Two friends would meet at their favorite restaurant in Santa Fe, N.M., just to chat about the things that interested them, such as deep-sea diving.

One day, they were talking about the novels they had enjoyed when they were young, adventure tales by the likes of Jack London and Herman Melville. One friend turned to the other and said, "Hey, let's write a novel."

Similar conversations happen all the time, and sometimes an unpublished manuscript even results. But one of the participants in this conversation was Gene Hackman, winner of two Academy Awards, nominee for three more and one of the most respected actors in America.

The joke in publishing circles is that only celebrities can get their books published; but unless they use a ghostwriter, they still have to write the book. Daniel Lenihan, Hackman's friend and co-writer, had experience with technical writing and other nonfiction, but Hackman had none.

"I hadn't done any writing, so I went home and wrote a story about a storm at sea, which had happened to me when I was in the Marine Corps, but I set it in 1805," Hackman said from his home in Santa Fe.

The story he wrote wound up, in somewhat different form, in their first novel, "Wake of the Perdido Star," a story of piracy and shipwreck. A murder mystery followed -- "Justice for None," about race relations in the 1920s.

Now Hackman and Lenihan are back with a third book, "Escape From Andersonville," about the notorious prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia during the Civil War. The writers will be at the Library of Virginia at 7 p.m. Saturday to discuss their book.

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"We looked at Andersonville, which was a creation of the end of the war. It became more deadly than the war itself because of the circumstances. The South couldn't afford to feed [the prisoners of war] any more than themselves," said Lenihan from his home in Santa Fe.

The book follows the story of Nathan Parker, a captain in the Union army who instigates a strategic surrender at the Battle of Monocacy in Maryland. He and his troops are sent to Andersonville Prison, where Parker is appalled at the inhuman conditions.

With prisoners of war dying by the thousands from starvation and disease, Parker engineers an escape and vows to return with Union troops to liberate the rest of his men.

Things do not always work out the way Parker hopes. Hackman said the disappointments that Parker faces -- despite a generally upbeat ending -- reflect the frustration he feels in the face of the chaos toward the end of the war.

"There was no such thing as a clean win at that point," Lenihan said.

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The book was originally going to be about life along the Mississippi River at the end of the war, and how the war affected those who lived there. In particular, it was going to be about the steamship Sultana, which exploded and sank in April 1865.

The disaster killed up to 1,800 onboard, most of them former Union soldiers returning from prisoner-of-war camps; it was the greatest maritime disaster in American history, more even than the Titanic.

"We didn't really have a solid idea about that, [so] we drifted into the Andersonville story," Hackman said.

"It was increasingly attractive to us because it seemed like such an intense time. We were intrigued by how much it had to go into shaping the American character."

Going into the writing, the two knew they had a potential problem in writing about the war. Civil War buffs can be obsessive about the subject and have absorbed every possible fact there is to know about it. Any mistake, no matter how minor, would be pounced upon by some buffs as an unforgivable flaw.

"So we kept away from the events that are very well researched. We spent a lot of time on knowing where our characters were going to be, and on action we made up, skirmishes we made up," Lenihan said. "It's pretty carefully researched, but in a focused way."

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Hackman has become so enthusiastic about writing -- Lenihan joked he sometimes gets too worked up about it to talk about it -- that he has reportedly given up acting for writing. But his artistic sensibilities were shaped by his time in front of the camera.

"I'm a great lover of good stories. I've read millions of scripts, and you just cry to have somebody come up with something different and entertaining and at the same time enlightening. As an actor, I also love characters, and I think my experiences as an actor help my experiences as a writer," Hackman said.

Even so, he isn't already casting the movie version of "Escape From Andersonville" in his mind.

"I haven't really thought about it," Hackman said. "I suppose I would start thinking along those terms if somebody is interested in a screenplay. It's only been out a month, so who knows? I think the time of those big episodic movies has passed us by."