DEBORAH CROMBIE: In a starred review, Kirkus says of Kevin
“Slowly,
methodically, excruciatingly, first-timer Egan shows his heroes’ plan spinning
out of control in a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences..."
And according to our own RED Hank Phillippi Ryan:
"With relentless suspense,
cinematic pacing and a twist around every corner,
Kevin Egan creates a brand new genre: legal
thriller noir."
So how do you get an idea that garners that kind of praise? Here's Kevin to tell us.
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KEVIN EGAN:
PEOPLE DIE; GOOD
IDEAS DON’T
Ever
wish your boss dropped dead? You know, the boss who just denied your raise for
the second straight year, the boss who forced you to change your vacation plans
at the last minute, or the boss who just dumped a pile of work on your desk
late Friday afternoon and sashayed out the door. Tempting, huh? Now change the
perspective a bit. What if your boss dropped dead and you were the only person
who knew? And what if you had a good reason to keep that death a secret, even
for a little while?
I
have worked at the New York County Courthouse for over two decades, mostly as a
law clerk to a judge. (Even if you’ve never been to New York City, you would
recognize the courthouse from the opening credits of Law & Order.)
Strange things have happened there, too, like Judge Joseph Crater locking his
chambers on a summer night in 1930 and never being seen again.
My
law clerk’s job dovetailed nicely with my passion for fiction writing, which I
pursued on every commuter train ride and during countless lunch hours ensconced
in quiet offices. By the mid-1990s, that regimen had yielded one science
fiction novel and a three book golf mystery series. I avoided writing about my
work life because its most intriguing aspect – the complex coexistence of
judge, law clerk, and confidential secretary within a judicial chambers – did
not lend itself to any drama that I felt I could portray in a way that would be
interesting to outsiders.
Yet
one idea persisted in my mind. Each judge’s chambers in the courthouse is a
private, self-contained world. The secretary and I could – and often did – fake
our judge’s presence in chambers, sometimes for several hours, sometimes for a
few days. So with that in mind, I
wondered what would happen if a judge dropped dead and the staff, rather than
report the death, continued to run chambers as if the judge were still alive.
Why would they do this? How long could the ruse go on?
My
golf series ended, and I worked for almost four years on a novel with the
opaque title of Third Monday in July. The judge dies at his desk after
hours, a desperate litigant discovers and steals the body then blackmails the
staff into silence while the law clerk rewrites a decision in the litigant’s
favor. The book covered a period of almost two weeks, and the tone uneasily
combined straight suspense and black humor. The premise and the leisurely pace
required the suspension of too much disbelief. It was a mess.
More
years passed, more projects failed. And then my agent had an idea. Why not
write another golf mystery series, but with a female protagonist? Why not
indeed, I thought. I wrote the book, my agent sold it, and my long stretch of
being a dis-published novelist ended.
Now
that I was back in the game, my agent suggested that I raise my profile by
writing short stories. I logged onto the MWA website and saw a posting for an
anthology that would focus on the police, the courts, and other governmental
agencies. The submission deadline of March 15 leaped out at me. I had almost
six weeks.
I
began casting about for ideas and remembered the failed Third Monday. I
still believed in the premise of a judge’s secret death in chambers and
wondered if an implausible novel could be compressed into a plausible short story.
In
re-examining the novel, I made two critical changes. The first was to make the
judge’s own staff, rather than a disgruntled litigant, the prime movers in
hiding the judge’s death. This was easy. In the New York court system, a
judge’s staff are personal appointments. They are paid by the State, but the
judge has the sole discretion to hire and fire. If the judge dies, the rule is
that the staff keep their jobs until the
end of that calendar year. And so the second change was to set the story on New
Year’s Eve. If the judge were to die, the staff would lose their jobs the same
day.
Click.
I had it.
“Midnight”
was 21 manuscript pages. The first 20 establish the circumstance and follow the
staff as they methodically execute their plan to make it look as if their judge
died on January 1, thus guaranteeing their jobs for another year. They seem to
succeed until the last page, when the law clerk discovers a secret about the
secretary and the plan unwinds.
The time came to submit to the anthology, but
a funny thing happened on the way to the post office. When I checked the MWA
website to confirm the mailing address, I saw that the submission deadline had
passed one year earlier.
Not
to worry. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine bought “Midnight” and
cleverly planned to feature it on the cover of its January 2010 issue. Still,
expanding the short story into a novel was not at the top of my to-do list
because I had turned in the second installment of my new golf series and had
begun to work on the third. Then, on the day my AHMM contributor’s
copies arrived in the mail, the publisher cancelled my series.
I
began writing Midnight that day.
Deconstruct
any event and you see that a knife edge of circumstances separates that
particular event from an infinite variety of alternatives. Misreading that MWA
posting fooled me into writing the story that permanently changed my approach
to writing. I had solved my personal mystery of how to write about my work-day
world and I had a blueprint for handling an idea that just wouldn’t die.
DEBS: What a great premise! And now Kevin has a question for you, readers: "What has happened for you to wish your boss dropped dead?" Do tell!
Kevin will be dropping in to answer comments and questions, and will be giving away a copy of MIDNIGHT to a lucky commenter.
