The genesis of Superman

Although thriller author Brad Meltzer lives in Fort Lauderdale, he is quick to give Sarasota credit for hastening his rise to the top of the best-sellers list, and for giving him the seeds for his current book, "The Book of Lies."

A longtime fan of all things "Superman," Meltzer was speaking at Kobernick House in Sarasota in 2006 when a woman in the audience stood up and told him she knew more about Superman than Meltzer ever would. She was, after all, the niece of Jerry Siegel, the Cleveland teenager who had first drawn the Superman comics in the 1930s.

"I wound up calling her, Marlene Goodman, who winds up being one of the sweetest, nicest people in the whole wide world," said Meltzer in a phone interview as he hustled from the Fort Lauderdale airport to his home last week. "She tells me about this murder that nobody ever knew about. I became obsessed with this story, and formed this truly incredible friendship with Marlene."

The murder Goodman related to Meltzer was that of Jerry Siegel's father, who died in a robbery in 1932. Although the family stories and official records of the death are inconsistent -- Siegel either died of a heart attack or was shot in the chest -- during the period after Siegel's death, his teenage son and a friend, Joe Shuster, created a bulletproof superhero who went on to stand for truth, justice and the American way.

The story just fueled Meltzer's fascination with Superman. "Ever since I was a little kid, every picture of me, from 6 to 36, I'm wearing a cape," he said.

He believes "ordinary people change the world. I believe in regular people and how big movements get started."

The best part of the story for Meltzer is Clark Kent.

"We all know what it's like to be boring and ordinary," he said. "It's the greatness within us that's at the heart of all my work."

His new book takes the murder of Mitchell Siegel and wraps it around the biblical story of Cain and Abel -- history's first murder. That first murder takes up just a few lines in the Old Testament and doesn't mention what Cain used to kill his brother. Was it a stone? The jawbone of an animal? His bare hands? His teeth, making him the first vampire?

"Let me be clear: That is cool to me," said Meltzer.

Scholarship on the subject fascinated him. Differing translations of the original text throw into question whether Cain was remorseful or not.

"Maybe, just maybe, Cain is not the bad guy in this story," said Meltzer.

His interest in the story of Cain and Abel goes back many years. Eleven years ago, after his first novel, "The Tenth Justice," was a success, Meltzer went to his editor and said he wanted to write "a modern-day thriller that retells the story of Cain and Abel. My editor looks at me and says, 'You are an idiot. Why are you going to go risk your career on that?' I could either be strong and stand up for what I believe in, or I can cave. I caved faster than anyone in the history of caving."

But with a armload of best-sellers to his name, including "Dead Even," "The First Counsel," "The Millionaires," "The Zero Game" and "The Book of Fate" -- Meltzer was better positioned to pursue the intersection between two unsolved murder mysteries.

The two years he spent researching and writing the book also coincided with his mother's losing battle with breast cancer. In "The Book of Lies," the protagonist suffers from the loss of his mother.

"It would be so much better a story if this (book) choked the soul right out of my body," said Meltzer, who read the dedication to "The Book of Lies" to his mother on her deathbed. "But this book seemed inevitable."