“ARE YOU TELLING ME that you are the research-and-nonfiction-book-writing Cinderella of Minnesota, and you were flown, first-class, to Amsterdam and then on to Budapest by the director of the Oscar-bait Russell Crowe film Nuremberg, where you ate schnitzel and Danish, palled around with Oscar winner Rami Malek watching rough cuts, and then sat in your hotel suite and discussed your work with Mr. Robot star Rami Malek?” I ask Jack El-Hai, writer of many, many books. “Yes, that is what I am telling you,” he says, as we sit together over beers one bright, sunny day in the caged patio ofThe Bulldog on Lyndale in south Minneapolis. “And then you just went to the airport, bought chocolates, and returned to your Minneapolis life?” I continue. “How did you know I bought chocolates?” asks El-Hai. “Everybody buys chocolates in the airport in Budapest!” I sputter. “Well, yes, perhaps. But I was just so glad that he [James Vanderbilt] invited me. He didn’t have to. He’s a generous guy,” El-Hai notes. “James Vanderbilt, writer of Zodiac, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, whose name I’ve always wanted to get into the magazine, for no particular reason! James Vanderbilt, director of Nuremberg, wrote from a script he developed from your book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, working on it for over a decade, and at one point sending a snail-mail copy of a script to your Minneapolis house!” I sort of say. “Yes. Actually, I had a lot of work to do. I was finishing my next book,” El-Hai says, smiling with just a little irony tickling the corners of his mouth and eyebrows, which is about as much of a rise as you’re going to get out of one of the most professional writers we’ve ever had in this fair city. Jack El-Hai, by the way, is used to driving nearby Hollywood-interested people into sputtering incoherence. He was at a party once, after the Nuremberg-inspiring book was sold, and had a grand old time chatting with Channing Tatum. “But I • didn’t know who he was,” he shrugs. “That drove my daughters crazy.” As well it might. But you know who’s a superstar like Channing Tatum or Rami Malek, but of turning dusty archives into fresh narrative gold? It’s Minneapolis’s own Jack El-Hai himself. If you are even a casual consumer of media in the Twin Cities, you probably know his work. There was his 2005 book The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness, which was later adapted into an episode of PBS’s documentary series American Experience. When El-Hai was interviewed by Terry Gross about the book for Fresh Air in 2005, he recalled encountering the “mountain” of papers that gave birth to the book with equal parts of overwhelm and nausea at the sheer magnitude of it all, as well as the pure thrill only a true researcher can know.