The Sicilian (39 page)
Praise for Mario Puzo
and his final novel
Omerta
“[A] deft and passionate last novel.”
—Time
“A splendid piece of crime fiction . . . A fitting cap to a tremendous career . . . Through it all, Puzo keeps the heat on and keeps the reader enthralled with his characters and his story.”
—The Denver Post
“In
Omerta
(the Sicilian code for silence), Puzo cements his reputation as a page-turning storyteller.”
—Detroit Free Press
“A seriously guilty pleasure . . . As with
The Godfather
, the reader gets sucked into the plot immediately.”
—The New York Post
“Puzo suffuses the novel with many of the ingredients his readers crave, tantalizingly documenting the lavish lifestyles and sexual exploits of his hot-blooded characters.”
—The Miami Herald
Mario Puzo on
The Godfather
I was ready to forget novels except maybe as a puttering hobby for my old age. But one day a writer friend dropped into my magazine office. As a natural courtesy, I gave him a copy of
The Fortunate Pilgrim
. A week later he came back. He thought I was a great writer. I bought him a magnificent lunch. During lunch, I told him some funny Mafia stories and my ten-page outline. He was enthusiastic. He arranged a meeting for me with the editor of G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The editors just sat around for an hour listening to my Mafia tales and said go ahead. They also gave me a $5,000 advance and I was on my way, just like that. Almost—almost, I believed that publishers were human.
It took me three years to finish...And it was mostly all fun. I remember it as the happiest time of my life. (Family and friends disagree.) I’m ashamed to admit I wrote
The Godfather
entirely from research. I never met a real honest-to-god gangster. I knew the gambling world pretty good, but that’s all. After the book became “famous,” I was introduced to a few gentlemen related to the material. They were flattering. They refused to believe that I had never been in the rackets. They refused to believe that I had never had the confidence of a Don. But all of them loved the book.
In different parts of the country I heard a nice story: that the Mafia had paid me a million dollars to write
The Godfather
as a public relations con. I’m not in the literary world much, but I hear some writers claim I must have been a Mafia man, that the book could not have been written purely out of research. I treasure the compliment.
—Mario Puzo,
The Godfather Papers,
1972
Also By Mario Puzo
Fiction:
THE DARK ARENA*
THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM*
THE GODFATHER
FOOLS DIE
THE SICILIAN*
THE FOURTH K*
THE LAST DON*
OMERTA*
THE FAMILY
THE GODFATHER RETURNS*
Nonfiction:
THE GODFATHER PAPERS
INSIDE LAS VEGAS
Children’s Book:
THE RUNAWAY SUMMER OF DAVIE SHAW
*Published by The Random House Publishing Group
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1984 by Mario Puzo
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by Simon & Schuster, New York, in 1984.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-48074-3
v3.0
