In Honor Or Dishonor

The American public never grows tired of reading about Abraham Lincoln, and yet, Lincoln was a complex character, and there is much about him which is little known or even unknown. The story of the assassination is also filled with characters and details which are only poorly known to today’s public. Combine this thirst to know with a story which provides powerful drama, and you have a novel which should appeal to all readers who enjoy murder mysteries, tales of intrigue, action adventures, and emotional involvement. What kind of a person was Abraham Lincoln? Did he have weaknesses and uncertainties? How did he deal with the complex problems of his day, a time of desperate strife-torn challenges to the very existence of the American nation? Why did John Wilkes Booth want to assassinate Lincoln? What sort of a man was Booth? Who were his co-conspirators, and what motivated them to risk their lives? Were Mary Surratt and Dr. Samuel Mudd guilty members of Booth’s conspiracy or innocent victims of a justice system out of control? Why a novel instead of a history book? There are a huge number of non-fiction studies of Lincoln, his life and times, and his death. From these works we draw the information about the assassination, but to tell the story for the satisfaction of the general reader, the novelist’s challenge is to bring the characters to life, to make them real people, motivated by the wide range of human emotions common to all people, past, present, and future. The story can be shaped and controlled in a way which makes it understandable and in more satisfying ways than are found in most non-fiction accounts, without sacrificing the facts. Historical novels are usually either more history than fiction, or more fiction than history. In Honor Or Dishonor has been carefully written to balance history with fiction, to express ideas and aspects of the story which can be better told through the novelist’s imagination and emotions, while at the same time sticking close