The Executioner's Song
A Pulitzer Prize-winning "true life novel" reconstructing the 1976 Utah murders committed by Gary Gilmore, his trial, and his 1977 firing-squad death — the first execution in America in a decade — told through the voices of the families, lawyers, and media men drawn into it. Page count is for the in-print Grand Central Publishing trade paperback (2012, foreword by Dave Eggers, ISBN 9780446584388); first published by Little, Brown in October 1979.
Book Two is appeals, rights deals, and lawyers' arithmetic, and readers who tore through the Utah half arrive at "one that I found really tough to get through." The book it gets measured against is a quarter as long: "How this won the Pulitzer prize is beyond me...nowhere even close to being a patch on the amazing In Cold Blood by Truman Capote." Capote did his own reporting. Lawrence Schiller conducted and owned these interviews, and turns up in Book Two as a character; even an admirer says "you realize that Mailer got most of his research material from Schiller." Eleven hundred pages on a man whose distinction was demanding the state hurry: "Had he ended up with life in prison...no one would written ten words about him."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
