One Sunday in 1992, I picked up a copy of the Asheville Citizen-Times and came across the “Flashback” section, which ran a picture each week of past events in Asheville history. That day, it pictured a tall, skinny African-American in a plaid shirt topped with wide suspenders holding up baggy black pants. He was scaling the front of a local hotel in what was described as the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department’s re-creation of the accused man’s escape route following a hideous murder in the late 1930s. Farther down the article, it stated that two Baptist ministers who later baptized the convicted man in a death-row bathtub quoted him as saying the state was going to kill an innocent man.

For weeks, I could not get that photo and story out of my thoughts. The what-if factor grabbed me and would not let go. What if the man really did not commit the crime? Psychologists say that the number-one subconscious fear we all harbor is false imprisonment. What if another person literally got away with murder? What if you or I were chosen by fate to look back in time and discover the real story, maybe even correct a grievous mistake? Is it ever too late to right a wrong?

During the early 1990s, right after my exit from retailing, I was hired by the University of North Carolina at Asheville to conduct an oral history of the Jewish community of western North Carolina. The influx of Jewish peddlers, merchants, professionals, and educators to the Christian South may seem an incongruous migration. The people I taped told me all kinds of stories—funny, sad, scary, and sometimes even borderline criminal. Right at the end of one of those interviews, an elderly man opened a file cabinet in the back of his closet and started pulling memorabilia from his life and the lives of many others in the community. One piece of paper he tossed aside caught my attention. It was a wanted poster he had taken off a telephone pole 65 years earlier. When I reached for it, he said, “I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested in that old thing.” It turned out to be the most fascinating bit of history I’ve ever run into. He then proceeded to tell me “the rest of the story.”

The man pictured on the wanted poster turned out to be William Dudley Pelley, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic writer and publisher who lived in Asheville in the 1930s. Under his leadership, the city became the base of the Silver Legion of America, or Silver Shirts, one of the largest pro-Hitler organizations in the United States. At its peak, the organization boasted over 15,000 members.

The Past Is Never Dead is a work of imagination. Some of the characters and incidents are based on historical people and events, but the situations, relationships, and actions have been rearranged to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. As I researched local archives, I ran across other interesting characters and famous people who visited or lived in Asheville—names like Thomas Wolfe, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Edwin Grove, and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Scott Fitzgerald’s almost daily stupors in our town were so common that Thomas Wolfe’s mother would not allow him in her boardinghouse. Now, not only a moment in time but a whole decade of Asheville history captivated me.

In Yiddish there is a word, bashert, which means “meant to be.” I started feeling that, for whatever reason, I had been picked to hear about this era of Asheville history and maybe eventually tell others about it. I chose The Past Is Never Dead as my vehicle to do this.

Questions to Consider:

1) Gritz Goldberg seems to have a strong and eclectic community of family and friends around him. Do you find these characters, and their relationships with Gritz, to be believable? How does that community come to his aid when he finds himself in an unfamiliar and dangerous situation?

2) The real history - William Pelley, Zelda Fitzgerald, the Battery Park murder - of Asheville, North Carolina, informs this mystery. What kind of place does Asheville seem in the novel? If you are familiar with the real city, does the setting of the novel match your experience of Asheville? Do you think this particularly story could have been set anywhere else?

3) What makes some stories or events become local legends, while others are quickly forgotten? Which do you think will happen to the “true story” of the Battery Park murder, now that Gritz has uncovered it?