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IS LAW Bestselling Lawyer-Novelists Talk About Their Craft 
STEPHEN M. MURPHY * BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK 2002 book One L: An Inside Account of Life in the First Year at Harvard Law School. Before attending Harvard, he earned a master's degree in creative writing at Stanford University. After spending several years at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago, Mr. Turow entered private practice with the Chicago law firm of Sonnenschein, Nath, and Rosenthal. His first novel, Presumed Innocent, became an international bestseller and is often credited with creating popular demand for legal thrillers. The book was made into a hit movie starring Harrison Ford as prosecutor Rusty Sabich. Narrated by Sabich, Presumed Innocent explores the tensions Sabich experiences after he is charged with murdering his colleague and former lover, Caroline Polhemus. Turow skillfully plants clues while taking the reader on a tour of the seamy side of Kindle County's criminal justice system. Until the pieces cometogether at the end, the reader continually wonders whether the seemingly honorable prosecutor really did kill Polhemus. This interview took place in 1988. FICTION: Presumed Innocent (1987) • Burden of Proof (1990) • Pleading Guilty (1993) • Laws of Our Fathers (1996) • Personal Injuries (1999) NONFICTION: One L: An Inside Account of Life in the First Year at Harvard Law School (1977) MURPHY: Before you went to law school, I understand you had a manuscript that was unpublished. Can you tell me what that was about? TUROW: This was a book called The Way Things Are and it was about a rent strike on the north side of Chicago. It was not a bad book. It was not unpublishable, but it went unpublished. It was a sort of dis- appointing, disconcerting experience. MURPHY: Was it a novel? TUROW: Yes, it was a novel. It was about a young man who had been a draft resister and fled to Canada. When his number came up in the lottery a safe distance from eligibility, he returned to the United States. As the novel opens, his girlfriend's left him and he's literally asleep and screams in the dark. It's about his coming back to life in all kinds of different ways. To describe it, it doesn't sound like it would be that bad or that good. It was overwritten, and the biggest problem with the book was I finished it in 1974 and the market for sixties novels had sort of passed by. I've been asked why I don't publish it now and the answer is it would have been a decent book for some body who was twenty-five years old to publish but not somebody who's forty. So it's consigned to history. I thought it was unfair when it wasn't published, but it's not a book without evident flaws. MURPHY: You have no plans to try to get it published now? TUROW: I am not unaware of the symbolism, but it sits under my com- puter now. I use it to prop up my monitor and that's where The Way Things Are resides. MURPHY: Did your inability to get that manuscript published lead to your going to Harvard Law School? TUROW: I often say that, and my frustrations with that book certainly reinforced that decision. But I had actually decided to go to law school before I sent the book to New York. I finished it in the spring of 1974 and sent it to my then agent. It was at that point in time, as I was finishing that book, that I had begun thinking seriously of going to law school. I made that decision ultimately in the spring of 1974. I decided that if the book is published, then it's published; if it's not, it's not. MURPHY: Where did the idea for One L come from? TUROW: The idea for One L came really backhandedly. When I made this decision to go to law school, I wrote to the agent who was then peddling The Way Things Are in the interval between the spring of 1974 and the spring of 1975. The Way Things Are had been turned down at somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three different publishers. I've never had the strength of heart to go back and count the rejections, but it was many. So I wrote to her, kind of apologeti- cally, and said that I was going to law school, just really to advise her of that. I said, "By the way; if you know any writers, it would be a great idea to write a book about law school because there is really no good nonfiction treatment of what law school is like from the law student's perspective." There was no further discussion between us about this. One day I went to my mailbox. I was living over on Fair Oaks in the city near Dolores in the Mission. Lo and behold, there's a contract to write the book that became One L. She had taken my letter and shown it to an editor. As far as I can tell, they were both half smashed. And thus, there comes One L. When I fin- ished the manuscript after my first year in law school the editor lit- erally could not remember why he had bought the book. He had no idea. And he called me up and said, "Tell me, why was it that I wanted to publish this book?" And I had to sell him again on his own idea. MURPHY: When you wrote the book, you kept a journal while you were at law school. Did your fellow students know you were doing that? TUROW: They did not. My closest friends knew sometime during the year what I was doing. But, in general, most of my classmates did not. There were four or five people who knew what I was up to. Most of the people who are the basis of the central characters in One L knew that they were being observed in this fashion, although I am not sure any of them really ever believed it was going to be anything. They all read the manuscript before the book came out. But most of my class- mates didn't know. MURPHY: How did you ever find the time during the first year to write One L? TUROW: Like many lawyers, especially trial lawyers, I've had a lot of very trying periods while I have been in practice. But I really don't think I've ever in my life worked harder than I did during my first term in law school. Writing the book and being a very intense law student was very hard. It really was. MURPHY: Did you ever estimate how many hours you put into it? TUROW: I don't know. All I know is that I really feel sincerely that I worked from September through September without any real time to myself. There were no vacations. When I sent the manuscript of One L to New York, it was two days before classes were going to reopen. So I had one day off and then I took a tour around Boston Harbor. That was it. During that summer we went to visit with a friend of ours who had come to Connecticut to visit her family. We went down there and saw her. I brought my typewriter. My friend Marsha is the person who really named the book. She asked, "What are you writing about?" And I said, "It's just about what it's like to be a One L." She said, "What's a One L?" I told her and she said, "That would be a good title." But anyway, when we went down to see Marsha, I brought the typewriter and continued to work. MURPHY: After it was published, did you get any reaction from your fellow students? TUROW: Oh, yes. I like to say that the reaction from the students was in a direct relationship to the light in which they were portrayed. There are a lot of composites in One L. Both to protect people's privacy and simply for the sake of narrative economy, a lot of dif- ferent people were combined in single characters. But people nonetheless decided, Well, I'm So-and-so. If they thought So-and- so was a positive character they tended to like the book a lot. And if they had a dim opinion of it . . . And that ran to the faculty. That was just a uniform reaction, that people liked it or didn't like it depending on how they fared. MURPHY: Have you had any real strong reactions from anybody who disliked their portrayal in the book? TUROW: I have never gone on record anywhere saying,This is So-and- so and that's So-and-so. One of my friends who is now a law profes- sor herself runs around and tells her students, "Well, I'm Gina." Arthur Miller has always claimed that he was Perini, and I have never commented on that. MURPHY: And you don't want to comment on that now? TUROW: And I won't comment on that now. All I can tell you is that he gave an exam in his copyright course at the end of my first term which had a question that said, "You are an associate in a law firm. The senior partner introduces you to his client, Rudolph Perini. Professor Perini has undergone the indignity of having a student write a book about him. Please advise Professor Perini as to what causes of action he has against the student," who is referred to as Ray Ripoff. MURPHY: After law school, you went to Chicago and worked as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office. What made you want to work as a prosecutor? TUROW: I was looking for an alternative to corporate practice. It was too long a distance to travel and too short a period of time to come from the Stanford English Department, where a legitimate commu- nist by the name of Bruce Franklin had been a member of the faculty when I got there, to becoming a part of a corporate law firm. No human being is quite so malleable, I think, as to be able to traverse that kind of ground in so short a period of time. I certainly wasn't, so government seemed to me to be a reasonable alternative. I had a good sense of what some of the hazards of ACLU, Nader-type work might have been, although it was intriguing to me. I became per- suaded by a couple of friends of mine, principally one who is up in Seattle, that there is actually a lot of good to be done by being a pros- ecutor, because of the amount of discretion that you have. I had been exposed to similar arguments when I was in college by a guy named David Dick who was, at that time, a sergeant in the New York Police Department and was trying to recruit people to become cops out of college. I was kind of enticed by the argument then, and I was enticed by it when I was in law school. I had a very good friend who was at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago and I met the U.S. attorney through him during the sum- mer I was writing One L. He offered me a job for the next summer and I took it. I really liked the U.S. Attorney's Office and that cer- tainly reinforced my belief that this was really a useful thing to do as a lawyer. So when I saw that I was going to be lucky enough to get one of those jobs, I couldn't think of turning it down. Ironically, though, the thing I focused on the least was the fact that I was going to be a trial lawyer. I viewed myself as a kind of policy maker in individual cases, if not on a broad-scale basis. When I took the job I suddenly realized, Now you're going to have to try lawsuits. You don't know anything about them. I didn't think of myself as a pub- lic speaker, and so it was quite an education to become a trial lawyer. MURPHY: During law school, hadn't you actually prosecuted a case? TUROW: I did. After my summer at the U.S. Attorney's Office I enrolled in the clinical program at Harvard, which is a NITA program for the first three weeks and then a clinical component. My placement was at the Suffolk County DA's office. I ended up trying my first jury case there, which was a so-called barking dog case. But it really was about a guy who had eight dogs in a city which says that you can only have three. MURPHY: We call other kinds of cases "barking dogs." TUROW: This is literally a barking dog case. The guy who was my supervisor there, a guy named Tim O'Neill, became in some very abstract ways some of the inspiration for Rusty Sabich. Tim said to me "Twenty years from now vou are still going to be talking about this barking dog case," and he was right! I talk about it all the time. The defendant was a man named Charlie McCarthy, of all things. Charlie's neighbors despised him. He had these eight dogs and they barked all the time and he had been tried and acquitted. He had been tried again, because of course each day was a new offense. He had the eight dogs on such and such a day and he was acquitted of that, so they took it and charged him with having eight dogs a month later and tried him again. We tried him at Christmas and of course it mistried. So he had been acquitted and mistried and no other assistant in the office would go near the case. It was then left to me to try Charlie. MURPHY: So did you get poor Charlie convicted? TUROW: Yeah, poor Charlie was convicted, although you have to bear in mind that this was the third jury trial that Charlie had had in a six month period in the Boston Municipal Court, which was just an amazingly overburdened court. The chief judge of the court tried the case. My closing argument lasted thirty minutes. The charge to the jury took forty-five. I mean, you never heard a simple ordinance explained more painstakingly and the jury's obligation to follow the law more carefully. Charlie was convicted. MURPHY: You mention that one of the inspirations for Rusty Sabich came out of your expeniences in the Suffolk County DA's Office. When did you actually start writing Presumed Innocent? TUROW: I began Presumed Innocent as near as I can recall sometime in 1979 and I really didn't know where I was going with it. I just wanted to write something that was in my own voice, that wasn't going to be terribly self-consciously literal and was going to be about the criminal justice system because I was already feeling very animated about it and that provided the initial inspiration for Presumed Innocent. But I really began writing just about characters and settings. I had this idea at the outset abou--as Lipranzer said--this naked dead lady, but that was about it. The voice for Rusty--didn't know who or what Rusty was, I knew that I wanted to do a narrative voice that vvas a little bit different than the traditional kind of hard-boiled American detective novel. But I had no idea where I was going with it. I just wrote every morning on the commuter train as I was on my way to work to be a prosecutor. MURPHY: And you did that from 1979 until when? TUROW: I did that from 1979 through about 1982 and I got to a point where there is a scene where Raymond Horgan hands Rusty Sabich the "B" File. I wrote it when the train was then pulling into the sta- tion downtown and I was sitting there looking at the thing thinking, "What in the hell is this? Where am I going with this?" I had no idea. I had a murder. I didn't know who had committed it. I had this elec- tion. I didn't know how it was going to turn out. Now I had this file. I had one more subplot and I didn't know what that meant. I put it aside for a couple of years and I meditated. I'd garden on Saturdays and I'd think about Presumed Innocent and what the plot would be, re- stucco the house and think about the plot, and after a couple of years in which I was really working on something else and thinking a lot about Presumed Innocent, I figured it out and then went back to it and wrote the end and then went back into the very beginning and wrote through it again. MURPHY: So you actually had written the book for about three years without knowing what the ending would be. TUROW: Oh, yes. It was 1984 before I knew what the end of Presumed Innocent was. It was about five years. MURPHY: Is there any part of Scott Turow in Rusty Sabich? TUROW: Oh, I am sure there's some part of Scott Turow in Rusty Sabich. I am not as quiet as he is. I am not as depressed. I am not as lonely. But there's certainly a lot of a similar worldview. There is no question about that. I am not as deprived as Rusty. MURPHY: Did you base the plot on an actual case? TUROW: I really didn't. Some of the inspiration for it, for the crime, came from cases that I saw. But those were authentic rape/murders, the cases that I saw in Boston. There was very much a question of having a finite starting point and just letting your imagination expand on it in an almost abstract fashion to see what a murder is. MURPHY: It is interesting that the crime in Presumed Innocent was different from any of the trials you had as a prosecutor. Did you find that difficult in the evidentiary part of it? TUROW: I didn't find it particularly difficult although I was very wor- ried that I wasn't accurate. I think that if Presumed Innocent came out any later it might not have been. I think that there have been signifi- cant advances made in sperm typing and things like that that didn't exist and still really weren't perfected by 1987 when the book came out. I think any year now Presumed Innocent is going to be outdated in terms of its forensic evidence; I did check and make sure I was accurate then. I mean, I had seen murder cases tried while I was in Boston but I hadn't actually done one as a prosecutor. MURPHY: There is a reference in the book to Nico Della Guardia and a case he had prosecuted involving a black physician charged with manslaughter for an abortion. I know there was such a case in Boston in the late 1970s. TUROW: There sure was. The background of Presumed Innocent as I said, the initial working points of Presumed Innocent , drew heavily from the experiences that I had in the Suffolk County DA's office. At the time that I was there, Garrett Byrne, who was an eighty-year-old man, was running against Newman Flanagan. Flanagan had come out of Borne's own office just in the same fashion that Nico comes out of Horgan's. The case that Flanagan had used to propel himself into notoriety was the Edelin murder/manslaughter case. A horrible, demagogic prosecution of this black physician who performed an abortion in a Catholic hospital. It excited all of the ugly passions of the folks in Boston with which you are undoubtedly well acquainted. Now, in the initial drafts of Presumed Innocent there were reams about this and it all ended shrunk down to a couple of lines. But it certainly provided a kind of Mecca. I never met Newman Flanagan and I have no idea whether Nico has any resemblance at all to Newman, because I just don't know him. MURPHY: Do you know if Ray Horgan has a resemblance to Garrett Byrne? TUROW: Well, I can say categorically he doesn't. I met Mr. Byrne and he was eighty years old when I worked there. I think he was eighty- four, as a matter of fact. Raymond, as the plot necessitates, is a some what more virile character. MURPHY: Did you have any of the same difficulty getting Presumed Innocent published as you had with your first novel? TUROW: No, Presumed Innocent had all of the good fortune that my ear- lier efforts had lacked and there were multiple bidders for Presumed Innocerrt. It's one of those books--and in some ways I stand apart from it; I stand apart from the phenomenon--that, for whatever rea- sons, seemed to excite people as soon as they read it. There were a number of editors throwing huge amounts of money at the manu- script. It was very exciting, a dizzying, amazing kind of experience. MURPHY: Were you surprised at the response? TUROW: No, I was shocked at the response. My hope had been that Pre- sumed Innocent would be published. When I sent it to New York I had entertained doubts about that. I really sat around and had discussions with my wife, Annette, about where I would go. "If this book isn't pub- lished, I'm just gonna give up. I'm not gonna keep doing it." And she'd say, "You don't mean that." "Yeah, I mean it. If this book isn't published, this is really not fair. This book's got a lot of commercial potential, you know, this book ought to be published." And she'd say, "It'll be pub- lished. Don't talk like that." But that's where my head was at. MURPHY: Any idea how many copies of Presumed Innocent have sold to date? TUROW: Well, let's see. Presumed Innocent sold in hardcover about 700,000 copies through Farrar, Straus. Three hundred thousand or 400,000 copies were sold by the Book Club, and Warner Books has now sold about 3.8, 3.9 million paperbacks, so we're talking some- where in the neighborhood of five million copies and that's in the United States and Canada. There are about sixteen foreign editions so there are a lot of copies of Presumed Innocent out there. MURPHY: With all those sales, there must be some plans for a movie. TUROW: Yeah, the movie rights were bought before publication by Sydney Pollack. He is the producer. A guy named Alan Pakula, who made Sophie's Choice and Parallax View and All the President's Men is going to direct it. They're casting about now, trying to get a screen play that everybody is satisfied with. MURPHY: Who would you like to see play Rusty Sabich? TUROW: I don't have a clear preference. There are lots of late 30-ish, early 40-ish-type guys in Hollywood who I think do a really good job. I mean, evervbody would do something different with the char- acter. Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, there are all kinds of different names that I have heard mentioned . . . Kevin Costner. Rusty's kind of an everyman in certain ways. I think the more interesting, question is, who plays Carolyn and that's a tough call. Were it my movie to cast I would start there. That is not the kind of thing that movie makers everywhere will do because they start with the box office. These days the male stars tend to be bigger stars than the female stars and that's where they are going to start. They want to secure their box office. MURPHY: Do you have any preferences for who would play Caroline? TUROW: I don't. I'm not sure that Imn familiar with all of the actresses in Hollwwood that might be available. I have heard somebody say Jane Fonda at one point and I thought that was kind of an interesting suggestion. Kathleen Turner is the most commonlv suggested. A lot of people mention Glenn Close, after Fatal Attraction. There have got to be other women who would be good but I think the point is that you have to start with her because the man has got to play off her. She's an elusive, difficult, interesting character. As Sydney Pollock said to me at one point, "Every man who walks into that theater is going to have his own fantasy of who Carolyn Polhemus is while I gotta pick one woman to play that part." MURPHY: Were you influenced in your writing by any particular author? TUROW: The influences on me are odd ones. The writers who I admired enormously were Saul Bellow, John Updike, Bernard Mala- mud, whose influence I think is probably invisible in Presumed Inno- cent. I think maybe a scholar would point out that Updike is an exponent of the present tense. I'm sure that's one of the places where I got that. Then, more in the adventure genre, there were people like Conrad and Graham Greene, whose books I admired enormously, and le Carre. That's my constellation, and that looks all the way across the night sky. I consider those people to be different kinds of writers although they are all realists of one kind or another. MURPHY: Were you ever influenced by the mystery writers like Hammett, Chandler? TUROW: The answer is no and I suppose that's surprising. I am not well read in Hammett. I've been through lots of Chandler and I like it. I admire it. But if you and I were to sit down with a Chandler novel, I would go through it page by page and point out to you things that I just don't like. I don't like the hard-boiled, unresponsive central figures of those books so they really didn't engage me like all of these other kind of very internal books that I was talking about before did. MURPHY: Last month you published an article in The New York Times Magazine called "Law School versus Reality, " in which you criticized the Socratic method used in law schools. TUROW: Well, the criticism of the Socratic method is old and it really goes back to One L. I don't feel, based on my observations of law schools, that the Socratic method has anywhere near the kind of choke hold on legal education that it did even ten or twelve years ago when I started. But I do feel that the methodology and the curricu- lum are in dire need of revision. There has been a lot of controversy that surrounded the publication of that article. I had all kinds of mail on it, particularly from law school teachers, some of whom think that I had absolutely no right, as somebody who is not a law school teacher, to comment on this. The theory being that since I'm not on the law school campus every day I must not know what I'm talking about. Other people think it's great. But I thought about this subject for many, many years because One L has made people sort of turn to me with their own law school experiences. And I feel strongly that the law schools, whatever their many virtues in teaching certain kinds of intellectual skills, fall down in training lawyers in the sense of instilling any kind of professional values. And by that I mean that they have really steered clear of a deep, complete contemplation of what it means to be an attorney. There's lots of thought about the law, but very little thought about the profession. I really think that's some thing that is severely lacking in the law school curriculum and it's something that ought to be, in and of itself, an area for examination. MURPHY: If you were the dean of a law school, what changes in the curriculum would you make? TUROW: I think the most significant change I would make is that I would move courses in professional responsibility into the first year. There are about ten or twelve law schools around the United States that do that. But certainly the first revision I would make is to move professional responsibility into the first-year curriculum and to begin at the threshold asking students what it means to be a layer. And the only way you answer that question, I think, is by defining the duties and responsibilities of an attorney. It just seems to me, as I said in that article, that's what you really want somebody to start thinking about the day they come through the door. Do you really want them to think about personal jurisdiction or do you want to say to them, "You've got a client. He's on trial for his life. He comes to you and says that he's gonna lie about what happened or he tells you a story that contradicts what happened before or he tells you a story that's somewhat inconsistent or he tells you a story that's slightly inconsis- tent." And to take people through to find for themselves what the responsibilities are. The reason I think that's important is there are so many lawyers who come out of law schools who are not equipped by the law schools to even confront what they end up dealing with in practice. I'm not talking about skills. The best way to learn to draft a contract is to draft a contract. That's not what I'm talking about; I'm talking about an intellectual framework that will let people think in advance about what they're going to be about as lawyers. And there is very little of that in law schools, at least to my observation. I refuse to defer to the law school faculty members who want to say that because I'm not on a law school campus every day I don't know what I'm talking about. I talk to plenty of law students; I hear about plenty of curricula, and I still think virtually all of them fall short of what I had in mind. * Reprinted by permission of the author |
