Historical fiction always aspires to create vivid context around personal struggles. The Great Pretenders addresses social upheavals in what—on the face of it—appeared to be an era of happy conformity. I grew up during that fifties postwar boom in one of the new tract houses in the Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, the streets all rigidly parallel, the neighborhoods uniformly white, televisions blinking blue in the living rooms. People took for granted that black and white families would not live in the same neighborhoods, or work for equal pay, or have equal opportunities. But by mid-decade, under all that bland assumption, new currents roiled. Radios blasted out the raucous, rebellious chords of rock and roll. The terrible death of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till outraged the nation. In Montgomery, Alabama, in an unprecedented collective action, citizens walked rather than ride at the back of the bus; they boycotted the buses for more than a year while their struggle went all the way to the Supreme Court. I wanted the reader to experience these contemporary upheavals as well as the political tremors besetting the picture business. I plunged Terrence Dexter, a reporter for a fictional LA paper, into the maelstrom of the bus boycott to experience it personally.

Ideally the human dilemmas that characters face should resonate beyond the pages of any novel. In this book those dilemmas are questions of aspiration and desperation, of betrayal, of loyalty, forbidden love, unregretted folly—in short, choices. Every life has choices. Truly, what are any of us but a handful of character traits tossed into a potful of historical circumstance? We are all obliged to respond, to fulfill or reject, to rise to occasions we could not have foreseen or imagined.

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