Been away for awhile . . .

The basic narrative arc of The Family Corleone comes from Puzo's screenplay. Actually, it's not one screenplay, but rather unproduced pages extracted from The Godfather 3, and pages from The Godfather 4--the movie Coppola and Puzo wanted to make but Paramount scotched. There's a total of about 55 pages of script, and I followed as closely as possible Puzo's story, which was essentially about Sonny entering into his father's business, and Vito's resistance to Sonny being in the business. But 55 pages of script won't stretch into a 450 page novel, so I had to do a lot of inventing built around Puzo's framework. Mostly I did my best to stay true to the spirit of Puzo's work. One book reviewer wrote that it was tough for anyone to write a prequel/sequel to Puzo because his fans are so loyal they'll likely burn the writer in effigy for even trying. So far--at least as far as I know--no one has burned me in effigy, and so I'm grateful. I'm also a Puzo fan. He was a great storyteller. I think The Fortunate Pilgrim is his best book. In fact, I think it's a masterpiece of American Lit. But I also like The Sicilian a great deal, and The Last Don. They're good stories and great reads.

I'm reading Man of Honor now, Joe Bonanno's autobiography. Interesting to see how much of The Godfather is borrowed from the history of the Castellammarese wars.