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Since  The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles came out last month, at least a dozen readers have asked, “Did this really happen?”

When I reply, “Did what really happen?” they generally mention the murder that sets the story in motion. Then, because most folks don’t appreciate long-winded answers, I say,  “Maybe.”

What I mean is, I don’t know everything that occurred in Los Angeles in 1926, and according to what I do know, a murder of the same nature and motivation could well have happened.

My rule is, I won’t write anything I know didn’t happen.

In The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles, Tom Hickey, a young bandleader, feels obliged to pursue the truth about the murder of an old friend because the police and the mainstream media deny it occurred. A scene shows Tom, early one morning, intercepting William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies as they are going to survey the progress of the beach house Hearst is having built for her. After I had written the scene, I encountered a news report that Davies returned from New York on the train late on the night before.  She and Hearst probably wouldn’t have risen bright and early that morning. So I made the scene come later, mid-morning.

Now I’m writing a Tom Hickey novel set during the 1930s. Tom has gotten a clue about the fate of his father, who disappeared in 1910. He learns that his Charlie Hickey was in Mexico around the same time the writer Ambrose Bierce vanished while on an assignment from Hearst to report on Pancho Villa.

One account of the life of the Sundance Kid has him surviving the gun battle in Bolivia portrayed in the Newman and Redford movie and turning his outlaw skills to occupations that included working as Pancho Villa’s train-robbing consultant.

How then could I fail to bring Bierce, Sundance, and Charlie Hickey together?

I’m hoping not to find anything that proves they couldn’t have met. Not because I feel a deep and abiding obligation to factual history. I just want to believe my own stories.

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