Legal thriller author David Ellis’s day job? Appellate court justice

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles of the A BA Journal, and today I’m joined by judge and author David Ellis to talk about his new book. The Best Lies. David, thanks so much for joining us.

David Ellis:

Oh, thanks for having me, Lee. It’s great to be here. Great talking with you.

Lee Rawles:

So I love getting to speak to fiction writers in addition to all of the nonfiction writers we discuss, and one of the things that fascinates me about legal professionals who then also go on to write legal thrillers is it doesn’t feel like a total escape. So I would love for you to talk about what drives you to make your writing life and your legal professional life complimentary in this way.

David Ellis:

Yeah, it’s funny, you talk to anyone who’s a trial lawyer and they will usually describe themselves as a storyteller because when you’re delivering your case to a jury, you’re telling ’em a story. People are accustomed to receiving things as stories basically from birth. We’re told stories when we’re little kids. We watch stories on television, we read stories in books and trial lawyers like to do that to cabin their approach in that way. And I think it’s an effective way and it seems like kind of a natural thing for people who have been doing that for a living to want to move on to writing fiction. It’s not that big of a jump. I didn’t feel like it was a huge jump for me personally. I was writing stories since I was a kid, long before I was a lawyer. People always say, how’d you become a writer?

And my answer is, I was a writer first. I just forgot about it for about 20 years. I mean, once they stopped requiring creative writing in school, which was about middle school, maybe the end of middle school, and then it stopped high school, college, law school, nobody was asking me to write creatively and I wasn’t doing it on my own. And the next thing I knew I’d been a lawyer for several years and I was having one of those moments where you watch the sunset, right? You’re on vacation, you got a drink in your hand, your toes are in the sand, and you’re thinking about your life and I thought you used to love to write. Why did you stop? And I didn’t have a good reason and so I made the deal then with myself that I was actually going to write a book.

I wasn’t just going to think about it, I wasn’t just going to cobble together a few chapters, but I was going to have the discipline to write an hour a day during a busy legal career until I got a book done. And I’m so glad that I did and I’m proud that I forced my way through that because there’s a million reasons not to write a book, mostly because the odds of getting published are slim, but I did it and whatever awards, whatever success I’ve had, what I am proudest of is that I saw it through the first time. And one of the reasons I like to tell that story, Lee, is that I think even today I see in the curriculum of high schools and middle schools and certainly college, there’s no creative writing. We make room for athletics, we make room for music.

Everybody’s got music programs in their schools, but no one’s making you do creative writing. And so if you see that in your child, if you see that in your grandchild, you may have to foster that at home. I do that with my children. One of my children in particular really likes to write. I think she could be another writer in the family, but I need to push that with her and encourage her independently not happening in school. But yeah, in terms of how I’m able to do that, it’s really Lee being on the appellate court. My whole job, my whole work product is a written legal opinion. I’m not trying cases at the trial level. Most of your listeners will know appellate judges just write opinions. That’s the only way we speak. And so writing an appellate opinion is not terribly different from writing fiction in both cases. If you’re doing a good job, you try to connect with your reader, you’re focusing on the audience, are they going to understand what you’re saying? I don’t ever want anyone when they’re reading a book of mine to get lost and say, what’s going on? I got mixed up. If that happens, that’s a fail as the writer, but that’s also a fail as a judge.

Lee Rawles:

Just to jump in there. Speaking as a reader, I actually had that thought The best lies takes place across multiple timelines and from multiple points of view. And yet as a reader, I did always feel like I knew where I was, what was happening? Well, not always what was happening, there are many twists and turns, but I didn’t feel dislocated. And when I read an appellate opinion from a talented jurist who lays out the facts of the case in a way that I can understand it, and as you know it’s reached the appellate level probably because it’s very complex. And so I did think to myself, he is plotting out all of these multiple timelines, character points of views, et cetera. I wonder if his work writing judicial opinions has an impact there.

David Ellis:

I think they compliment each other. I think they reinforce each other, and when I’m writing a judicial opinion, I’m very aware of the reader and are they going to be able to follow this? Is this making sense? And we’ve all read appellate opinions that are very long-winded and bogged down with unnecessary detail. I try to cut through the stuff you don’t need to know and just cut to the chase of what you do need to know and explain it in the clearest way possible. I mean, if there’s one word that would sum up my appellate opinions, at least as I try to make them, I hope everyone who reads them agrees. But my big thing is I want them to be clear. I want you to know exactly what I’m saying and not get lost. I think I owe that to the parties and I owe that because I’m creating precedent to the lawyers and judges who are going to try to apply what I’m doing. Same thing with fiction. You’re right, it’s a complex book and it takes a lot of work to make sure that you’re not moving too fast or too abruptly and losing the reader because if you do that really is a pretty big fail. I’m glad you were able to follow it. That’s a very important thing to me when I’m writing.

Lee Rawles:

I wondered whether you had the kind of board up a whiteboard with red yarn or a timeline, how you were able to keep track while writing, okay, well, this is what this person knows at this point, this is what this person knows at this point,

David Ellis:

Surprisingly, most of that stays in my head. I know people who have these boards where they lay everything out. I don’t do that. I take notes as I go. I don’t really outline a lot beforehand, but I do outline as I’m writing. And so if in chapter four, three things happened, I’ll put them in a little outline. Okay, chapter four was this so I can remember what I’ve already told the reader, but in terms of what the character knows and is going to reveal later or what I know and I’m going to reveal later, I for some reason tend to keep that in my head. I’m not really sure why, but I seem to be able to do that.

Lee Rawles:

Well, I think this is a great time to introduce through the listeners to what the plot is of the best lies, to the extent that we are not spoiling it, because I myself enjoyed the multitude of reveals and I don’t want to ruin that. But when we open, we are meeting Leo Balanoff. Can you describe this character to listeners, and this is just so people have an idea about your output. You have written 11 books as this sole author and then nine other books with James Patterson, a former guest of the Modern Law Library. So this is book 11. It’s a standalone, at least at the moment. I personally thought there could be potential for future stories just saying David, but could you introduce us to Leo Balanoff as we meet him at the start of this book, the Best Lies?

David Ellis:

Absolutely. And that’s how my whole idea for the book began. I’ve learned over the years, Lee, that I’m at my best when I start with a character that I really want to spend time with. I think that is crucial. And then I build out that character’s background and then that background usually plays part of a role of the plot, if not most of the plot. That seems to be how I roll these days, and that’s what I did here. I started by saying, what do I want from this character? And I first decided I wanted to write a book about a pathological liar. I’d never seen it before. I think that that area of psychology is super interesting. And when you write these books, you write about deception, you write about lies. And so I thought, I’m just going to start with this guy being a pathological liar.

What can I do that? I made him a lawyer and a crusading lawyer. Leo is in addition to being a diagnosed pathological liar, a crusader who will stop at almost nothing to right a wrong in the justice system. He has what I call an oversized sense of justice. And so that gets him into trouble because he’ll try to get somebody off charges who he knows is innocent and he’ll take steps to do it, that will get him jammed up. As the book opens, it’s not really a spoiler. In the first chapter, one of these things that Leo has done has gotten him charged with murder of a very, very bad person. And to extricate himself from that predicament, the government makes him work undercover to catch an even worse person. And so I think the initial idea for the book was to take this pathological liar and throw him in the middle of an undercover investigation.

So he’s got to please two sides at the same time. And what is a pathological liar going to do when he has to please both sides at the same time? That was really how it started. And that really is in a nutshell, without spoilers the gist of the book, it was incredible fun to write. It was hard, but it was when you start like that, you start with so many possibilities and how you’re going to play people against each other and deception. And it really in some ways that made the plot open up for me more than I could have dreamed.

Lee Rawles:

Another character who is so important to the book and to Leo himself is Andy Pietrowski. I hope I’m saying her name, the way you picture it being said. Could you talk a little bit about her, because you said Leo occurred to you first. How did Andy come to you?

David Ellis:

So without giving too much away, it really is, it’s always hard for me to talk about my books to people who haven’t read them because if I try to describe the book to you, invariably half the things I say are going to not be true. But given her role in the book, I needed Andy to be a loner. I needed her to be somebody who grew up a loner, somebody who always felt like an outcast. And so I created a character, a woman who is in fact biracial and grew up on the south side of Chicago at a time where being biracial was not a very easy way to grow up. And I knew that because I know somebody who is exactly like Andy in that she grew up as a biracial woman on the south side of Chicago. And we read a bunch of articles about how people have dealt with that. It’s in many ways, according to everything I’ve heard and learned, it’s harder than being black or being white is being a mix. And so I thought that really fit the bill for her because I needed her to be a loner. I needed her to feel like she didn’t necessarily fit in. That character worked beautifully against Leo and it seemed to work very well for the book. People seem to be responding to her. I love Andy. She might be my favorite character in the book,

Lee Rawles:

And Andy has this law enforcement background, but she’s currently working in security, specifically industry, trying to protect against international sort of industry espionage. She’s hired as this security figure, and I really loved feeling like I was learning a little bit about some of these counter industrial and espionage things and what it would be like to have this industry security job, et cetera. And I’m curious about the research you did into that.

David Ellis:

I tried to learn everything I can about corporate espionage and what would happen in today’s world, Lee, one of the biggest revelations I got, and I say this in the book, I got it from somebody who is an attorney for a big pharmaceutical company, and this book, Andy works for a pharmaceutical company, and he said to me, the hardest thing about protecting against corporate espionage, other companies or countries stealing your technology is that the people who are creating the technology, the scientists and the doctors and the PhDs, these people by definition are not secretive. They’re collaborative. They want to talk about it and they want to talk about it to anybody who will listen. And you want to tell them, don’t talk about it, don’t use your phones, don’t text anybody about it. But if you put too many clamps on these individuals, they won’t want to work for your company.

You have to keep them in that somewhat innocent stage of wanting to discover. And part of their process is talking about it with each other. And so you try to say things to them like You can’t use your phones, or We have to put you in some kind of a skiff, one of these secured compartmented information facilities so that you can’t email it out or people can’t listen in, they can’t eavesdrop, but it’s a constant tension. I thought that was really interesting because I always thought, I always pictured some state-of-the-art facility where some space door opens and closes behind you and you go into these rooms and do your work and come out and don’t say anything when in fact these people really are busting at the seams to talk about their work. So important to them.

Lee Rawles:

Well, anyone who’s ever been say at a hotel at the same time as an academic convention, the conversation’s happening everywhere, elevators and at the hotel bar, and they are so excited. And having to put the kibosh in it must be difficult interpersonally.

David Ellis:

And that’s something that wouldn’t have occurred to me had I not researched it. But that’s why you do research because people can give you the practicalities of something like that, and it always makes sense once they tell it to you, it just didn’t occur to you. So yeah, the book isn’t all about industrial espionage, but certainly there’s an aspect of it. And it was a challenge because I know more than enough, but I don’t know what the experts know. And I had to figure out a way to smuggle something very valuable out of a company. And it was great fun. It was hard, it was a challenge, but I think we did it in a way that worked really well.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with David Ellis about his book, the Best Lies. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles here with David Ellis. And David, we are just talking about researching of corporate espionage. It’s just an element in the best lies. And I have to ask, another element that certainly pops up is the Estonian mob, and there are small snatches of Estonian in the book, a hot tip for listeners who are reading it, you can use the Google Translate app on your phone. It has Estonian available. You can pop it up, see what the characters are talking about, but perhaps you are a fluent speaker of this language. If not, how do you as a writer make sure that you are getting correct phrasing? Is that part of the editorial process? Do you have a friend who could do this for you? I just was interested in that. It’s

David Ellis:

Usually all the above. Lee in this case, I did not have a friend who spoke a stone in and no, I do not speak Estonian, but I triple and quadruple checked. I mean, I certainly would start with something like a Google translate to make sure I was getting literally the words correct. I would watch videos or read things online where people talk about idioms and slang so I could try to get the slang right. And then of course there is proofreaders afterwards who are looking up every word and making sure I’m getting it right. I can never be 100% certain I got every little thing. And it’s not a lot of Estonian. There’s just maybe a couple of chapters where it’s featured, but nevertheless, you don’t want somebody to say, yeah, you really screwed that up. Nobody from Estonia would ever say that. I dunno why I care about that, because the number of people who are reading this book who are fluent in Estonian, I assume is pretty small, but you try to get everything right in a book if you can. I mean, you make, I guess, creative exceptions. If something like you were writing a Courtroom scene, you might want to make some little changes to make it more dramatic. But in things like that, like corporate espionage or Estonian, to me, I try to get it exactly right. I think I did. Everyone tells me I did.

Lee Rawles:

The next thing I’d love to talk about is sense of place because you and I actually share very similar academic backgrounds. We both did undergrad at the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana and so did Leo Balanoff and then graduate school in Northwestern University. So many of the places I felt sometimes you’re saying absolutely places in the real world that I recognize exist, especially around Chicago. But there are other times where I think to myself, this must be a pseudonym, and I think I may even have a guess. For example, is there’s a scene that happens in a bar in Champaign Urbana, and I thought to myself, is that really Daniels? Things like that. But I’d love to talk about when you are constructing your story, how do you decide whether to use a place that exists and that you know well? And you can go and you can look at the street names, et cetera, and when you need to develop a place that is not currently existing, but it’s extremely believable, and here I’m talking about a lot of this action takes place in a Chicago neighborhood called Deemer Park. This is not a place that exists. So how do you make the decision about when you’re going to locate it very strongly in, no, this is a real place, it really exists. Here’s the map, and I need this to be a place where I have a little more creative license.

David Ellis:

And I wish I could tell you it was a science and not an art, but it’s an art, not a science in terms of I can’t give you some general rule that I follow. I think when I was picking the town and I created Deemer Park, I think Deemer Park would look familiar to somebody who knows the south suburbs of Chicago. But there was enough corruption in that police department that I thought since I live here and I’m a judge and I’m a judge for all of Cook County, I’m in the first appellate district and our state is divided into five appellate districts, but Cook County is so huge. It’s its own district, and Cook County includes many of the suburbs south of Chicago. It would’ve included Deemer Park or any town that I was maybe mimicking as a sitting judge, I have to think, do I want to name a town and call it corrupt in my book? And I thought, not in terms of restaurants or things like that. And you mentioned CO Daniels in Champagne. I think the name of that bar in the book probably mimics CO Daniels. The actual layout of theBar was really more mimicking r and r Sports Grill, if you remember r and r,

Lee Rawles:

Very vaguely. But yes, I do.

David Ellis:

I worked at r and r Sports Grill for a while in the kitchen. So when Leo, as a college student was in the kitchen peeking out and seeing this beautiful woman named Andy, I didn’t actually ever peek out and look at a beautiful girl. Maybe I did, but that person in the kitchen was once me, but I just changed the name because I guess I just didn’t see the need to use a real name. I guess I didn’t give it a lot of thought. If somebody had said, you should call it RR Sports Grill or Co Daniels, you might’ve been able to talk me into it. I don’t think I put a ton of thought into it, but Deemer Park I did for the reasons I gave. I can’t completely forget that I am a sitting appellate judge right now. And so if I’m going to say something that could be ascribed to that part of my life, I have to be very careful. So

Lee Rawles:

It would be difficult to look at the chief of the Beverly Police Department and say, oh, no, no, I wasn’t saying that your police department was really making these poor decisions.

David Ellis:

Right. And in the book I wrote before this Look closer, I basically characterized Oak Park and River Forest, but I didn’t call ’em that for the very same reason because I didn’t. I talked a lot about the police force in this little town, which was basically river forest, but if I literally did that, then they would maybe have a gripe with me and I know some of them. So it’s those kinds of practicalities, Lee. It’s really nothing beyond that.

Lee Rawles:

Well, let’s talk about the rhythm of both of your professional lives. Obviously you have your commitments to the first district appellate courts, and then you have this very impressive, to me output of fiction books. Obviously, I’m sure every day very much varies, but in general, what is the rhythm of say your work week? When are you able to devote yourself to fiction writing and when do you need to put on the robe and pick up the pen for that aspect of your job?

David Ellis:

So I do need a rhythm and a routine, or I would go crazy. I get up at an ungodly hour. I get up at three 30 in the morning and I write until seven, and that’s it for writing, except maybe on the weekends. But I’ve still got kids that are all young, so my weekends are usually tied up with my kids going to baseball games or violin recitals, what have you. The time that is always devoted to fiction writing is three 30 in the morning until usually seven with school back in. One of my daughters now has to get up at six 30, so maybe it cuts off even a little earlier, but that’s it. I’m a judge. Once that time has passed, my wife is getting up, my children are getting up. Then I spend the day as a judge. I work eight to whatever I would like to say, eight to five.

It’s probably later than five, but I work the full workday as a judge, and I talk to my clerks and I write my opinions and do my work. I don’t write during that time. I wish I had more time to write books, but I feel like being a judge is a serious commitment. If I were just working in private practice for myself, then I could do whatever I wanted and cut back on my time and say, oh, I’m going to spend the whole morning writing books, but I’m not. I’m a public officer. And so I feel like that wouldn’t be appropriate for me to do that. So yeah, so that’s it. I get about three and a half hours a day of writing, and I try to pack as much in as I can, get myself out of bed and working. Fortunately, I enjoy it, right? If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t be able to get up that early and do it.

Lee Rawles:

One thing I would love to discuss, I mentioned James Patterson appeared on this show earlier this year, and he is a pistol. He is fun. But when you are involved in that collaborative process, and let’s say it’s three 30 in the morning and you’re ready to get to work, but he is in a different time zone, he maybe having different rhythms. How has that gone? Obviously it must be going okay because the two of you have written nine books together

David Ellis:

And boy, I think it’s more than nine at this point. I’ve lost track. It’s probably it could be in the double digits at this point. Yeah, we just keep cranking ’em out. He’ll reach out to me when it’s convenient for him, and that’s usually, yeah, sometime during the day we’ll talk for 15 minutes about pages that I’ve submitted, and he’ll give me his thoughts on what we need to do differently or whether the pages I submitted are just fine, in which case, let’s go on to the next group. And he’s very involved in it. Jim creates the ideas for the stories. He plots them out chapter by chapter. He calls ’em scenes, but scenes chapters. He’ll have an idea for every scene of the book and what he wants it to look like, and I’ll write it a few chapters at a time and give it to him and then we’ll talk about it.

The best analogy I could give is if I were an actor and he were the director, the director and the screenplay writer, his idea, I’m acting it out, and then he tells me whether I acted it out well enough or not. And if I didn’t act out the scene well enough, he’ll say, okay, let’s do that scene again, Dave, good job. But I need it to be a little tighter. I need more drama. I wasn’t feeling this tension. I want this character to sing more, whatever it may be, and then I’ll do it again. And by the way, it’s a masterclass when I talk to the guy, the guy knows so much about writing and so much about delivering the promise to the reader that he makes, and I’ve just learned so much. I feel like every time we talk, I’m taking a class.

Lee Rawles:

Well, one of the things I really loved that you said early on in our conversation is how important it is to create a space for young people to work on creative writing to see if that’s something that calls to them. And one cause that is extremely dear to James Patterson famously is his crusade for juvenile literacy campaigns. I’m just curious, would you ever contemplate, you have a very busy schedule, but would you contemplate developing a program to promote creative writing for children somewhat like he has done for literacy campaigns?

David Ellis:

Yeah, I would love to do something like that, and I wish I had the platform that he has, but you can create a platform, I suppose. Yeah, I think something like that would be a great idea because I believe in it strongly, and I think there’s a lot of people out there who have untapped potential, and I’ve lost count of the number of people, and a lot of them lawyers as we discussed, but a lot of them non-lawyers who’ve said, yeah, I’ve always wanted to write a book. And I say, well then write it. And they say, well, but I don’t know how to do this or that. I said, I didn’t know how to write a book. When I started writing a book, I had taken your basic garden variety English honors classes in high school. I did not study literature in college. I was a finance major. Law school doesn’t teach you how to creatively write, at least not that kind of creatively. And so I just taught myself how to write. I just started doing it, and I had, the only skill I really had Lee was the ability to know that my writing wasn’t good enough yet to be objective about my own work. And some people can’t be objective about their own work, and if they can’t, they need somebody else to tell them that they trust who will be blunt.

Lee Rawles:

And I did want to ask you, you mentioned the experience of sitting in the sand and realizing I want this to be part of my life’s work, and that you then started was the first book you wrote, the first book you published? Yeah. Oh, okay. Great. Because I have also spoken to people who say, no, the first book I published was the third or fourth book I wrote, and they needed that experience, and sometimes they could go back and rework earlier manuscripts, but I would love to hear about that first book, which I have not read. What was your first book?

David Ellis:

It was called Line of Vision, and it was a first person, completely first person, one point of view narrative, a legal thriller, a murder mystery. That’s kind of what I write. I think of it. I think what made the book special was it was a psychological thriller, but it just came from my passion and my imagination just really what I wanted to write, something that I would want to read. And at that time, I had no expectations. Nobody knew was doing it. Nobody was saying, Hey, Dave, where’s your book? Nobody knew who I was. And so there was a purity to that that I could just do whatever I wanted. But I’ll tell you, Lee, that may have been my first book, but I rewrote it so many times. It’s almost like I wrote the same book three times. I mean, the final version that I submitted bore no resemblance to the first draft.

I think I changed every single word. I went from third person to first person. I went from multiple point of view to one point of view learning as I went and getting better at writing, building those muscles, and I finally got to something I was proud of, and then of course, I got turned down by just about every literary agent out there. Another thing I had to overcome, I had to believe in myself and I had to keep pushing. It took me probably, I think I estimate 75 literary agents said no to me. Most of them even hadn’t even read the book. They just didn’t like my description of it in the cover letter, and that’s all they were reading back then. You couldn’t email back then, right? You couldn’t email the book back then. This was US Mail. This is late nineties, and so most people rejected me on the cover letter alone, and so I rewrote the cover letter and tried to get their attention again.

It took me 18 months to find a literary agent who said, I think we can do something great with this book. It took me 18 days to find a publisher. We sent it to the biggest publishing house in the world, which is now Penguin Random House. Back then, it had a different name. It was just Penguin. And they signed me immediately and the book won the Edgar Allen Poll Award for Best first novel by an American author. And so this book that I had no idea what I was doing and just kept working on it until it got better, this book that got turned down by almost every literary agent out there won this very nice award. So I’m the example. You can do it. If you have the discipline and you put in the time and you really do everything you can to make it work, it will probably work.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to take another break, dear from our advertisers. When we return, I’ll still be speaking with David Ellis about his book, the Best Lies. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles here with David Ellis. And David, I’d love to talk about the transition between being a lawyer and a novelist and moving into your time joining the judiciary. First of all, when you were first contemplating running for election, were there suggestions that your creative writing might be a barrier you were very accomplished in your legal profession already, or was it just a fun thing that you were able to talk about when you spoke to people about your candidacy? Well,

David Ellis:

I’ve always in the legal community and people know I write books, and every once in a while the periodicals will write a story about that as, Hey, a lawyer who writes books and now it’s, hey, a judge who writes books. But I’ve always kind of kept it on the back burner in my legal job, for example, I don’t talk about my books at work with my clerks. I mean, they know I write books. They knew the best lies came out in July, and they knew I was going to take a week and do a book tour. But other than that, they don’t talk about it. I don’t even think they read my books, and I’ve just always tried to keep them somewhat separate. When I ran for the appellate court, I wanted to run on my credentials. I will say this, Lee, and I believe it truly.

I think having been a creative writer, having published many books before I got on the appellate court was a benefit to me because I was not the least bit intimidated by writing a judicial opinion. Not just because I’d written a bunch of appellate briefs as a lawyer and motions for summary judgment and motions to dismiss and all those things. But because I had put it out in the public before and I was used to the idea that people will comment on it, that sometimes those comments won’t even be positive, but it’s hard to put yourself out there. I know some judges who go from being on the trial bench to the appellate bench, find it a little disarming that they’re going to write these opinions that are going to be read by all their colleagues and dissected and sometimes criticized. And to me, that was not the slightest barrier. I was completely ready for that when I walked in on day one.

Lee Rawles:

Now you joined the bench 2014. I first became aware of you because I was a journalist in 2009 through your work on the impeachment trial of Governor Rod Blagojevich. And this book, the Best Lies. There are various, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, there’s also corruption investigations taking place and multiple levels where you’ve got the locals, you’ve got state, you’ve got federal, and they’re all kind of working together and figuring out, well, got this portion, who’s got that portion, et cetera. Does that work inform your writing that way? And looking back now, I guess 15 years later, yeah. What impact did that trial have in your life

David Ellis:

To this day? I wish it had never happened, not because it wasn’t a unique experience for me, because it was, but because I thought when the governor was arrested by the FB, I thought he should have resigned, and I wanted him to. And I still think to this day, it would’ve been better for the state if he had just stepped down. And fun fact, he could have stepped down temporarily. There’s actually provision in the Illinois Constitution that allows a governor who’s under a disability to temporarily step down and let the Lieutenant Governor take office. And that provision had never been tested, but I thought he could have said, look, I’ve been indicted by the feds. I’m a little distracted right now. I’m presumed innocent, but I also realize for the good of the state that I really can’t govern right now. So I’m just going to step back for a moment.

I think if he had done that, he might not have been impeached, but he didn’t. He was defiant. And so we went through it. It was the craziest experience of my life. We got through it. If you remember, governor Begovich was off in New York at all the talk shows and telling everyone how crazy we were and how unfair we were in Illinois. And my biggest goal in running the impeachment and then prosecuting him in the Senate impeachment trial was that we were going to do everything in a very transparent and upfront way. And I think that we accomplished that no matter how much he was trying to tar and feather us in the press. I wanted everyone who was watching and they were watching all around the world, all around the world was watching this. I wanted them to see that we were being straight up and by the book.

But yeah, yes, I interacted. The federal government had indicted him. And as you know, Lee, the federal government, when they’ve indicted somebody is usually very secretive with their evidence. They don’t like to go out into the public and chat about it. And of course, I was trying to get ahold of their evidence. So I interacted with the US attorney in Chicago and with the FBI agents, I even put one of the FBI agents on the witness stand at the impeachment trial and asked them questions for hours. It was quite a way to get to know that office. I guess I’d rather get to know it that way than on the receiving end of their inquiries. And they were very nice and they were very professional. But yeah, I learned a lot about how state and local officials will interact and yeah, of course that stuff is going to inform what I’m doing when I’m writing these books. There is some amount of imagination I always have to use, but the general limits of what may or may not happen. Yeah, I know that stuff pretty well now.

Lee Rawles:

Well, for your fans who are no doubt listening to this interview, do you know what’s coming up next? Do you have further plans for, you have written a series series about Jason Kohler Rich? I’m going to be a hundred percent transparent. I haven’t myself read it, so I don’t know. Is there space for Jason to have more adventures or are you really enjoying doing standalones, just what’s next?

David Ellis:

Yeah, so people have asked about Leo and We option the Best Lies to Warner Brothers television for probably a show. And they’re of course very interested where you’re going to have more for Leo. My general thought, Lee, I never say never, but in these books including this book, I take the secrets of their background of their screwed up pasts, and I bring them into the plot and I tear these characters down. And maybe or maybe not, they rise up at the end to some extent. And I often think when it’s done, I’ve spent these characters, they have no more secrets and there’s nothing else for me to do with them. Now, that’s not always true. And I have had several people ask, could you bring Leo into another book? So I’ll consider it at the moment, the next book I’m working on, I told you before, Lee, I always begin with the character and I said, how do I come up with a couple of characters who might do some really crazy, maybe cruel, maybe not so cruel things to each other?

And my wife gave me the answer one day, we were sitting in the kitchen and I was having this conversation with her. I said, how do I pit two people against each other in a way that would be very understandable? I’ve done husband, wife, what else could I do? And she said, what about siblings? And I thought, wow, that’s perfect. Siblings can be unbearably cruel to each other, but also unbearably loving to each other. They can run the gamut and the sky is the limit. And so my next book is about two siblings as adults who share a very interesting past growing up together and a pretty interesting present as well. I haven’t totally fleshed out the book. It’s going to be the same kind of a thing though. I always write intellectual, I’m sorry, psychological thrillers with a lot of twists. I like books where the ride is just as fun as the payoff at the end.

I don’t just like the big twist at the end. I like a twist every 10 chapters. And that’s what I try to do in best lies. Just when you think you’ve got everything laid out, I shake the earth a little bit and twist you 180 degrees and you’re going in a different direction. And then once you’re comfortable with that, I do it again. That’s what I try to do. That’s what I enjoy. That’s what keeps me on my toes as a reader or as a viewer of a show. And so that’s what I’m always going to try to do for my readers.

Lee Rawles:

And one thing I appreciated as a reader was the characters themselves. I changed my mind multiple times throughout the story on a number of the characters, my judgment of say the morality of what they were doing, et cetera. But at every point it felt like a believable human was making these decisions, which I think sometimes is difficult to achieve.

David Ellis:

It is, and I’m really gratified that you said that because that is really what my books are. I like books about, I won’t use the word normal because I don’t think there is such a thing as being a normal person, but conventional people, I’m a conventional person. I suspect you probably are too, Lee. We basically follow the rules. We went to school, we have a family, or don’t we have a job? We don’t break the outer boundaries of societal rules. We don’t kill people, we don’t kidnap people, and most people don’t. Most people are conventional, but some people cross those lines, sometimes conventional people cross lines. And I’m always interested in that intersection where you take seemingly normal, normal people and have them do things that would be considered not okay in society, like murder or things like that. At least crimes commit bad crimes.

And I think people can relate to that because we’re all just a few steps away from being that person. We just choose not to be. And so I think we can all relate to that. And so then, yes, when they have these lapses or when you learn something new about ’em, it’s believable because you could maybe even see a little bit of it in yourself. I’m never going to write about a superhero. I’m never going to write a character who’s just completely, horribly bad with no redeeming qualities, and I’m never going to write. I’m definitely not going to write a character who’s 100% redeemable great, who has no flaws, because that’s just not life.

Lee Rawles:

Well, David, thank you so much for appearing on this episode of the Modern Law Library. If people want to find out more, do you have a website you’d point them to?

David Ellis:

Sure. David ellis.com, just my name .com. And I will say that if anybody who reads the book and has a book club wants to do a book club, I try to talk to readers as much as I can. And surprisingly, a lot of authors don’t do that. But I have a whole place on my website where you can sign up for my newsletter if you want to hear from me, but also you can ask me to virtually appear at your book club and we can talk about the book after you’ve read it. People really seem to enjoy that, and it seems to be a rare thing. So I like to let people know that. And of course, you can find me on social media. I’m not that hard to find. But thanks for asking

Lee Rawles:

And thank you so much for appearing on this episode. And thank you to you, my listeners, for joining us. Make sure you rate, review, and subscribe in your favorite listening service so that you don’t miss an episode. And if you have any ideas for books that you’d like to hear me discuss with their authors on future episodes, you can always reach us at books at ABA Journal dot com.