May 29th, 2012
If you haven’t read Joel Engel’s amazing true-crime thriller, L.A. ’56, treat yourself now. It’s a perfect beach book.
Over the weekend, the L.A. Weekly ran a story about it that’s straight out of a movie. Here’s Joel setting the scene:
Shortly before one of my signings, at the sensational Book Soup in Hollywood, the store received a call from a woman who said she wanted to talk to me. Why? Because, she said, she was “the daughter of the rapist” whose crimes are at the heart of the incredible story that takes place in Los Angeles in the summer of 1956.
I wondered whether my life was in danger and whether I should cancel the event. Then I returned her call…and learned that this 69-year-old woman had known nothing about her father, not even his name, until recently. Her mother, still alive at 91, had always refused to tell her anything about him, as had her aunts and uncles. So all that she knew about the man whose genes she carried was that he hadn’t exactly been Martin Luther King.
When, just weeks before, she finally learned his name, she began Googling and was led soon enough to links about my book, then eventually to the free sample chapter on Amazon. As it happens, the first three words of the entire book are “Willie Roscoe Fields”–her father’s name. Thus did she learn that the man she’d wondered about all her life had in fact been a serial rapist.
“Linda” confronted her mother with what she’d read–and her mother confirmed the whole story plus additional details that she passed on when she and I sat at a cafe near the bookstore with the L.A. Weekly reporter listening in.
As bizarre as that is, the turn of events forms a sensational bookend with the daughter of the man who was falsely accused of the crimes. Until I tracked her down for an interview, nearly 55 years after the events, this 57-year-old woman had believed all her life that the father she’d met only twice, when she was an adult, had in fact been a rapist.
You couldn’t make it up.
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