Although the historical events in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time, and contradictory source material, will allow), fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical passages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones-all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.

What immediately comes to mind, with this-the final book of the Frank Nitti Trilogy-is the battle over the title I had with editor Tom Dunne of St. Martin’s Press.

My title was The Hollywood Wound. This was a World War II phrase among combat soldiers, meaning a wound bad enough to get you sent home, but not so bad you wouldn’t recover to a normal life. I felt it also had a secondary resonance, which is the Hollywood aspect of the story-the move by Nitti and the Chicago Outfit to take over the motion picture unions.

Well, Dunne just hated the title (loved the novel, though). Word came back to me from several other writers that Dunne had said to them, “Your friend Collins writes great books, but he comes up with terrible titles,” which I thought then was fairly ungracious and still do. But he was the boss, and I did my best to come up with alternates. The only one I remember (of a long undistinguished list) is True War, which would have been a natural follow-up to the prior books (True Detective and True Crime), but seemed both too easy and…wrong.

I had also considered The Million-Dollar Wound as a title, because that, too, was a combat phrase with the same meaning as “Hollywood wound.” “Million-dollar wound” did come into use during World War II, but not with the prominence of the “Hollywood” term; and “million-dollar” was more commonly (if inaccurately) thought of as strictly a Vietnam-era term (and admittedly that’s where “million-dollar wound” really became common G.I. vernacular). In addition, there’s a “million-dollar” resonance in the story that I won’t spoil here.