JOE McGINNISS

I’m just back from a weekend in New York City, where I received the “True Thriller” award at the sixth annual ThrillerFest, sponsored by the International Thriller Writers.

The photos are of Peter James about to present me the award and of my–very very brief–acceptance remarks.

I paid tribute to Brian Murtagh, the just-retired US Department of Justice attorney who for 41 years stayed on the case of Jeffrey MacDonald. If it weren’t for Brian, MacDonald never would have been brought to trial, much less convicted, and since that 1979 conviction Brian has been the man who’s thrown up the roadblocks every time new lawyers tried to find a way to help MacDonald weasel out of paying the life-sentence price for having murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters at Fort Bragg in 1970.

I also paid tribute to my wife, Nancy Doherty.

Nancy, for forty years, has been my best editor, and my worldwide traveling companion, but she has been so much more. Not least, the mother of two of my children. As for everything else, it’s too personal to get into here, but I can say with certainty that wherever I am today, without Nancy I’d be in a much worse place.

I’m told that a video of my interview with Kathleen Sharp and Q&A session, as well as my acceptance remarks will soon be posted at the Thrillerfest website.

It was a wonderful event, with eight hundred people in attendance. I made many new friends, including John Lescroat, whose work I’ve enjoyed and admired for years, and Douglas Preston, who, in addition to his many splendid thrillers, wrote a true crime book called The Monster of Florence, which caused him to be arrested in Italy and interrogated by the same crazed prosecutor who won a conviction against Amanda Knox (and I must give you all an advance tip on the book that finally gets to the heart of that bizarre story: The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox, by Nina Burleigh.)

I myself am a fugitive from the Italian criminal justice system, having been convicted in absentia on charges filed against me by Gabriele Gravina, president of the minor league soccer team that was the subject of The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. That story is too long to go into here, but Gravina filed criminal charges against me as part of a (largely, but not entirely) successful attempt to prevent publication of Miracle in Italy.

The actor Anthony LaPaglia, who now has his own production company, optioned The Miracle of Castel di Sangro and hired me to write the screenplay, which I did. Anthony then went to Italy to make sure there would be no, shall we say “problems” with filming there. He met personally with Gravina in Rome. Gravina told him, “Under no circumstances will this movie be filmed in Italy.”

Anthony was made to understand the amount of sabotage that could occur to all the expensive equipment on location in Castel di Sangro. Gravina explained to him that it would be a very serious mistake for him to attempt to make the movie at all. Anthony, a wonderful man who was a joy to work with and who taught me a lot about screenwriting, decided to focus on other projects and let his option on Miracle lapse.

So, yes, “those people” are alive and all too well in Italy today. They also caused my original Italian publisher, Garzanti, to cancel its contract to publish an Italian edition of Miracle.

Anyway, Doug Preston and I had a lot to talk about. I also reconnected with some very dear old friends.

OFF TOPIC: My Arizona trip is still pending. It’s amazing how complicated things can get in July when a publisher has such big plans for a book to be released on Sept. 20. All I can say is that there’s a lot of inside baseball being played right now and my goal is the same as that of Crown: to have the biggest and best possible rollout of THE ROGUE in September. Whatever helps that, I’ll do. Whatever doesn’t, I won’t. I’ll say more about Arizona in the next couple of days as questions are resolved.