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Jane Ellen Clark, the curator at the Monroe County Heritage Museum, told me that I had to interview Jennings Carter, the likely inspiration for Jem Finch, since Carter, his cousin, Truman Capote, and Harper Lee played together constantly as children. She said she got chills the first time she met him because she noticed that his arm was broken in the same place as Jem's arm.

We met Jennings Carter in Clark's office, and like she said, his left arm hung shorter and seemed to be at a ninety-degree angle to his body. He had a shy smile and right away said, "I don't know what I can tell you that hasn't been said."

I asked about the games he'd play with Truman and Nelle. He said the Truman and Nelle loved to read the comics with Truman's elderly cousin, Sook, and sometimes Sook would get the word wrong, but she never minded if they corrected her. Jennings said that Sook did send a fruitcake to President Roosevelt, but that he never wrote back.

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At the height of his fame, Alexandre Dumas was constantly interrupted by visitors who had come to meet the great man and tell him of their admiration for his works. He was, by all accounts, both generous and sociable in his reception of his fans, and he enjoyed their praise. It pleased him that his books pleased others. But all the same he must sometimes have found all the interruptions frustrating. He wrote as he did everything else in his life - whole-heartedly, exuberantly and prolifically. His most famous books - The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, are still widely loved and read today. I have a postcard of him over my desk, smiling down at me. I've always been sorry that I have never had the option of sending him a letter, at least, to tell him how much his books have meant to me. I would love to be able to send him a copy of Living with Ghosts.

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Like a few other teams - the Yankees and Red Sox come to mind - the Dodgers are the subject of an entire subgenre of baseball literature and it would be natural to wonder - What could be new in Forever Blue?

The first thing a Dodger die-hard will notice is that I set aside the judgments made by others about Walter O'Malley and other key figures in the Dodger story and followed instead the trail of documents. Internal team memos and private corporate records showed O'Malley began his effort to build a new stadium in Brooklyn in 1946. O'Malley made mistakes, but it's hard to refute his devotion to the borough. Yes, he was responsible for the final decision and cannot escape responsibility for moving the team and breaking a lot of hearts. But the record also shows O'Malley and the public were manipulated by the city's great power broker Robert Moses, who never wanted a stadium in Brooklyn, and failed by Mayor Wagner who let two great teams - the Dodgers and the Giants - leave at once.

Other new material in the book includes the inside story of how an old-fashioned gossip columnist in Los Angeles named Vincent X. Flaherty courted the team for years and helped the city's real leaders bring baseball to the coast. Formally private letters revealed new details on the struggle over the Chavez Ravine, where Dodger Stadium was built, and show how O'Malley risked financial ruin to make his ballpark a reality. Mixed in with all these historic events are fresh takes on players, insights into the arrival of the player's union, and new evidence of O'Malley's influence on the game itself, over thirty years.