{"id":12033,"date":"2017-09-13T15:33:26","date_gmt":"2017-09-13T19:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/?p=12033"},"modified":"2017-09-28T15:32:22","modified_gmt":"2017-09-28T19:32:22","slug":"real-life-wrongful-conviction-inspires-dick-lehrs-ya-novel","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/articles\/real-life-wrongful-conviction-inspires-dick-lehrs-ya-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Real-Life Wrongful Conviction Inspires Dick Lehr\u2019s YA Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"COM's
COM’s Dick Lehr, a former Boston Globe reporter and best-selling author of books about real-life criminal enterprises, murderous teens, and criminal cops, has written a young adult novel based on a case where he helped overturn the murder conviction of a wrongly accused man. Photo by Cydney Scott<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dick Lehr\u2019s fans know him as an award-winning investigative journalist who has penned best-selling books about real-life seedy criminal enterprises, murderous teens, and criminal cops.<\/p>\n

Lehr\u2019s new book, out today, is a bold departure. Written for a young adult audience, Trell<\/em> (Candlewick, 2017) is the fictional story of a 14-year-old who teams up with a newspaper reporter in a quest to free her wrongly imprisoned father.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was looking for a way to reach a younger audience,\u201d says Lehr<\/a>, a College of Communication professor of journalism, who will read from the book tomorrow, September 13, at Brookline Booksmith<\/a>. \u201cThat became a novel to show readers the power of journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lehr says that while writing for teens is new to him, writing about social justice issues is not. He may be best known for Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil\u2019s Deal <\/em>(Harper, 2000), cowritten with Gerard O\u2019Neill (COM\u201970), about their experiences as Boston Globe<\/em> reporters chronicling Bulger\u2019s double life as a gangster and an FBI informant. The book was made into a film<\/a> starring Johnny Depp in 2015.<\/p>\n

Among Lehr\u2019s other work are The Fence: A Police Cover-Up along Boston\u2019s Racial Divide<\/em> (Harper, 2009), about the beating of a black plainclothes policeman by white police officers and the ensuing cover-up, and The Birth of a Movement: How <\/em>Birth of a Nation Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights <\/em>(Public Affairs, 2017), the story of an African American newspaper editor in Boston and his battle against the racist depictions in the film Birth of a Nation<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Trell<\/em> draws heavily on Lehr\u2019s reporting of the murder conviction of Shawn Drumgold, a drug dealer arrested and sentenced to life in prison for the death of 12-year-old Tiffany Moore, who was hit by a stray bullet on a summer night in the late 1980s while she sat on top of a mailbox talking with friends. Her death received nationwide press coverage, and public outrage put pressure on police to make an arrest.<\/p>\nRead more on BU Today<\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dick Lehr\u2019s fans know him as an award-winning investigative journalist who has penned best-selling books about real-life seedy criminal enterprises,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12163,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[1343,135,1342,1341],"bu-publication":[],"discipline-type":[],"bu_edition":[],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/12033"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12163"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/12033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12037,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/12033\/revisions\/12037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12033"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=12033"},{"taxonomy":"discipline-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/discipline-type?post=12033"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=12033"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=12033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}