Fact or Fiction

Do people want facts, really?

When I first mention the book I am writing, to friends or colleagues, they assume I am making a work of fiction.  They do not automatically think of a nonfiction biography/courtroom drama even though it is a true crime story.  Okay, fiction gives an author more latitude.  I wouldn't have to worry about cross-checking facts, squinting at smudgy pages of the federal census, getting death certificates and baptismal certificates, plucking clues from 100 year old newspapers, making footnotes and keeping up a bibliography.  I could just.... wheeee!!  Whatever comes to mind.  Edith Wharton.  D.H. Lawrence.  F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Maybe I'd change the names, or maybe I'd keep 'em.  The folks involved are long since dead and gone, so no one is alive to sue me if I get it wrong.

Fiction is freedom.

What holds me back is this:  fiction has been done on this story 3 times.  1) Hollywood produced a really trashy exploitation film in 1918 that has been lost to the dust bin of time - fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your curiosity level.  Myself, I would give anything to see it.  2) A Chilean poet Luz Larrain wrote a fictional memoirs in 1994 from Blanca's viewpoint, in Spanish, and although I got a copy, I can't read Spanish!  I've put some of it through Google translator, enough to recognize a few small factual errors.  For example, she calls John de Saulles's sister Caroline a "senorita" which means a single woman, but in fact Caroline was married and had a daughter of her own.  Little things like that bug me.

This year, a columnist for the London Sunday Times wrote a romance story involving Rudolph Valentino and used the de Saulles murder as a background setting.  Although the author did some research, she did not go quite so crazy as I did and I immediately spotted a number of factual mistakes in her timeline of events, etc.  She changed the name of John de Saulles's chauffeur just enough to give herself the "freedom" because she wanted to depict him as a jolly 6 foot+ tall blonde Swedish man.  The truth is Julius Hadamek was 5 ft. 5 in. dark haired and from Austria.  I found his passport, with photograph and physical description on Ancestry.com.  I found the passenger manifest from when he first arrived at Ellis Island in 1909.  I found him in the 1920 New York federal census, and from his World War II compulsory draft registration card, I know that he and his wife Olive stayed together for 20 years.  Facts are interesting to me.  The humble immigrant chauffeur, who watched his master be shot dead by his ex-wife, found true love and happiness for himself.

I want to be the first to write the only, definitive factual reference book about the de Saulles case.  But will it sell?  Do people really want to know what happened, or do they just want a fancy story?  Is fiction more glamorous than fact?