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Nora Robert's Secret Weapon: a Guilty Conscience
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" Bestselling author Nora Roberts discusses her legendary work ethic.

Roberts is in the middle of a typically busy year. Her latest romantic suspense book, "Angels Fall," came out July 11. Later this year will bring the release of a futuristic crime novel, written under the pseudonym J.D. Robb, and three romantic fantasy paperbacks, "The Circle Trilogy," in successive months. There's also a new J.D. Robb novella published as part of an anthology.

How does she do it? Is she some kind of machine? Roberts laughs. "I often say I'm not a machine. I think I have a really strong work ethic, plus I really love the work. I think if you love what you do, you do a lot of it. I have a lot of discipline ... and I have a fast pace," the 55-year-old author says. "I had nine years of Catholic school, and grew up in an Irish Catholic family, with parents who expected you to do what you were told and do your job," Roberts says. "And while I'm extremely lapsed, I still have the core of Catholic guilt. ... If I just blew off a day and didn't have a really good reason, I would feel guilty about that. I mean, it would just not be worth it to me."

On Tuesday, The Associated Press reported on the death of a 68-year-old man named Paul Van Valkenburgh of Ormond Beach, Fla., who claimed to have written the song under the name Paul Vance. The story cited the man's wife as the source for that claim. But the music industry's real Paul Vance, a 76-year-old man from Coral Springs, Fla., is alive and well, and says the other Paul Vance appears to have made the whole thing up.

The Paul Vance who wrote the songs ? and provided proof with royalty payments he is still receiving for the hit ? said he has been inundated with calls from people who think he died. An owner of racehorses, Vance said two of his horses were scratched from races Wednesday because people thought he had died. "Do you know what it's like to have grandchildren calling you and say, 'Grandpa, you're still alive?'" he said in a telephone interview from Coral Springs. "This is not a game. I am who I am and I'm proud of who I am. But these phones don't stop with people calling thinking I'm dead."

Rose Leroux, the widow of the man who died, said she was surprised by the disclosure, and "kind of devastated." She said she had no reason to doubt that her husband ? who apparently had some sort of music career when he was younger ? was the writer of the famous tune. She said her husband told her that he never got any royalties because he sold the rights when he was young, around 19. She said that by the time they met almost 40 years ago, he was making his living as a salesman. He later became a painting contractor. "If this other man says he did it then my husband's a liar, or he's a liar," Leroux said.

The living Paul Vance estimated he has made several million dollars from the song, which was recorded by 16-year-old teen idol Brian Hyland, surged to No. 1 on the Billboard charts in August 1960 and has been pop culture staple ever since. The song ? about a bashful young woman in a skimpy bathing suit ? has been used in such movies as "Sister Act 2" and "Revenge of the Nerds II" and was more recently revived in a yogurt commercial. "It's a money machine," Vance said. Vance said his first hit was "Catch a Falling Star," recorded by Perry Como, and he went on to write numerous million-sellers for Como, Johnny Mathis and others.

At a press conference, seven of Kathy O'Beirne's brothers and sisters read out statements rebutting allegations against their father, who was accused in the book of beating and abusing his daughter.

Ms O'Beirne's bestselling account of her childhood after being placed in the care of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity is a grim catalogue of sexual abuse, beatings and rape. Sold as Don't Ever Tell in Britain and as Kathy's Story in her native Ireland, it appeared two years ago at a time when trust in the Catholic church's clergy and institutions had been shattered after the prosecution of priests for child abuse.

Her description of being handed over to the notorious "Magdalene laundries" - where difficult children were sent - by an abusive father at the age of eight fed public curiosity about life under the punitive regimes supposedly operating behind the walls of so many convents. To date, it has sold 350,000 copies.

*****

The reason we got together was because of the allegations she was making against our father," Oliver O'Beirne, her eldest brother, told the Guardian yesterday in Dublin. "They are totally untrue. I read her book from beginning to end and wanted to get a pen out and cross out everything that was not true." "I have no recollection at all of her having been in the Magdalene laundries. I did visit her in a children's home, St Anne's in Dublin. It's a messy business. I haven't talked to Kathleen since my father's will seven months ago. She wanted to stay on in the house. The book was total rubbish," he added. "Yes, we got a belt [at home] if we did something wrong; that was normal then. But talk about sexual abuse is absolute rubbish. We were reared to respect others and be courteous to everyone."

The Most Difficult Aspects of Making a Show Like This

The breaking of the stories is a huge part of my job. This is a big, giant monster of a show, and that monster needs to be fed constantly. While it is difficult, it has been a lot of fun as well. Trying to maintain the balance of plot and character is also a challenge. You don't want the engine of the story to overwhelm the character moments. Striking the right balance has been a process of trial and error. I think you'll see that we are really succeeding on that front.

As for the budget, yes, this is a huge show to produce. There are so many characters and so many locations. Of course, by bringing these characters together (which we really begin to do by episode 4) the logistics start to get easier. The other challenge is doing a show about people with special "abilities" and figuring out how to show those given our budget. We can't compete with a 200 million dollar feature in terms of special effects, so we are using them sparingly.

The unflattering portraits of France's 19th century literary giants are just some of the juicy morsels found in long-forgotten Paris police files recently published in book form. Bruno Fuligni, an employee at the French parliament who discovered the dust-covered files and compiled them, says what is even more startling is the vigor and thoroughness with which the most revered writers of that era were spied upon by snitches and secret police.

"Beyond criminals and political figures, there are files on writers and artists. In some cases, they go quite far in their indiscretions," he said. Some of the tidbits in Fuligni's book, "The Writers' Police", were collected from 1879 through 1891 under police chief Louis Andrieux -- father of one of France's most famous novelists and poets of the next generation, Louis Aragon. As Andrieux wrote in his memoirs, "All of Paris, in the end, is on file."

The notes and reports on Hugo, the "Les Miserables" author and tireless campaigner for social justice who lived in exile for two decades after calling the self-proclaimed Emperor Louis Napoleon a traitor, take up three voluminous boxes, Fuligni said. The police monitoring the larger-than-life figure overlooked nothing: his ideas, his breaches of conventional morality, the company he kept -- what Fuligni prefers to see as "the little weaknesses of this great genius." The book, for example, reproduces a detailed description of how Hugo was blackmailed by a mistress after she found out that her lover was, in fact, an illustrious poet and writer. Hugo is described in the files as "someone who exploits democracy" and as being obsessed by money, a trait born out by others.

"What is worrying is not the information itself but the way it is exploited," Fuligni says. The spies who kept tabs on writers and artists at the end of the 19th century were, in effect, their first biographers, and besides the sometimes parochial moral judgments, they came up with some startling insights. Police began watching Rimbaud -- the hard-living, drug-taking boy genius who delighted in shocking bourgeois sensibilities -- when he was only 15, even though they found his behavior repugnant and his work impenetrable. "They immediately saw that this young man was enormously talented. The police spotted him before the literary inner circle did," noted Fuligni with a smile. In a similar way, they targeted Verlaine, one of France's most famous and popular poets and -- after both men manned the barricades of the Paris Commune in 1871 -- Rimbaud's lover. There are also intercepted letters among the police files, and a few misjudgments. Verlaine, observed one snitch, "is someone not worth bothering about, but holds dangerous personal views."

Each issue of the new magazine will feature a different country as its theme. Magazines are sold accompanied by trinkets supposed to derive from that country, while Hello Kitty will provide information about the history and culture of the country in the spotlight.

The magazine will also include features about the Hello Kitty Museum, which contains all of the thousands of different types of Hello Kitty merchandise that has been produced since the cat character first appeared in 1975.

The first issue will focus on Britain, where Hello Kitty is supposed to live, and is accompanied by a charm bracelet and jewelry pouch modeled on Victorian England styles. The inaugural issue sells for 990 yen, while future issues will cost 1,890 yen apiece. There are plans to issue 50 editions.