I spent a year as a docent. I interviewed people who grew up on the island, read handwritten records of inmates, guards and kids who lived on the island. I went to an Alcatraz Island "Alumni Day" where I heard dozens of old Alcatraz residents (from both sides of the bars) speak. I hobnobbed with several of the many Alcatraz heads, who know every arcane fact about the place. I read dozens and dozens of books and spent countless hours roaming the island imagining how it would feel to be Moose.

I researched before I started writing, while I was writing, and while I was revising. I even had to look up a few things during the copy editing stage.

Q: Did anything unusual happen while you were working on the book?

Right from the beginning of the research, bizarre little coincidences began to occur. One day I’d come up with an incredibly wacky idea and a few days later I’d discover something remarkably similar actually happened in real life. Even the title has historic resonance.

Al Capone’s first job on Alcatraz was working the mangle in the laundry facility that serviced all of the people who lived on Alcatraz, including the guards, their wives and children. And so I figured if I were a kid living on Alcatraz I’d tell my friends "Al Capone does my shirts." When the manuscript was finished one of the historians we used to vet Al Capone Does My Shirts asked me why I didn’t use the real quote. "What real quote?" I asked. "Al Capone does my shorts," he said. Apparently WWII GIs sometimes used the phrase: Al Capone does my shorts" to indicate they were stationed in San Francisco.

Q: Did Al Capone Does My Shirts change very much from first draft to last? How?

When I speak on writing I talk about how important it is to consider the chemistry between the characters in your book. The example I use describes one of the significant changes I made in the manuscript.

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