Lunchtime Thrills

One of the best parts of this "job" is getting to hang out with writers, especially when you get to mix and match them in interesting combos. When I found out that Alafair Burke and Michele Martinez were not only both former prosecutors turned novelists but also shared the same publicist, I told myself this was a lunch date just calling out to be scheduled, and last week I was finally able to put it together. We met at a café near the law firm where Martinez worked briefly before she became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in 1993. Why did she give up prosecuting large-scale narcotics cases for writing, I wondered? "It was a classic work vs. motherhood thing," she said; she'd been increasingly frustrated with trying to balance her caseload and childrearing, and then one night she had a nightmare that struck her as the perfect first scene for a novel (and is, in fact, the opening to Most Wanted).

I'd assumed that Burke's turn to mystery writing was inspired as much by her family background--her dad is James Lee Burke--as by her experiences as a deputy district attorney in Portland, Oregon, but she pointed out that while she'd devoured mysteries growing up, her father hadn't really started writing them until she was already away at college. When the conversation turned to how supportive the mystery writing community is in general, though, she had a great story about how, when she'd temporarily stopped trying to write her first novel, Judgment Calls, a friend mentioned the manuscript to Michael Connelly, who quizzed her about it, then waved Jonothan King and exclaimed, "She's got 260 pages, she knows who did it and why, but she hasn't finished it!" As you can guess, they put on a little friendly pressure to see it through, and, well, she's about to see the third book starring deputy DA Samantha Kincaid, Close Case, published this summer.

Both authors talked about the difficulties in turning prosecutors into dramatically interesting characters and keeping the action flowing. They readily admitted that real-life prosecutors don't normally face anything like the dangers experienced by their fictional counterparts; taking out a prosecutor in the real world only ensures that another one will get assigned to your case. Burke revealed that she has to work the hardest to get the story's pacing just right and move Kincaid into the courtroom, while Martinez said that although "you never feel like you have the perfect plot," the crime parts come a lot easier to her than figuring out how the personal life of her protagonist, AUSA Melanie Vargas, will unfold. I'm guessing that, especially given the new twists a prosecutorial emphasis adds to the genre, legal thriller fans will gladly come back next year to see how things turn out.