This is exactly right.

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Anyone and everyone is welcome to the library. That's part of their glory. That's part of why they are such special institutions. That means that you can have people with ill intent coming into a library.

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas.

I'm also the co-host of the podcast, Buried Bones on Exactly Right.

And throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way,

amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported

on notorious true crime cases. This is about the choices writers make,

both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories.

Author Susan Orlean wrote a bestselling book years ago that you've probably heard of,

The Orchid Thief. It was made into a movie called

Adaptation. Susan has now written another book, this one about an unexpected crime that might

not have been a crime at all. A fire in the LA Public Library destroyed more than 400,000

books in 1986. Did they find out what caused it? Or who? Susan tells me the story at the center of her book,

the library book. So I think we should talk about the book that you had that was just an

incredible success, not that this one hasn't been, but what book would people most know you for?

Probably The Orchid Thief, I'm guessing, even though that came out 25 years ago.

But it's had a very long afterlife in the best sense that people continue reading it,

but also because it was made into a movie,

it was made into the film adaptation, which is a somewhat iconic film of its moment. And I think

a lot of people learned about the book because of the movie. Were you a screenwriter on that

...