Turow back in court in ‘The Last Trial’
Bestselling author revisits favorite lawyer in new novel, hints at next legal thriller
Scott Turow is back, and not surprisingly, so is Sandy Stern. The brilliant defense lawyer character, who is 85 and feeling every one of those years in “The Last Trial,” has almost always made an appearance in all nine of Turow’s books set in Kindle County, his fictional Midwestern creation. Turow, who studied and taught writing at Stanford University before becoming a lawyer, essentially invented the literate legal thriller in 1987 with “Presumed Innocent.” That novel told the twisty story of Rusty Sabich, a prosecutor accused of committing a murder in a case he is overseeing. In that novel, Sabich hired Stern to defend him. When that became a blockbuster, Turow made Stern, not Sabich, the protagonist in his next novel, “The Burden of Proof.” There’s a limited-series version of “Presumed Innocent” now in the works, which Turow believes will allow it to preserve the characters’ journeys in a way the popular 1990 movie starring Harrison Ford could not. “Walter White [from the TV series “Breaking Bad”] would never be the character of Shakespearean depth that he is if it was just a two-hour movie about a high school chemistry teacher that becomes a meth dealer,” says Turow. Despite his literary success, Turow has remained an active lawyer, performing pro bono work and working as an advocate for causes like overturning wrongful convictions and capital punishment reform. In “The Last Trial,” Stern, now 85, is nearing the end and must not only face the truth about his own mortality but also his relationships with his wives, his children and his friends. One of these friends, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who saved Stern’s life, is on trial for fraud and murder. Sonia “Sonny” Klonsky is back, as is Stern’s daughter and law partner, Marta, while Stern’s savvy but self-sabotaging granddaughter, Pinky, emerges as a scenestealer who may become Turow’s next protagonist.
Q
Were you hesitant to revisit the character Rusty Sabich after “Presumed Innocent”? And did that book’s success make it easier to undertake “The Last Trial”?
A
After “Presumed Innocent,” everybody wanted me to write the next Rusty Sabich book. But I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. Twenty years later, going back to Rusty seemed a lot more interesting. I knew Rusty was an appellate judge because I had followed his career in the background of intervening novels. Then I wrote a novella for The New York Times called “Limitations,” and he makes an appearance as chief judge. It started me thinking about him again. There’s a piece of Sandy Stern that never leaves me, just like Rusty. He has always been with me in some part of my imagination, which explains why he appeared even briefly in virtually every one of the novels.
Q
Sandy Stern was 52 in “Burden of Proof.” Was it trickier getting into his mind now as an older man thinking about the end of his life?
A
It is a lot different. I turned 70 while I was writing this book. If you’re 35 or 40, you probably have a lot more in common in terms of life and career with a 50- or 55-year-old than the 70-year-old does with the 85-year-old. So you have to translate yourself into this situation. Still, at 70, it suddenly dawns on you that you’re on the downward slope.
Q
You layer in complex details and never seem to rush through the legal process. Is that difficult to balance with the pacing of a thriller?
A
It wouldn’t be real to me if I short-circuited the legal process, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. David E. Kelley [“Ally McBeal,” “Boston Legal”] was a lawyer and he’s a genius. He can distort the legal process and still make that world compelling. My internal pinball machine would scream tilt if I violate the federal rules of evidence. It’s just who you are as a writer. Figuring out how to be accurate but not boring is a great challenge. I finally met my match in this book with the testing process for pharmaceuticals. When you talk about pharmaceuticals and how they get licensed, it is a vocabulary the rest of us can’t speak and concepts we can’t follow — it makes even the tax code seem straightforward. I finally accepted the fact that I was going to be employing a lot of shorthand this time.
Q
Did the character Pinky appear kind of full-blown in your mind or did she develop gradually?
A
If a book goes well, there’s always a character that runs away with the book and she or he ends up with a much bigger part than you as the writer ever imagined. To some extent, Sandy Stern was that character in “Presumed Innocent.” I was writing about a prosecutor accused of a crime he was investigating and that got me to page 190 but he had to have a defense lawyer, who became a very attractive character in his own right. I hadn’t spent a lot time thinking about it until Stern began jumping off the page. Pinky was the same way. I don’t even know where she came from; Stern had to have a paralegal, and then she’s just one of those characters who happened.
Q
A
So now you’ve decided to give her a book of her own. So it seems. I’m struggling with voice. Pinky is younger than my children and very different from my youngest daughter. I don’t think her dialogue will sound that different from “Last Trial” but what will her internal voice sound like? How articulate is she and in what ways is she inarticulate? I have a sense of peril about it, but it’s not going to keep me from doing it. You just learn to be patient with yourself. I’m confident I’ll be able to feel my way there.