Facebook post that received tens of thousands of shares and comments.

“I can’t believe I get a chance to be on this list with these very incredible writers,” tweeted Maid author Stephanie Land, while bookstores from Blackwell’s to Barnes & Noble took to social media to celebrate the president’s new list.

“When his list of books went up yesterday it almost seemed like you could hear a collective cheer — not only in the publishing industry but from readers all over,” says Kimberly Burns, a literary publicist at BroadsidePR.

Obama’s latest roundup paid homage to the late Toni Morrison, giving the author’s entire catalogue a nod before diving into the list. “You can’t go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison,” he wrote in the Facebook post. “They’re transcendent, all of them. You’ll be glad you read them.” The former president’s other end-of-summer picks included a variety of titles old and new, from Colson Whitehead’s “hard to swallow” yet “necessary” The Nickel Boys to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a historical novel tracing the rise of Thomas Cromwell that came out in 2009. “I was a little busy back then, so I missed it. Still great today,” he wrote.

Caitlin Luce Baker, a bookseller at Island Books in Seattle, pointed to the diversity in Obama’s latest picks as a significant improvement over fellow amateur book critic Bill Gates’ picks. “Obama’s list is so much better than Gates’, which made me sigh heavily and roll my eyes,” she tells InsideHook.

Over the years, Obama has recommended a vast and diverse catalogue of books, tapping literary classics like The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness, buzzy bestsellers like Gone Girl, and even children’s books from Harry Potter to Junie B. Jones. However casually given, a nod from Obama is nothing if not influential, and the former president’s hobby has gradually given rise to his status a literary influencer on par with OG celebrity book club star Oprah Winfrey.

Indeed, Obama’s literary influence has even produced evidence of an Oprah-adjacent “Obama effect,” in which every book he taps turns to gold. “I would say at this point that Obama might have an even greater effect,” says Burns, who notes that publicists often send copies of forthcoming books to both Barack and Michelle Obama, “not necessarily expecting an endorsement but because they think they might enjoy them or find them interesting. Getting an endorsement isn’t a strategy — it’s more like hoping to win the lottery.” Burns also adds that, while many of the titles on Obama’s most recent list have already enjoyed a fair amount of critical acclaim, they’re still likely to see a significant bump thanks to the former president’s nod.

“A couple of years ago he recommended Fates and Furies,” says Mark Haber at Brazos Bookstore in Houston. “I think he said it was his favorite book of the year. That really helped sales.”

While we may not be seeing an Obama book club any time soon, the former president provides a rare male voice in a largely female-dominated literary space helmed by the likes of Oprah and Reese Witherspoon. Covering a wide range of genres, topics and authors, Obama’s recommendations certainly aren’t aimed specifically at male readers, but his voice has helped redefine a literary space often associated — however problematically — with a stereotypically “feminine” vision perhaps best embodied by Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine book club.

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James Queally from the L.A. Times profiles Mitzi Roberts, longtime detective and the inspiration behind some of Michael Connelly‘s most compelling novels.

Mitzi Roberts always wanted to talk to serial killers.

A Los Angeles bartender and diner manager, Roberts was used to seeing cops stagger into her establishments, seeking a bite or a beer after their shift. Conversation between the investigators and Roberts, a self-described true-crime “fanatic,” came easily.

She told them of her desire to chase predators. At some point, one of them suggested a career change.

The move from diner manager to detective set Roberts on a career path that saw her climb the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department — from a graveyard shift that is sometimes home to cops who have “screwed up” to a treasured spot in the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. After years spent fighting an uphill battle as a woman traversing a department long regarded as a boys’ club, Roberts found herself zipping around the southeastern United States on a collision course with one of America’s most prolific killers.

The veteran detective’s career history may read like it borrows a bit from the jacket copy of a popular crime novel, but it’s actually the other way around. In her 24-year career, Roberts has not only found herself involved in some of L.A.’s most infamous cases, but she’s also served as a muse to the city’s modern master of detective fiction.

In recent years, Roberts became the inspiration for Renee Ballard, the newest protagonist to grace the pages of Michael Connelly‘s bestselling novels. Ballard — a Hollywood Division detective exiled from Robbery-Homicide who shares Roberts’ real-life love of surfing, knack for swift verbal jabs and dogged dedication to the job — is more than just a passing interest for Connelly. According to the author, Ballard could one day replace Harry Bosch, the beleaguered LAPD detective who appears in 22 of his novels.

“I write in real time. My characters age, and Bosch is aging out,” Connelly says. “Hopefully, I’m gonna be writing longer than Bosch is gonna be detecting, so it was kind of like looking for a new protagonist to carry on.”

Connelly says most of his protagonists — including Bosch, reporter Jack McEvoy and Mickey Haller of “Lincoln Lawyer” fame — are amalgams of individuals in his personal and professional lives. But Ballard is the first to emerge from a single source of inspiration.

“It was all there. I didn’t have to look for anything else,” he says of his decision to base Ballard on Roberts. “She was completely open with me and willing to work with me … it’s almost as if you went to one of your best friends and you said, ‘Help me out,’ and they said, ‘Of course.'”

Spend a few minutes with Roberts and it’s easy to see how she might fit neatly inside the pages of a crime novel. She’s quick with an insult, but quicker with a smile, able to put someone at ease or on the back foot almost at will.

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“Young people don’t read anymore,” cries your local cynic. “They’re always on their phones.” Clearly, they’ve never met a YA reader. Marie Pabelonio from GoodReads explains by cynics are wrong. (Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!)

YA readers show up to author signings dressed as their favorite character. YA readers camp out at bookstores, waiting for the midnight release of a beloved series installment. YA readers use their spare time to write fan fiction, make GIF sets, and create blogs with the same fervor people have for pop stars and TV shows.

So it’s no surprise that YA books have some of the most passionate fandoms.

Jonathan Sanchez, cofounder and director of YALLfest, describes the festival as “a chance to be with your ‘tribe’ of fellow Marissa Meyer or Leigh Bardugo or Angie Thomas fans.” Here lines of avid YA readers stretch along the streets of the main historic district of Charleston, South Carolina. “There’s like a whole ‘line culture’—sort of like sneaker fans—where by being in this ridiculous line together you show that you are in a unique but significant group.”

The passion is contagious, but do you have to be 18 and under to enjoy it?

Or are older YA readers doomed to live out this Steve Buscemi meme from 30 Rock whenever they encounter other fans?

The good news is that older YA readers aren’t an anomaly.

There are currently 15.8 million Goodreads members who marked “young adult” as their favorite genre on our site. While only 20 percent of those readers disclosed their age, 65 percent of that sample are 18 and older and 33 percent are above the age of 35. Based on our data, we can infer that older readers represent a healthy portion of the young adult audience, if not the majority.

So while the term “young adult” nods to a specific age group (industry insiders agree the age range for those readers is generally between 12 and 18 or 14 and 19), the category is far more inclusive than you’d think.

“Of course, interest in YA doesn’t immediately stop once someone turns 19,” says Erica Barmash, senior director of marketing and publicity at Bloomsbury Children’s Books. “And there are younger kids reading up as well.”

A quick look at the 1 million–plus Goodreads members who completed The Hunger Games tells us that 64 percent of those readers who disclosed their age are between 18 and 35. Of the 115,000-plus Goodreads members who completed The Hate U Give, 60 percent of those readers who disclosed their age are between 18 and 35.

“Just because a narrative in a YA novel might take place when those characters are teenagers doesn’t mean the experiences represented aren’t relevant to people outside of that age bracket,” says Lindsay Boggs, assistant director of publicity at Penguin Young Readers. “Even as an adult, I often reflect on my teen years. I don’t think I’m alone in that.”

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Netflix and Martin Scorsese are making their biggest bets ever on the confessions of a mafia “hitman.” The guy probably made it all up. Bill Tonelli from Slate reports on the lies of The Irishman… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Assuming you were alive in April 1972 and old enough to cross the street by yourself, you could take credit for the spectacular murder of mobster Crazy Joe Gallo—gunned down during his own birthday party at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy—and nobody could prove you didn’t do it.

Of course, anyone who knows anything about New York City organized crime can tell you who was behind it: The murder was payback for an equally brazen shooting—in broad daylight, in midtown Manhattan—of mob boss Joseph A. Colombo Sr. a year earlier, an attack Gallo supposedly ordered (though even that no one can say with absolute certainty, since the shooter was shot dead on the spot). But no one has ever been arrested or charged in Crazy Joe’s killing, and so technically it’s still unsolved.

The same is true about the disappearance, in July 1975, of Teamsters’ union legend Jimmy Hoffa. He had made some lethal enemies in the mob. After serving a prison term, he persisted in trying to regain control of the union even after he was warned, over and over, to back off. The last time anybody saw him, he was standing outside a restaurant in the suburbs of Detroit, waiting to be driven to what he believed would be a peace meeting. The FBI and investigative reporters have devoted decades of effort to solving the mystery, but all we have is guesswork and theories. So if you want to step up now and say you whacked him, be my guest.

That’s the thing about these gangland slayings: When done properly, you’re not supposed to know who did them. They’re planned and carried out to surprise the victim and confound the authorities. Eyewitnesses, if there are any, prove reluctant to speak up. And nobody ever confesses, unless it’s to win easy treatment from law enforcement in exchange for ratting on other, more important mobsters. Those cases often turn into the ultimate public confessional—the as-told-to, every-gory-detail, my-life-in-crime book deal. Followed by—if you’re a really lucky lowlife—the movie version that fixes your place forever in the gangster hall of fame.

And then there’s the strange case of Frank Sheeran.

Only if you had been paying close attention to the exploits of the South Philadelphia mafia back in its glory days (the second half of the 20th century) might you have noticed Sheeran’s existence. Even there he was a second-stringer—a local Teamsters union official, meaning he was completely crooked, who hung around with mobsters, especially Russell Bufalino, a boss from backwater Scranton, Pennsylvania. Sheeran was Irish, which limited any Cosa Nostra career ambitions he might have had, and so he seemed to be just a 6-foot-4, 250-pound gorilla with a dream. He died in obscurity, in a nursing home, in 2003.

Then, six months later, a small publishing house in Hanover, New Hampshire, unleashed a shocker titled I Heard You Paint Houses. It was written by Charles Brandt, a medical malpractice lawyer who had helped Sheeran win early parole from prison, due to poor health, at age 71. Starting not long after that, Brandt wrote, Sheeran, nearing the end of his life, began confessing incredible secrets he had kept for decades, revealing that—far from being a bit player—he was actually the unseen figure behind some of the biggest mafia murders of all time.

Frank Sheeran said he killed Jimmy Hoffa.

He said he killed Joey Gallo, too.

And he said he did some other really bad things nearly as incredible.

Most amazingly, Sheeran did all that without ever being arrested, charged, or even suspected of those crimes by any law enforcement agency, even though officials were presumably watching him for most of his adult life. To call him the Forrest Gump of organized crime scarcely does him justice. In all the history of the mafia in America or anywhere else, really, nobody even comes close.

Now, though, Frank Sheeran is finally going to get his due.

When it premieres at the New York Film Festival in September before a fall release, The Irishman (as the tale has been retitled) will immediately enter mob movie Valhalla: Martin Scorsese directing, Robert De Niro as Sheeran, Al Pacino as Hoffa, and Joe Pesci as Bufalino, all together for the first (and probably last) time. Sheeran is a part that De Niro has reportedly wanted to play since Brandt’s book came to his attention over a decade ago. The actor has been nursing it along ever since, finally getting Netflix to put up a reported $160 million. This will be Scorsese’s most expensive film ever, in part because of the extensive digital manipulation required to allow De Niro, who turns 76 this month, to play Sheeran from his prime hoodlum years until his death at age 83.

All in all, an astounding saga. Almost too good to be true.

No, let’s say it: too good to be true.

I’m telling you, he’s full of shit!” This is a retired contemporary of Sheeran’s, a fellow Irishman from Philadelphia named John Carlyle Berkery, who allegedly headed the city’s Irish mob for 20 years and had many close mafia connections. Berkery is a local legend, one of the few figures of that era still alive, not incarcerated, and in full possession of his wits. “Frank Sheeran never killed a fly,” he says. “The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine. You could tell how drunk he was by the color of his teeth: pink, just started; dark purple, stiff.”

“It’s baloney, beyond belief,” agrees John Tamm, a former FBI agent on the Philadelphia field office’s labor squad who investigated Sheeran and once arrested him. “Frank Sheeran was a full-time criminal, but I don’t know of anybody he personally ever killed, no.”

Not a single person I spoke with who knew Sheeran from Philly—and I interviewed cops and criminals and prosecutors and reporters—could remember even a suspicion that he had ever killed anyone.

Certainly, his first noteworthy mischief held no promise of underworld greatness. In 1964, at the somewhat advanced age of 43, Sheeran was charged with beating a non-union truck driver with a lug wrench—about what you’d expect from a Teamster goon. Sheeran was later twice indicted in the murders of union rivals. But in neither case did the government or anyone else accuse him of touching a trigger, only of hiring the hit men who did his dirty work for him. When Sheeran was finally convicted of something, it was for cheating his own union members. Not exactly the kind of crime that gets you invited to Don Corleone’s daughter’s wedding.

But none of Sheeran’s nonlethal past mattered or even came up once the book came out. Though Publishers Weekly called it “long on sensational claims and short on credibility,” the credulous world welcomed a solution to the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa’s whereabouts and a chance to read tales of other famous mobster mayhem. Even the New York Times’ reviewer wrote, “It promises to clear up the mystery of Hoffa’s demise, and appears to do so.” The book appeared on the Times’ extended bestseller list and has sold over 185,000 copies, according to its publisher. Charles Brandt, the former chief deputy attorney general of the state of Delaware, was, at 62, the author of a hot property.

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