THE LAWYER AS
AMATEUR SLEUTH
William G. Tapply
As much as people claim to despise attorneys, their fascination with
lawyers and legal proceedings is apparently boundless. Contests
between prosecuting attorneys and criminal defense lawyers -- both actual
and fictional -- provide constant entertainment on television and in
movies and books. Lawyers are both heroes and villains.
In many cases (look no further than the O.J. Simpson trial), they threaten
to overshadow the criminals themselves. Sometimes, lawyers are
the criminals.
It’s no wonder,
then, that crime fiction abounds with lawyers. Criminal lawyers,
both prosecutors and defenders, make tried-and-true protagonists, both
for series by writers such as Earl Stanley Gardner and for the stand-alone
legal thrillers of best-selling authors like Scott Turow and John Grisham.
So I made a shrewd
choice when I invented my lawyer-sleuth Brady Coyne, right? He’s
a character designed for the long haul, a lawyer who has found himself
in a position to investigate enough different crimes to keep me writing
about him for nearly twenty years. At last count, I have managed
to squeeze eightteen novels out of him.
Well, wrong, actually.
I wasn’t shrewd at all. I didn’t create Brady with anything
more in mind than getting me through one novel.
Maybe I had some good
instincts. But mainly, I was lucky.
Perhaps if I’d
taken myself more seriously as a writer when I was trying to put together
my first book, I would’ve made different decisions and Brady would
have turned out to be a very different (and possibly less interesting)
character. I know plenty of mystery writers who say they thought
long and hard about their protagonist before they ever started writing,
and that they had a series in mind when they created him in their first
book. They were smarter than me. They understood that the
first book in any series is a template for all that might follow.
A series protagonist, once created, cannot be changed. He can
grow and evolve, of course, the way we all do. But basic decisions
about job, lifestyle, personal history, and character, once made, are
forever. Bad decisions in the first book make for a short-lived
series.
I wasn’t thinking
about a series. I just hoped my first novel would be published.
I didn’t honestly expect it, though. Publishing a novel was
a crazy fantasy for an anonymous middle-aged high-school history teacher.
If getting one novel published was too much to hope for, what would
be the point of worrying about a series?
I just wanted to write
that one book. I had a good idea for a story, I thought, but I
made dozens of false starts. Sometimes I wrote several chapters,
sometimes an opening chapter, sometimes just a few lines, before it
all came crashing to a halt. For one reason or another, none of
them seemed to work. My problem was, I didn’t know whose
story it should be. I had a murder victim and I had a murderer.
I knew their story. But I needed a protagonist, a sleuth, someone
with a logical reason to investigate the crime.
Early one summer morning
-- July 15, 1981, to be precise, the day before my forty-first birthday
-- I began still another version of my story’s beginning. This
time, for the first time, I found myself writing in the first person.
It sounded pretty good, and after writing a couple of pages, I paused
and asked myself: “Who is this ‘I’ who’s narrating
the story?”
Well, let’s make
him the lawyer. There’s a lawyer in the story.
Okay.
I wrote a couple more
pages of what seemed to be a prologue, and I discovered that this as
yet unnamed narrator liked trout fishing and played golf. No surprise.
I liked trout fishing, and I played golf. He smoked cigarettes.
So did I. Okay, so this guy was something like me.
Except, of course,
he was a lawyer.
But what kind of lawyer?
Certainly not a criminal lawyer. This guy couldn’t possibly
appear in a courtroom. I was not a lawyer, and I had no appetite
for learning all the technicalities of criminal procedure. This
lawyer could never be another Perry Mason.
A family lawyer, then.
A generalist. A lawyer who did his business over the phone or
across a conference table, the way my lawyer friends told me that ninety-percent
of a lawyer’s business is actually conducted in the real world.
So I wrote, “It
had seemed at the time like a routine matter for her family’s attorney.
I could settle estates with my eyes closed.”
I wrote the entire
prologue before it occurred to me that I had to give this lawyer a name.
Well, a lawyer named Brady Coyne had made an appearance in an unpublished
(and undoubtedly unpublishable) short story I’d written a couple
of years earlier. I couldn’t remember where the name had
come from, but it seemed like a good enough name, so I went with it.
I could always change it later if something better occurred to me.
Early in that story,
what turned out to be the moment of truth -- not just for that novel,
but for the seventeen others that have followed it so far -- arrived
when Florence Gresham, Brady’s elderly client, asked him to look
into the mysterious death of her son.
Brady, who was an honest
and candid man, replied:
“It’s not
really my line. Perhaps a private investigator . . .”
Florence could have
answered, “You’re right. I’ll call a private investigator.”
In fact, I remember considering the unassailable logic of that reply.
It was, I thought, what most people would say.
I stopped typing.
It looked like another false start for my story. Florence hires
a private eye. End of my lawyer-protagonist. End of Brady
Coyne.
I came that close to
writing a private-eye novel. But something held me back.
It just seemed too pat, too easy. I wanted an amateur sleuth,
someone whose reasons for agreeing to pursue an investigation would
be interesting and complicated and worth thinking about. I couldn’t
have articulated it at the time, but I wasn’t interested in a professional
investigator whose primary motivation for solving a crime was simply
that it was his job.
I wanted a sleuth
readers could identify with. An amateur, like most of them.
So instead of having
Florence agree to hire a private investigator, here’s what I wrote:
“No!” she
said with a vigorous shake of her head. “No sleazy private
eyes. None of those trench coat-and-cigar types. I want
you, Brady Coyne.”
“Oh, come on,
Florence. They’re not all like that.”
“The Greshams,”
she said, “do not hire private investigators. They retain
attorneys.”
There it was.
That was my template. Brady might be a professional lawyer, but
he would be an amateur sleuth. Later, when I created new adventures
for him, I also created clients who were, like Florence Gresham, the
type of people who would “retain attorneys” rather than hire
“sleazy private eyes.”
And so for this story
-- which was the only story I was thinking about -- Brady
would be the type of lawyer who did as an amateur what private investigators
did professionally. He looked into things because his clients
asked him to.
By the time I wrote
DEAD MEAT, Brady’s fifth “case,”
I had a pretty clear understanding of who this lawyer-as-amateur sleuth
was and why he kept getting hired to conduct investigations:
“Vern Wheeler
was typical of my clientele. He was old, smart, eccentric, and
rich. I’ve found that most rich people tend to be old, smart,
and eccentric. I like them best when they’re all of those
things. In fact, I specialize in solving the legal problems of
old, smart, eccentric, rich people. They rarely come to me for
specialized expertise or courtroom savoir faire. When they do,
I help them find it elsewhere than the office of Brady L. Coyne, Attorney-at-Law.
Mostly they come to me because I offer a surprisingly rare commodity:
discretion.
“I am discreet
as hell. I can’t help it. I can’t take credit
for it. It’s my nature. It’s how I was raised.
Or perhaps it’s in my cautious WASP genes. I am always surprised
how old, smart, eccentric, rich people want to pay me lots of money
for this accident of my personality.”
All of my novels are
launched, in one way or another, by clients who value Brady’s discretion,
not his legal expertise. They tend to be rich and elderly, people
with family secrets, public figures who don’t want their names
in the newspapers. People who are prime targets for blackmail,
kidnapping, betrayal, theft, murder. Potential victims.
People with problems.
Brady’s clients
are generally his friends as well. If they’re not friends,
Brady doesn’t work for them. But since they’re his friends,
he’s willing to do things that go beyond his legal expertise.
All of this more or
less occurred to me -- at least subconsciously -- when Florence Gresham
told Brady that she wanted him, not some “sleazy private eye.”
At that moment, my character was really born.
Brady is a lone-wolf
attorney, a one-man law firm. He can do whatever he wants.
He can accept a case or reject it, take on a client or fire him.
He’s accountable to no one except Julie, his secretary, who provides
periodic reality checks (and ongoing conflict) by hounding him to keep
his appointments and increase his billable hours.
In SCAR TISSUE,
Brady observes that Julie “chose all the furnishings and appointments
for our suite of offices and arranged them to create the illusion that
I am a smart, powerful, wealthy, and in-demand Boston attorney. . .
.
“The fact is,
I am smart enough, and I have no interest in accruing any more power
or wealth than I already have. I have as many clients as I want,
which is considerably fewer than I could handle if I really wanted to
work hard. The demand for my services is greater than my supply
of enthusiasm for performing them. I’ll trade billable hours
for a day of trout fishing any time.”
Brady can do estates,
wills and divorces “with my eyes closed.” When
he was in law school (he went to Yale), he aspired to argue important
constitutional issues before the Supreme Court, and, frankly, he finds
most of this routine family-law business unchallenging and boring.
He continues doing it because it pays well and gives him the leisure
to go fishing when he wants to.
He jumps at any interesting
case that promises a break from the routine.
Brady is no hard-bitten
gumshoe. He’s as likely to walk the tree-lined streets of
the Boston suburbs, or the dirt roads of rural Maine, or the cobblestone
sidewalks of Beacon Hill, as the mean streets. He has no particular
training or talent for detecting -- just intelligence, a modicum of
courage, commitment to his friends, passion for justice, respect for
the law, diligence, honesty, fallibility, a sense of humor . . . and
discretion. He has neither the cynical world view of some private
eyes nor the excessive honor of others.
He is, in other words,
like you, gentle reader, and he’s very much like me. I’d
rather have you identify with him than admire him. He’s not
bigger than life. He’s just about life-sized.
As I kept writing that
first novel, new questions kept popping up. I answered them one
at a time, as needed. It was a random, arbitrary, often whimsical
process. I had fun doing it.
Was Brady married?
Well, no. It would be more interesting, I thought, not to tie
him down to a single relationship. It would be fun for me
to imagine and write about his encounters with women. Maybe even
a discreet sex scene here and there . . .
As it worked out in
this first story, a relationship with a woman became central to the
plot, and Brady’s woman troubles have continued to be fun for plots
and sub-plots ever since.
But, I decided, he
had been married. He was divorced, and he had a complicated ongoing
relationship with his ex wife. I gave him two half-grown sons
(who have aged eight or nine years in the twenty years since that first
book). Joey has been a sophomore at Stanford for several years
now. Billy, a college drop-out, is an Idaho fishing guide in the
summer and a ski instructor in the winter. Brady doesn’t
see much of his boys. He misses them.
A few chapters into
the story, it was time for Brady to go home. So where did this
divorced Boston lawyer with an office in Copley Square live? I
knew his home would reveal a good deal about his character.
This is what came out
of my fingers when I sent Brady home:
“The Harborside
apartment complex rises against the waterfront near the old Commercial
Wharf, right off Atlantic Avenue. I live in apartment 6E.
Two bedrooms, a living-dining combination, and a closet they call a
kitchenette, all for $980 a month. At one end of the living-dining
room are floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors which open onto a balcony
with a rusted wrought-iron railing. There’s room for two
vinyl-covered aluminum folding chairs and a hibachi. I sit on
one of the chairs when I want to drink Jack Daniel’s and watch
the sailboats drift on the harbor and think solitary thoughts, which
I do almost every evening. I use the hibachi on those rare occasions
when I have invited a guest to sample my cuisine. I’m damn
good at charcoal cooking, though I find it hardly worth the effort when
I’m alone. Usually I feed myself a frozen pizza or a can
of Dinty Moore beef stew.
“I use one of
my two bedrooms for sleeping. My double bed is one of the few
pieces of furniture I own. I need an extra-firm, orthopedic mattress
to keep my vertebrae flexing properly. The rest of the stuff I
rent from a guy named Burke who, I think, gives kickbacks to the realtor.
“The other bedroom
contains most of my worldly possessions: cartons of books I probably
will never get around to unpacking, a broken vacuum cleaner, a pair
of large speakers -- Gloria kept the stereo; I got the speakers -- a
tool box, a table saw, a ten-speed bike with flat tires, an ironing
board. Artifacts, mostly, of my other life.
“The things I
really care about I store in the living room where I can keep in touch
with them. That’s where I have set up my fly-tying table
and cabinets of bucktail, wood duck breasts, hackle necks, tinsel, yarn,
thread and hooks. I keep my felt-soled waders there, too, and
my rack of split-bamboo rods, and the shelf for my reels. And
in the corner, where I can pull out the five iron or the putter, stands
my bag of MacGregor M.T. Tourneys.”
His rent has probably
skyrocketed since 1981. Otherwise, Brady has stayed right there
in Apartment 6E.
Show don’t tell
-- the fiction-writer’s most important motto. This passage
describing the place and its location and the catalog of objects found
in it identified Brady. It showed what he valued and how he lived,
and it revealed a good deal about his personal history which, up to
that point, I had not considered. Writing this passage helped
me to fix Brady in my mind. It made him specific. It revealed
him to be a rootless, solitary, even lonely man, a man in transition.
Anything could happen to a man who lived this way.
I especially liked
the Dinty Moore touch. Boston, I thought, already had enough fictional
gourmet sleuths. A good breakfast for Brady was the leftovers
from take-out Chinese, all the half-filled cartons dumped into a big
cast-iron skillet and stirred together on the stove. He drank
Schlitz beer, and his idea of home-cooked Hungarian goulash was
opening a can and adding his own paprika. When he had company,
he could always grill burgers on his balcony.
Although I didn’t
allow myself to take it seriously, I was thinking, at least subconsciously,
of creating a protagonist for the long haul.
A man’s leisure
pursuits reveal a lot about him. Brady was a passionate fly fisherman
-- mainly because I was a passionate fly fisherman, and I knew I could
write knowledgeably about it without doing any research. But I
also recognized that fly fishing is a solitary, contemplative pursuit,
and when it’s done passionately, it requires the same kinds of
intense problem-solving and scrupulous attention to detail that investigating
murders requires. And so, as the series evolved, fly fishing became
a kind of on-going metaphor.
I put Brady’s
apartment on the waterfront -- one of those random, whimsical decisions
when I first wrote it, but one that revealed itself as significant.
Brady, the fisherman, has a strong affinity for water. Water,
in fact, plays an important role in many of his cases. George
Gresham, the victim in that first novel, died when he plunged -- jumped?
got pushed? -- off a cliff into the ocean. Numerous other murder
victims in my stories are found in water -- ponds, rivers, oceans, even
swimming pools -- apparently drowned. More often than not, there
is another, more insidious, cause of death.
Brady himself encounters
danger in water several times. In FOLLOW THE SHARKS
he is swept off his feet by the powerful currents of the Deerfield River.
In THE VULGAR BOATMAN he is thrown
off a fishing boat into the ocean at night and must swim several miles
to shore. In CUTTER’S RUN
he becomes seriously ill when he wades in a stream that is contaminated
with deadly chemicals.
The seeds for all of
these events were planted in my very first novel.
In fact, the seeds
for the seventeen novels that have followed that first one (which we
ended up calling DEATH AT CHARITY’S POINT)
were all sown that July morning in 1981 when I began writing in the
first person and invented Brady Coyne.
Oh, Brady has evolved
in the twenty years since I created him. He’s aged a few
years (not many). He’s stopped playing golf (I’m not
sure when that happened), and his passion for fly fishing, like mine,
has intensified. He’s had several relationships with women
-- including Gloria, his ex wife. I certainly didn’t see
that one coming, and it was fun resolving it.
Relationships continue to trouble him. He admits he doesn’t
understand women. He’s tried -- and failed -- to quit smoking.
He’s switched his favorite brand of bourbon and bought a couple
of new cars. He’s killed two men with the Smith & Wesson
.38 that he kept in his office safe in that first story. He’s
pursued cases on behalf of bankers and politicians and athletes, judges
and Vietnam veterans and fellow lawyers, college professors and television
personalities and ministers. They are all both his clients and
his friends, and most of them are old, eccentric, smart and rich.
Every one of them, in one way or another, repeats the words that Florence
Gresham spoke: “No sleazy private eyes. I want you,
Brady Coyne.”
I wish I could say
that I knew what I was doing twenty years ago when I put those words
in Florence’s mouth.
But I guess it worked
out okay.
