Show Transcript:
Welcome to the Dan Decker Books Podcast. I’m Dan Decker, the author of The Good Client, Max Damage, and a bunch of other thrillers and legal thrillers, as well as a little bit of science fiction and fantasy. Thank you for joining me today.
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On this podcast, I give a writing update and usually share a thought or two about something else. This week’s thought is about my legal thriller influences. Hello and welcome back. I hope everybody is having a great week out there. It’s been a great week for me over here at Grim Archer Media.
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I’ve been accomplishing a lot of things. The first thing is I finally submitted the Killers Club over to ACX for review. Part of the reason why I’m late at getting to do that is because I have been heads down working on Mitch Turner number six.
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It’s really important for me to be able to have momentum and this is why I have not been able to get the killer’s club audio book submitted until now, but good news. I finally submitted it. It’s in review. I saw earlier that it was done with the first step of the review.
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Hopefully it will be done here pretty quickly and I will be able to get it out for everybody to check out. Anyhow, Mitch Turner six is going really well. I finished with the third draft and now I’m starting on the fourth draft and At this stage, I usually do a number of quick drafts. For me,
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it’s really helpful to get into the story and see the whole story at once or as close to as once as possible. When you’re working on a novel, oftentimes you’ll write a piece and then you won’t come back to it for days or maybe even weeks. Not for months for me usually in my circumstances,
1:56
but there are some authors who won’t return to a piece of writing for months. And so it can be difficult to Make sure that you’re keeping all of that in your mind. And for me, I like to try to work on the story cohesively as a whole.
2:09
And by doing that, I hope that it turns out to a better story. So Mitch Turner’s number six is just coming along great. I still don’t have a title. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve written down a couple of potential titles. I’m not crazy about any of them, but certainly my juices are flowing there.
2:28
It’s funny to me that sometimes the titles will just come to me and I’ll know them right away. And other times I won’t know the title for a long time. So just kind of interesting how that works. The other project that I’m working on, and this is just a side project,
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is I have a little fantasy project I work on every day, usually in the morning, right as I get in. And sometimes throughout and I try to work on it as a break throughout the rest of the day. But basically, I just work on that to keep me writing in general,
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because a lot of times I’ll get stuck in revisions and revisions can go on for a very long time. And I like to be writing something new every day. And so writing on a side project really helps me do that. And I’ve mentioned that before on this podcast that I have some of these other side
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projects that I’ve put out that I’ve put down to paper that are probably never going to be seen anywhere just because I don’t have the time to go back and work on them and make them any more polished than they already are.
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Anyhow, so I had this little fantasy project I’ve been working on as well that’s been kind of fun. I was thinking this week about my influences, specifically my influences when it comes to writing legal thrillers. I’m not 100% positive, but I believe the first legal thriller that I ever read was The Firm, which is probably…
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The first legal thriller that many people have read, at least in my timeframe, because that was a very popular legal thriller, was the subject of a Tom Cruise movie as well. Interestingly enough, the way I remember reading that, if my memory serves me well, is in a Reader’s Digest abridged version of that book.
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I think I stumbled across a copy of that book, I think maybe from my great grandmother’s house. I think she was a big subscriber to the Reader’s Digest. I remember her having a lot of those. And I remember reading The Firm as an abridged book initially. So it must have been much shorter.
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I don’t know that I read the full book. But then after that, I know that I went on and I read other John Grisham novels as well. I know I read that one when I was a kid, probably somewhere in maybe the end of grade school or junior high or maybe into high school.
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But I was a kid when I read that first book. The other thing that I think is really interesting, the other big influence on my legal thrillers, and I think you can see this in my legal thrillers, is Law & Order. Specifically with Law & Order,
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it’s almost two different shows every episode where you have the first half, which is the procedure or the, it’s not the procedure, it’s the investigation part where they’re going around, they’re trying to figure out what happened, trying to find the culprit. And then the second half is they bring that culprit to trial.
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And in the Mitch Turner books, you can kind of see that I follow that same format where the first part of the book is an investigation. And the second part of the book is… the trial usually and you know the same format has also fallen i’ve also used the
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same format with the killers club and only the guilty where you have the the investigation as well with only the guilty that one was interesting to me because i tried to break out of that mold just a little bit in terms of, I wanted it to have a little bit more action.
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Burke Wyatt is somebody who thought of himself as a cop first before a lawyer, and he tends to be more active than other lawyers would be. And so that book, I think I kind of played with the formula there a little bit. But that brings me to thinking about The Fixer,
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which is different from my other legal thrillers in this regard, because what it does is it focuses almost entirely on the investigation. And when I set out to write this book, that was actually my intention, was to focus primarily on the investigation side of the legal thrillers and to ramp
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up the thrill and the action part of it. And so that’s really what happens. And so there is one One legal scene in the book one one trial scene I should say in the book and then the rest of it is investigation and trying to solve the problem and then trying to.
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solve the other problems that come with trying to solve the initial murder. So anyhow, so yeah, law and order definitely had a big influence on me. I remember when I was in college, I would usually come home for the day from my classes. And it was very,
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very often that I would sit down and find reruns of law and order on one of the cable TV channels. I don’t remember which one, maybe TNT and watching those reruns. those reruns. And so certainly those had a big influence on me. The other, other book that comes to my mind that definitely had an influence on me,
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uh, and my legal thrillers, uh, is the Lincoln lawyer, the Mickey Haller series. Mickey Haller, uh, is written in first person, similar to how Mitch Turner is written. He, uh, that’s a first person narrative as well. Um, I have noticed, though, with the most recent Mickey Haller books,
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and maybe I misremember this from the first one from the Lincoln lawyer. I thought that one was first person narrative all the way through. But in the latest one, the one that I just most recently read, I think it was Resurrection Row or Resurrection Walk, one of those two titles. Yeah.
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And that one, what Michael Connelly is doing is he has both Mickey Haller and Harry Bosch perspectives. And so we have the first person narrative of Mickey Haller, and then we have the third person narrative of Harry Bosch. Anyhow, definitely Mickey Haller had a pretty significant influence on Mitch Turner as well.
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Over the years, I’ve read a lot of John Grisham books. I don’t remember any of them specifically as standing out to my mind any more, one more than the other. Perhaps A Time to Kill stands out to me a lot just because that one was very well done, dealt with some very heavy and sad issues.
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And also, I think that that was a book he worked on for a long time before he finally published it. I think that was, if I remember correctly, might have been one of the first books he was working on or he worked on it for a 10-year period of time or something like that.
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Anyhow, another one of John Grisham’s books that I remember quite well is The King of Torts. Now, that book doesn’t focus on criminal law. It focuses on mass torts. It was very interesting to me to read that book and then start my work as an attorney after graduating from law school.
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I might’ve read it about the same time, but yeah, it was kind of interesting to see that side of things. So far, I haven’t yet written a legal thriller that focuses more on the civil side. I’m sure I probably will at some point. I just don’t have any
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Ideas that have come to me that I’m anxious and curious to write about. But yeah, that was certainly one of the books that I remember very well. Another one that comes to me is one that I remember particularly was, I believe, The Runaway Jury. That one was pretty fun.
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I think I read both the book and saw the movie on that one. The whole concept of a jury consultant coming in and being very significant to the outcome of the case, or at least playing a huge role on the attorney’s team was very interesting to see and to think about.
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I haven’t really played around with that idea very much and probably will at some point. Now, this doesn’t really count as an influence on me, at least not on my earlier writing. I hadn’t discovered Peter O. Mahoney until just recently, but I read his book, The Southern Lawyer, sometime within the last year, and I really enjoyed it.
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He did a really good job telling a very compelling story, giving it a very Southern feel, which I’m sure you’ve noticed John Grisham does in a lot of his books. I imagine, but don’t know, that both Peter O. Mahoney and John Grisham spent a lot of time in the South,
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and that’s why there’s a good distinct Southern flavor in their books. It’s Part of why I’ve been trying to put out a couple legal thrillers based in my local area, even though Salt Lake City and Idaho Falls don’t really have a ton of crime per se. There’s not a lot of criminal trials here,
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especially not to the extent that you would have in a big city, right? There’s not the extent you’d have in New York or Philadelphia or Chicago, which is where Mitch Turner is based. But I really enjoyed The Southern Lawyer. Had a really good time reading that one. I should try to pick up the next book sometime soon.
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Anyhow, that’s me rambling about my influences and the book I’ve been reading recently. I hope you’ve enjoyed the show. I hope you have a great week, and we’ll talk to you later. Oh, before I forget, if anybody doesn’t know, you can go to my…
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website and sign up for my newsletter and get a free ebook and audio book of my short story, The Arraignment, which is a Mitch Turner short story. So if you’re not familiar with Mitch Turner and you’d like to know a little bit about him, go ahead and go over there and you can totally get that for free.
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The text audio and music of the show are all copyrighted by Dan Decker. This show is published by Grim Archer Media, all rights reserved.
