Licensed to Thrill: Volume 1
Page 46
Lee Child: I’m about ten inches tall when I’m lying down. About 6-4 when I’m standing up. Very thin, no matter how much I eat. I like being tall. Who wouldn’t? There are many completely unearned advantages. Like having an English accent—in America that’s 20 unearned IQ points, right there.
Diane Capri: Readers want to know some personal details about you that Charlie Rose didn’t ask. Let’s start with a few of those. Here’s an easy one. You were chewing gum when I saw you last in NYC and not hanging around the smoking sections. Have you quit smoking?
Lee Child: No, I’ll never quit smoking. I enjoy it. It’s one of my main pleasures in life. Every New Year I make the same resolution—keep on smoking.
Diane Capri: You know Kim Otto is hunting for Reacher in Don’t Know Jack and she’s more than a little worried that she might actually find him before she’s ready. She worries about Reacher’s facility for, um, solving problems. Your fans write, warning me not to disrespect Reacher because he’s one of the good guys. Clearly, Jack Reacher’s A Wanted Man—in more ways than one. That’s got to make you somewhat, well, let’s call it pleased. How does all this attention affect your life? Does your wife, Jane, still make you take out the trash and handle the broken toilets like a normal husband?
Lee Child: Oh, sure. I haul trash and fix things like any guy. I’m a qualified electrician, from backstage jobs in the theater. Also a qualified firefighter, for the same reason. Away from the hoopla, I live a completely normal life.
Diane Capri: Um, okay, thanks for sending along that picture of where you live amid not one single dust mote . . . . It fascinates me that your daughter, Ruth, has an amazing facility for languages. Did she inherit that from her parents? How many languages can she speak fluently? And what kind of work does one do with that talent, anyway?
Lee Child: Ruth speaks most of the European languages, and if there’s one she doesn’t, just wait a day or two until she masters it. It didn’t come from me or Jane. From my mother, possibly. Maybe it’s one of those things that skips a generation. My mother had a similar talent. Ruth works at NYC’s famous Gay and Lesbian Center, dealing with people who don’t speak English so good. She can do sign language too. And sign language for the blind.
Diane Capri: Like most writers, you read widely and love books. It’s astonishing that our Florida crime writers’ patron saint, Travis McGee, remained undiscovered to you until the mid-1990s, long after John D. McDonald died. Not surprising that you’re a fan and McGee has influenced your work, though. When you created Reacher, you avoided duplicating character traits that contemporary crime writers had already developed, but like you and McGee, Reacher is a tall dude. Does Reacher share any of McGee’s other traits? Do you?
Lee Child: Not really. McGee was pretty sure of himself. Reacher is professionally, as am I, but personally we’re a lot more diffident than old Travis. No grand pronouncements for either of us.
Diane Capri: We’re all looking forward to reading A Wanted Man which just opened to raves from readers and critics and at the top of the best seller lists. This is Reacher’s 17th chance to get his butt kicked. Is that gonna happen?
Lee Child: He has a busted nose in this one, carried over from the last one. (Well, not the last one, which was a prequel. The one before.) It was a challenge not to write anything about smells. Normally I’m a five-senses-all-the-time writer.
Diane Capri: Many readers have already devoured A Wanted Man and wait hungrily for Reacher #18. They want to put the title on their wish lists. What is it?
Lee Child: It’s called Never Go Back—because Reacher goes back to his old unit HQ and falls into a world of trouble.
Diane Capri: Well, sure. Trouble always finds Reacher. The other thing we’re looking forward to is the new film titled simply Jack Reacher, starring Tom Cruise. Cruise fans are swooning already; some Child fans are a bit less ecstatic. You’ve seen the film and loved it. Why?
Lee Child: It’s a fast, hard movie, and Cruise nails it dead on. How? Because he’s a great actor. They do that stuff for a living. The rest of the cast is spectacular too. Altogether awesome. Plus it has a better car scene than Bullitt.
Diane Capri: When we put Reacher on trial for murder at the very first ThrillerFest, the still-to-be-revealed Kim Otto took Reacher on, sort of. Otto made darn sure everything went according to the law and Reacher still got off. But only because he cheated. Otto will be smarter next time they meet. Is Reacher worried?
Lee Child: Reacher didn’t cheat. It was jury nullification, pure and simple, because of his charm. Sure, he said with a smile, I killed the guy. Not guilty!
Diane Capri: Um, that’s a little unnerving, actually....For the first time ever, you’re headed to my summer town. I feel a bit like Kim Otto. She knows Reacher is watching her, and it’s a little creepy and she’s not all that thrilled about it. Of course, I’m looking forward to seeing you, but what brings you to Northern Michigan? Tell me straight. Are you stalking me?
Lee Child: Yes. Fortunately for me there’s a great author event there, for cover. Be afraid.
He said that with a smile. Maybe.
John Grisham’s THE FIRM (1991)
By: Diane Capri
In 1991, an explosive new talent conquered the best-seller lists, reinventing the legal thriller. The Firm was Mississippi small-town lawyer John Grisham’s (1955) second novel. In its wake, Grisham’s books, including legal thrillers, nonfiction, and other novels, have sold more than 235 million copies worldwide. Prior to The Firm, Grisham spent ten years in his first career as a small-town lawyer and Mississippi legislator. The passion to write his first novel, A Time to Kill, was ignited by an incident he witnessed while waiting his turn in court. The disturbing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim made him imagine the consequences if the victim’s father had killed her assailants. That first novel was published by a small press and had a printing of five thousand copies. Grisham then began writing The Firm, combining Faust’s mythical devil deal with high-octane David vs. Goliath, an unrivaled combination that became his forte. Grisham’s other thrillers include The Pelican Brief and The Client, two of his many books that were adapted into movies.
Ten years after the unlikely anthropology professor Indiana Jones defeated the Nazis with a lot of help from God (and considerable suspension of disbelief), rookie tax lawyer cum action hero Mitch McDeere spectacularly defeated modern-day Mafia and government manipulators, using only his wits and his Harvard law degree.
Certainly lawyers had been inspirational literary heroes, triumphant in mythic David and Goliath battles before The Firm was published in 1991. But this was no courtroom drama and McDeere was not our father’s Perry Mason or even Scott Turow’s worthy but flawed Presumed Innocent (1987) prosecutor, Rusty Sabich. Rather, The Firm dramatizes a minimum of lawyering and instead emphasizes McDeere’s race to save himself before his government or his employer terminate his life.
The Firm captures the despair of gray-flannel-suited lawyers who felt shackled by golden handcuffs to their lavish lifestyles. Its emblematic cover depicted an attorney clutching a briefcase while being manipulated by the strings of a puppeteer. The book energized the legal thriller, which heretofore every working lawyer knew was an oxymoron on steroids. Grisham’s ability to make the genre exciting and suspenseful by featuring larger-than-life lawyer heroes propelled The Firm and Grisham to the top of the charts where he has remained for almost two decades.
At the end of the 1980s, a decade of conspicuous consumption and excessive spending, workaholism reigned in all sectors of the economy. Lawyers were commanding salaries beyond their wildest dreams. Megafirms launched, the number of lawyers skyrocketed, and the competition to hire the best and the brightest intensified. What was once a genteel, collegiate, underpaid profession became a cold, profit-driven business supported by billable time.
Against this backdrop, The Firm opens with the hazing ritual all law students must endure: the first law job interview. The uninitiated reader might a
ssume job interviews lack even quiet drama, let alone thrills. Yet, a typical law student feels more nausea during the process than panicked passengers escaping the half-submerged Titanic. Following years of hefty debt accumulation and daily Socratic inquisitions during which students consume thousand-page casebooks digested and regurgitated into a three-hour essay exam upon which the entire grade for the course and subsequent employment depend, exhausted students compete for work. Making the best choice is yet another angst-producing hurdle. The tension of the interview process lasts most of the fall and into the spring of the final year.
More determined, better credentialed, desperately motivated by personal struggles, and closer to the brink of financial ruin is Grisham’s Mitch McDeere. Third in his class at Harvard, Mitch receives offers from prestigious firms in New York and Chicago. But when he’s seduced by an elite Memphis law firm’s extravagant offer, he proves his mettle by interrogating the hiring partner. He’s assured that no lawyer has ever voluntarily resigned from the firm.
Wanting to believe the firm is that good, Mitch decides he has no choice; he must take the lavish offer. After all, like all law students on the brink of licensure, he is confident that he can handle whatever comes his way. But his bravado soon evaporates—the coming challenges far exceed his practical risk analysis. Early on, every reader knows the job is not what it seems, but like Mitch, they’re already hooked.
Before The Firm, lawyer readers had already made the same bargain Mitch did. They knew that despite the astronomical salary, new BMW, low-interest home mortgage, repaid student loans, and beyond-the-call support in passing the dreaded bar exam, the job would be hell on earth. And so it is with Mitch.
What follows is a brief period of calm before he realizes that the limitless job he’s accepted with the Mafia-controlled firm can have only one possible outcome. Like his colleagues, he is literally tethered to the firm. He will work until death.
Grisham crafts his story expertly. Readers fear that Goliath will win and that Mitch will either conform to the firm’s policies or die. But despite the forces opposing him, Mitch McDeere is not your average David, as we’ve suspected from the outset. The Mafia and the FBI are no match for him.
Lawyers can be heroes, too, Grisham reminds us, not just in The Firm, but in each of his many books about the legal profession that followed. In Grisham’s world, attorneys are a force to be reckoned with. They lead lives not of quiet desperation, but of noisy, active, responsible accomplishment in the face of powerful opposition. The practice of law, at least on the page, has never been the same since Grisham’s debut.
Diane Capri was an associate and a partner in a large Detroit law firm where she and her colleagues were living Mitch McDeere’s Faustian bargain themselves when Presumed Innocent ignited and later The Firm inflamed her passion to write lawyer-hero stories of her own. One of the country’s top attorneys for more than twenty years, Diane is the author of several novels featuring lawyer heroes a bit more realistic than Mitch McDeere.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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That said, the criminal activities herein depicted are pure fiction, as are the characters. Any events or real places mentioned are used fictitiously. As we all know, truth is stranger than fiction.
Thanks again for reading!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Diane Capri is a lawyer and multi-published author.
She’s a snowbird who divides her time between Florida and Michigan. An active member of Mystery Writers of America, Author’s Guild, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime, she loves to hear from readers and is hard at work on her next novel.
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Licensed to Thrill is a work of collected non-fiction and fiction. Except where specifically noted, names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Licensed to Thrill, Vol. 1 © Copyright 2012 Diane Capri, LLC
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9882346-3-5
Licensed to Thrill © Copyright 2012 Diane Capri, LLC
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9882346-2-8
Fatal Enemy © Copyright 2012 Diane Capri, LLC
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9882346-0-4
Fatal Distraction © Copyright 2012 Diane Capri, LLC
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9837298-3-9
Don’t Know Jack © Copyright 2012 Diane Capri, LLC
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9837298-0-8
Due Justice (formerly titled Carly’s Conspiracy) is a work of fiction, revised from the previously released novel by M. Diane Vogt, Silicone Solution.
©Copyright 2011 Diane Capri
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9837298-9-1
Twisted Justice (formerly titled George’s Game)
© Copyright 2011 Diane Capri, LLC
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9837298-2-2
Secret Justice (formerly titled Harper’s Hell) is a work of fiction, revised from the previously released novel by M. Diane Vogt, Gasparilla Gold.
©Copyright 2011 Diane Capri
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9837298-5-3
Wasted Justice (formerly titled Kate’s Killing) is a work of fiction, revised from the previously released novel by M. Diane Vogt, Six Bills.
©Copyright 2011 Diane Capri
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9837298-8-4
Raw Justice (formerly titled Annabelle’s Attack)
©Copyright 2011 Diane Capri
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-9837298-1-5
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eISBN: 978-0-9882346-3-5
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Table of Contents
Praise for Diane Capri
Also by Diane Capri
DON'T KNOW JACK
Dedication
Cast of Characters
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20