In this episode we chat to thriller writing legend Scott Turow about his new book Presumed Guilty, and also discuss the true story behind the classic Presumed Innocent and his short lived career as a screen extra
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Murder Junction. Everyone. Well, this week on the show,
we have a genuine thriller writing legend, a man whose
work has sold tens of millions of copies around the
world and delighted readers for many, many years. We are
talking to the one and only Scott Turow, author of
the classic novel Presumed Innocent, which of course became the
acclaimed film starring Harrison Ford and gret Tuscaki, and he
(00:24):
will be leading us not only through his career as
judge writer and all round good guy, but also through
his latest novel, Presumed Guilty. Scott, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Thank you us same for making time for me. I
apologize to you and your listeners for quality of my voice,
but I have that the wages of book to her
are seeen for me to be respiratory in factions. So
I'm sorry, but there's the best I can do.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Not at all. I GRAVITASDS.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
How are you feeling?
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Are you?
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Are you feeling okay?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I feel great? I mean, but you know, larryn Otis
is a strange creature. You know, some infection lodges and
the larynx, and this has been remarkably persistent So anyway,
as I said, I apologize.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Not at all. Can I start by being a bit
of a fanboy. I'm going to tell you a very
quick story as to why I was absolutely delighted that
you agreed to do this. So twenty odd years ago,
I was working in India. I grew up in the UK,
but I was working in Bombay in India, Mumbai as
it's now known, and I ducked into a bookstore and
I came across this, this very old copy which has
(01:38):
remained with me ever since. And you know, as soon
as I started reading, presumed innocent. Honestly, you look, you'll
see here Our listeners can't see, but there's all sorts
of brilliant phrases and notes that I've made, which I
said to myself, if I'm ever published and I ever
write a legal thriller, I'm just going to copy Scotch
throw And I've kept this ever since. So I'm a
(01:59):
huge fan. Thank you so much for spending the time
with us. So our starting point for these discussions is
really to just ask you so that our listeners can
ground you. I mean, most of nearly all of them
will know who you are anyway, but just tell us
a little bit about growing up, where you grew up,
and that sort of journey towards adulthood.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Sure, I grew up on the North side of Chicago,
and my ambition from the time I was ten or
eleven years old, which I had largely stolen from my mother,
was to be a novelist. That was her great dream.
And once I read the Count of Monte Cristo, I thought,
(02:38):
you know, this is If it's this exciting to read
a book, I imagine how much more exciting it is
to write it. Which that'll give you the logic of
an eleven year old. So my parents ultimately moved to
the suburbs. I graduated from a large suburban high school.
(02:58):
I was the editor of the newspaper there, but I
was still telling anybody who would listen that I was.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
Going to be a novelist.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And I went off to college, and in Massachusetts, a small,
little tiny at this point.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
All Men's College.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I had not bothered to notice that there were no
creative writing classes at this school, so although during my
time there, some really wonderful writers were hired as writers
in residence, so I didn't suffer too much, as it
turned out, But during my time in college, I noticed
(03:36):
these red banded really they call the color cardinal announcements
from the Stanford Creative Writing Center announcing these fellowships with
which they gave, and I noticed, kind of coincidentally, that
many of the American writers whom I admired, like Larry
(03:58):
McMurtry or Robert Stone or Ernest Gaines or my former
teacher Tillie Olson, Tom mcguain, a lot of writers that
I thought were terrific, had had one of these Stanford
Writing fellowships. So that became my great goal, as if
the mere awarding of the fellowships would have turned me
(04:19):
into a novelist. But I was lucky enough to win one,
and I went off to California and ended up staying
for five years. My particular fellowship lasted two years. After that,
I was hired as a lecturer in the English department,
and what I discovered there, in addition to the fact
that my own writing wasn't going especially well, was that
(04:43):
I really was not interested in becoming an English professor,
which is the path you're almost immediately started on when
you have even the most junior of faculty appointments in
the English department. At Stanford, and as I be began
to think about what else I was going to do
(05:05):
aside from remain a aspiring novelist, I noticed how interested
I was in law, and there was somewhat surprising. My
father was a physician. He hated lawyers, long before it
was common in this country for physicians do that.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
I knew none.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
But when my college friends became lawyers, I was really
copsmacked by how intriguing what they were doing seemed to me.
And I eventually started asking myself, do I really want
to be a lawyer? And the answer seemed to be yes.
So I turned down a tenure track appointment elsewhere and
(05:52):
went to law school. And, as I like to say,
the great break of my literary career was going to
law school because for me any different reasons, the most
important being that it gave me a subject to write about,
which I truly was passionate, But beyond that, when I
announced to my agent that I was going to go
(06:13):
to law school, what came back in the mail was
a contract from a publisher she'd been having lunch with,
who wanted me to write a nonfiction book about law school,
which I did. That book one l remains in print today.
It's been read by I dare say, thousands and thousands
(06:35):
of American law students and their parents and people.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Go and never go.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And it became sort of the first stepping stone in
my literary career, and I think it provided me with
something of an audience when presumed Innison came out ten
years later.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I'm going to take you back a little bit further
to an earlier stepping stone. So this is some in
which you've said somewhere online. While I was doing the research,
I came across this I found quite interesting. And you've
said that, as you just told us, so you wanted
to be a novelist from a very young age, but
young age. But you also said you began your career
with a story plagiarized from one of your school texts.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Yeah, that's true. Well that story that you that was true.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
I mean I I guess I was eleven, so that
would put me in roughly what we call sixth grade.
And I had read a story I still remember this.
I had something to do with skiing and a young
man named Bobby Hanson. And just to prove my bona
fhides as a novelist, I sat down and rewrote that story,
(07:45):
and you know, gave it to my mother and see this,
you know, this brilliant work. And I'm not sure I
think I knew even intuitively at that point that that
was not the right way to go about writing. But
eventually I had a subject of my own, although as
I say, never really one that reached my core the
(08:10):
way the law did.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Once I arrived there.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Tell us the genesis of the book that changed I
wouldn't say it changed your life, because you still had
a very long and successful legal career. You didn't abandon
the law at all for a very long time, I
believe you. You kept going to the office and then
you sort of balance things out with your law fun. Well,
what was the genesis moment for Presumed Innocent?
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Well, I was lucky enough when I left law school
to get a job as a federal prosecutor in Chicago.
And you know, as I look back at my time
at Stanford, there were all kinds of reasons that my
writing didn't go as well as I might have hoped.
(08:54):
But one of them was that I was really undecided
about what the purpose of you know, the novel ought
to be. And and you know, and that you can
make whatever decisions about what the novel ought to be.
But what any writer is really asking is what kind
of novelists I bought I to be.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
And I got.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Into a debate with one of my professors, whom I
was very fond of, but he was very much an
avant gardist. He thought andre Gid was the you know,
the be all and end all of twentieth century fiction.
And I told him, I said to Alford, I think
that the greatest novel could be read by appreciation, read
(09:41):
with appreciation by a bus driver and an English professor.
That this he didn't believe it, you know, he really accepted.
You know, Hollins maxim that the poet is the antenna
of the race, and thus if the second line goes that,
not as many people remember, and thus he will will
never be.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
Understood by the bullet headed many. And I just.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
I couldn't accept that. And so I was in a
courtroom in Chicago, well on my way through my career
as a prosecutor, and still writing assiduously on the morning
commuter train. That was the only time I had but
I kept doing it, which was the remonstration I'd gotten
(10:29):
from my teachers at Stanford, especially Wallace Stegne, and I
suddenly turned around in this courtroom.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
I was up there observing a couple of younger lawyers.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
And I looked at everybody who was sitting there. And
you know, characteristically the people who are spectators in a
courtroom are generally older folks who are looking for some
form of free theater which God knows, trials. But this
happened to be a particularly broad cross section of people
(11:05):
who were there, not only elderly, but also younger, different races.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
And different genders. And I suddenly thought to myself, this
is it. This crime is the story.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
That entertains both the English professor and the bus driver.
And at that point I decided to begin what became
presumed innocent. I had been chastened by the experience of
writing One l which had been a nonfiction book in
which everybody, even though names were changed, could clearly pick
(11:43):
out who they were.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
So I knew I couldn't set this novel I.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Started working on in the Prosecutor's office where I was working. Instead,
I chose as a backdrop the Boston DA's office, where
I'd spent my last semester in law school, working as an.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
Intern or a clerk.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
And as I said, that provided the background, I transmogrified
one of the murder cases that I had worked on
in Boston on the prosecutor's side, and that became the
murder of Carolyn belimas you know, with the victim tied
(12:24):
up and and and that that was in fact the
circumstances of the first murder case I worked on doing
research for the prosecutor, guy named Phil Bea Shane.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
And in that.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Case, of course, it was her pimp who was accused
of actually murdering this woman and trying to make it
appear that the murder had been the work of an intruder.
But you know, in the election, that's going on in
the background and presumed innocent, was exactly what was going
on in the Boston DA's office while I was there.
(13:00):
And uh, you know Nico de la Guardia, who's supposed
to be a little bit of a demagogue, who you know,
made points by prosecuting a black o bg y n
for what he claimed was murder by performing on abortion.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
That that's those were the facts. That's that's what that's
what that's fabulous.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
I had no idea that there was a true story
behind this that you'd you'd reference from your your days
in court.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
And and when Presumed Innocence came out, how did your
life change? Was it instantaneous or was it a gradual
thing that that that it picked up the success that
it did well.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
I always say that, you know, writing Presumed Innocent was
like writing a rocket ship, and you know, and suddenly
all these dreams are coming true. I never i'd written novels,
I'd never succeeded in publishing one. All of a sudden
there were several publishers who wanted to publish this manuscript.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
And.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
No more than three weeks after I had accepted the
offer of Ferris Strauss and Jeru, there were offers from
the movies. And then the New York Times started writing
about this because mostly because it was so unusual that
I had turned down a higher offer for Presumed Innocent,
(14:34):
because I wanted to publish with FSG, and because I
then gone into private practice as a lawyer, and I
really thought, you know, that'd be kind of foolhardy to
let money rule the day when, in point of fact,
I know was no longer on a public salary and
(14:55):
presumably would make plenty of money as a lawyer. So
that again, that was unusual. So the New York Times
started to write about that, and you know, all of
this was happening. And I remember, you know, just to
just to answer the question, coming through the back door
(15:15):
to my house and you know, putting down my briefcase
and taking off my boots.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
You know, it was winter.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
By then in Chicago, and I as I opened the
door to the house, I had just this sudden recognition
that I was living inside a dream. Not none of
this had really happened. It was a delusion. But I'd wanted,
you know, a successful literary career so much. Uh, and
(15:47):
that you know, I I was just imagining all of this.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
It couldn't really have happened. But and it went on
that way.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
You know, the book came out, there were these two
leirious reviews. It slowly climbed the best seller list. I
remember the wonderful Helen Antwin, who ended up as the
publisher of Beacon Pressed here, calling me and saying to
me that once Presumed Innocent hit number two. She says, well,
(16:18):
you're never getting the number one, because Mitch Nur's got
a book coming out next week and then Stephen King
will publish after.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
That, and she was wrong. We were all wrong.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
You know, as I like to tell people meaning it you,
you will meet very few people in your life who
can say to you, my dream came true. But my
dream did come true and I lived my dream.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I think we can we can relate to that feeling,
although our journeys are probably less like a rocket ship
and more like a sort of three legged donkey.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah, a rather ill three legged donkey.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
Well, that describes my legal career.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Do you want ask you about the film? Were you
ever tempted? Because it's one of my favorite legal films?
That and another film which I'm sure you must have seen,
although I'm not sure as a lawyer what you think
what you make of it? A few good men, So yeah,
I mean that's the way I think all American lawyers
approach getting out of witnesses. You just shout I want
(17:19):
the truth loudly enough, and.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
They did right, works off it all works all the time.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Did you ever were you ever tempted in the negotiations
with the film company to ask for a part for
a little cameo.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
On the bench or I drove that stuff?
Speaker 2 (17:38):
I once you know, when a miniseries based on one
of my books was being filmed. The the director my
dear friend Mike Robe, because my family was there talking
talk to us into being in a scene, and the
family that the camera was trained on was eating dessert.
(17:59):
H and the rest of the players were not doing
what they were supposed to do, And so there were
seven takes, and by the time that you know, my
ex and my daughters and I had eaten our seventh
piece of Boston cream pie, we knew that the being
(18:20):
in the movies was not all that it was cut
out to be.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Oh, I mean, I can see you as a if
you pardon, no disrespect intended, but I can see you
as a sort of charming yet slightly sinister mafioso. Yeah,
in a modern Scorsese good fell.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
It might happen. You know.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
When I was young, I thought I was an actor,
and I was briefly offered a professional role at the
Goodman Theater at Chicago.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
But you know, years later.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
There was a pilot filmed based on my novel Pleading Guilty,
and it was written by really good TV writer named
Hart Hansen, and Heart had written bones on you know,
American TV for years I'm sure it's been shown in
the UK. And the director was a guy named John Abner,
(19:14):
another very dear friend who you know he wrote he was.
He directed Fried Green Tomatoes by you know, just one example.
So and John got this idea that Heart and I
should appear in this one scene. And the hero in
this movie was being played by Jason Isaacs, and we
(19:37):
were becoming by a dumpster and mocking Jason. Well, we
literally couldn't even walk together. We couldn't get our stride straight,
let alone when we came out with lines, you know,
they were completely off. Either we muffed them or we
(19:57):
talked over one another. We forgot what we're supposed to say.
And you know, I'm not finally just screaming, oh forget it,
he says, I'll cut around it.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
So fair enough to summarize Scot Trow brilliant writer, brilliant,
brilliant lawyer, absolutely crap extra on set. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
I think the issue there, Scott is that you weren't
the lead character. I mean, it sounds like it's everybody
else's fault there, people talking over you, not giving you
the right part.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
No, I don't think even the eating the seven pieces
of Boston cream piles even do that properly.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
I'm going to close the loop here because you've had
lots of best sellers in between Presumed Innocent and your
latest novel. But your latest novel is a return to
Rusty sabeech Am. I pronouncing it correctly, So I've always
had it as Sabeach in my head.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
You you probably are pronouncing it more correctly.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Than I do.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
How do you pronounce it?
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I pronounced it savage. Yeah, so that in Presumed Innocent,
the cops who don't know any better call him savage.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Okay, So I've just finished reading Presumed Guilty, another brilliant
book with your trademark way of writing, your pros and
the way that you lead us in to the story.
And this one, of course has a racial dimension to
the story. So tell us give us the elevator pitch
for this book and then we talk a bit more
(21:28):
about it.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Well, Rusty Savage is, you know, nearly forty years past
the events Presumed Innocent. He's been you know, cuffed around
the years by the legal system more.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Than once, and he's fled Kindle County.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
My imaginative imagined landscape for an area to the north
where he's long had a vacation home, and he's intending
to really become a hermit up there, and gradually gets
drawn into life, including most noticeably by falling in love
with a woman more than twenty years younger than he is,
(22:07):
who's agreed to marry him, and they have a remarkably
contented life, far better than what Rusty has managed to
achieve previously in his relationships. The one fly in the
ointment is that her adopted son, and you mentioned race,
Aaron is black or half black, you know, but he's
(22:29):
what Americans call black. And he's been convicted of a
drug of fancies, spend a little time in jail. He's
now on probation, and one of the conditions of the
probation is that he has to remain under Rusty and
Bee's roof and remain in contact.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
At all times.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
And the novel opens when he's disappeared, and it turns
out that he has disappeared.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
With his on again, off again girlfriend, May.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Potter, who's the daughter of a very prominent local family,
and you know, she's brilliant.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
And beautiful and absolutely nuts, and.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
So he's gone with her and out of contact for
several days, when he returns, he's got her phone or
telephone for reasons that seem hard to explain. Pretty soon
Rusty gets up in the middle of the night and
finds him burning his clothing and his sleeping bag and
the you know, in the outdoor fire pit. And May
(23:35):
does not return. She's unseen, and suspicion mounts and focuses
on Aaron, And when he's charged with May's murder, Bee
gets the inspired idea that to defend Aaron, the perfect
lawyer would be Rusty, who regards this as a laughable
(23:59):
no initially uh, and for a variety of reasons, eventually
becomes persuaded that he's got no choice but to do this.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
And I have to say, I've gotten quite good over
the years that at at least narrowing down the killer
to the to the one or two who eventually turned
out to be it. But I did not. I did not.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Most people seem very surprised, which I you know, I
there's a point in the book where I think I've
completely given this away, and but people go right over it, go.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Right past it.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
What you're saying is I'm too stupid to have picked
up I.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Well, if you are Luss. You've been joined by a
vast horde of very literate, uh and intelligent people, So.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
It's the best.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Scott's being very polite there of us. You know, I,
having known you for long enough, can say that that's
probably the case. What are you working on right now, then, Scott.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I've started a new novel, and I'm I'm moving very slowly,
mostly because I've been, you know, busy doing what's required
of a author with a new book out and in
two countries, so there hasn't been all that much time
(25:33):
to write.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
I still have.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
One pro bono case left from my legal career, and
I spent the morning writing a memo in that case.
So there's all kinds of things right now getting in
the way. But I've got the concept for the next book,
and I really am making very steady progress with it
on a kind of daily or weekly.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Can I ask you a question, I mean, with everything
that's going on in the world, politics, especially American politics,
affect your ability to write and what you write and
how you write.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
I don't know whether it was Samuel's goldwinner Darryl Zanik,
who told one of his writers who showed up with
a kind of political tract of a screenplay in the
nineteen thirties. If you want to send a message, use
Western Union. I think, I think art, narrative art is
(26:32):
fundamentally about ambiguous circumstances, where, to use an elegant phrase
of Faulkner's, the human heart is in conflict with itself.
And I don't think novels can be reduced to a
sentence or even a paragraph in terms of their core concerns.
(26:53):
And I think, you know, when you start getting into politics,
and it's no secret to American readers in particular, who
have probably seen my opinion pieces here and there, how
I feel about what is going on in the United
States politically, which is to say, in a word, horrified
(27:16):
and also.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
Deeply afraid. But I don't, I really don't.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Think it's the place of a novel to be delivering
lectures on public well.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
I think the opposite is also it can be true,
right escapism is what people need right now, people.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
I tell people, and I mean it that these days
I read the newspaper in the morning the way I
did when I was ten years old, which is to say,
I turned to the sports pages first, and I read
all about you know, the Cubs in spring training, and
what's going on in the NBA and the NFL, and
(27:59):
then I will scan the headlines just to see what
depressing event occurred the day before. But I don't have
the heart to delve into that deeply.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
I think you're not alone in that. I think you
know I do that as well. I think there's so
many of us now that are emotionally drained, and you know,
we cannot focus on that. I hope there's a time
when we can re engage, but it doesn't seem to
be right now.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
You can make up some of the headlines well, I.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Mean, I think sync to the political if some novelists
wrote a plot saying that a guy had been defeated
in his quest for reelection, had staged an attempt at
a coup, was then indicted for that and tried along
the way on a unrelated offense for which he was convicted,
(28:55):
and then you know, wanted a campaign for president again
and got elected. You know, nobody would believe that that
would seem utterly impossible.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Wild story. We're going to finish Scott by something I
saw again in the research, which was your appearance on
the Time cover back in nineteen ninety, which was accompanied
by a description of you as a bard of the
litigious age. What a lovely phrase. I mean, how do
you interpret Do you think now, all of these years later,
(29:29):
do you think that that's an accurate summary of you
and your career?
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Well, it's certainly the case that Presumed Innocent came to
prominence at a time when, for all kinds of reasons,
including the re litigiousness that was growing in the United States,
that the law was preoccupying Americans, and there was great
(29:58):
interest in the law. That's why, that's why I Presumed
Innocent soul.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
So well, that's one of the reasons.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Excuse me, however, I flatter myself about you know, what
an inspired work it was.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
So was it algigious age? Yes?
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Was that representative of the booming American interest in the law?
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Yes, it was.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
And you know, certainly Presumed Innocent does occupy an important
place in that in terms of the public imagination of
what was going on in the law. I will add that,
you know, in nineteen ninety, unlike today, being on the
(30:43):
cover of Time magazine.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
Was a.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Really unique piece of public attention, so much so that
when I had been at my college reunion a few
days before, I had felt the need to gather my
friends and warned them in advance that this was going
to happen in the next couple of days, because they
would be really ticked off at me had I not
(31:08):
told them while we were to get So, you know,
I've had all kinds of amazing, great things that have
happened to me as in which are ancillary to my
career as a.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Novelist a consequence of it.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
But you know, I tell people, and I really mean it,
that the.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
The best part.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
The best part is still writing well, feeling you know,
that wind under your wings as a as a as
a writer, and feeling that you know, you're just using
so much of your experience, which I have to say
was something that I felt while I was writing Presumed Guilty.
(31:53):
I just felt I got this one.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
I think that you you y, You're a very modest
and humble man, Scott. So we've come to the end
of this session. We're not going to keep you any longer,
but just to say that, you know, if we have
a doe meet in person, I am going to get
you to sign this twenty palisman, a copy of Presumed Innocent.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Let's let's expand on that, Scott, are you going to
be on this side of the Atlantic anytime soon?
Speaker 4 (32:19):
I don't anticipate coming to the UK.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
My Italian publishers typically bring me over and I'm scheduled
to come in May, but I don't presently anticipate any
STAPs in the United king.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Well, we would love to see you if you are
coming this way. You know, both Vas and I sit
on the board of festivals and we'd love to have
you and we'll follow up on that.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Thank you very much, No, no, thank you.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
It's been an absolute pleasure and honor talking to you,
so thank you so much, sir.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Do you want me to please do leaders?
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Does that okay?
Speaker 3 (33:01):
And well, ladies and gentlemen. That brings us to the
close of another episode.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
Vas.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
If you and I were to have a cameo in
in a production of something, what would we be? Who
would we be?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
It wouldn't be presumed guilty, It will be definitely guilty.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Definitely guilty. I think we would be Statler and Waldorf
right from the Moe pits, right in the gallery.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
So far.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you've liked the show,
can we ask you to please leave a review, sign
up for regular episodes using your favorite podcast app, and
please do spread the word. We have been once again
your friends, Vassinabier, the Red Hot Chili writers on Murder Junction,
Thank you very much
Welcome to Murder Junction. Everyone. Well, this week on the show,
we have a genuine thriller writing legend, a man whose
work has sold tens of millions of copies around the
world and delighted readers for many, many years. We are
talking to the one and only Scott Turow, author of
the classic novel Presumed Innocent, which of course became the
acclaimed film starring Harrison Ford and gret Tuscaki, and he
(00:24):
will be leading us not only through his career as
judge writer and all round good guy, but also through
his latest novel, Presumed Guilty. Scott, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Thank you us same for making time for me. I
apologize to you and your listeners for quality of my voice,
but I have that the wages of book to her
are seeen for me to be respiratory in factions. So
I'm sorry, but there's the best I can do.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Not at all. I GRAVITASDS.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
How are you feeling?
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Are you?
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Are you feeling okay?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I feel great? I mean, but you know, larryn Otis
is a strange creature. You know, some infection lodges and
the larynx, and this has been remarkably persistent So anyway,
as I said, I apologize.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Not at all. Can I start by being a bit
of a fanboy. I'm going to tell you a very
quick story as to why I was absolutely delighted that
you agreed to do this. So twenty odd years ago,
I was working in India. I grew up in the UK,
but I was working in Bombay in India, Mumbai as
it's now known, and I ducked into a bookstore and
I came across this, this very old copy which has
(01:38):
remained with me ever since. And you know, as soon
as I started reading, presumed innocent. Honestly, you look, you'll
see here Our listeners can't see, but there's all sorts
of brilliant phrases and notes that I've made, which I
said to myself, if I'm ever published and I ever
write a legal thriller, I'm just going to copy Scotch
throw And I've kept this ever since. So I'm a
(01:59):
huge fan. Thank you so much for spending the time
with us. So our starting point for these discussions is
really to just ask you so that our listeners can
ground you. I mean, most of nearly all of them
will know who you are anyway, but just tell us
a little bit about growing up, where you grew up,
and that sort of journey towards adulthood.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Sure, I grew up on the North side of Chicago,
and my ambition from the time I was ten or
eleven years old, which I had largely stolen from my mother,
was to be a novelist. That was her great dream.
And once I read the Count of Monte Cristo, I thought,
(02:38):
you know, this is If it's this exciting to read
a book, I imagine how much more exciting it is
to write it. Which that'll give you the logic of
an eleven year old. So my parents ultimately moved to
the suburbs. I graduated from a large suburban high school.
(02:58):
I was the editor of the newspaper there, but I
was still telling anybody who would listen that I was.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
Going to be a novelist.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And I went off to college, and in Massachusetts, a small,
little tiny at this point.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
All Men's College.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I had not bothered to notice that there were no
creative writing classes at this school, so although during my
time there, some really wonderful writers were hired as writers
in residence, so I didn't suffer too much, as it
turned out, But during my time in college, I noticed
(03:36):
these red banded really they call the color cardinal announcements
from the Stanford Creative Writing Center announcing these fellowships with
which they gave, and I noticed, kind of coincidentally, that
many of the American writers whom I admired, like Larry
(03:58):
McMurtry or Robert Stone or Ernest Gaines or my former
teacher Tillie Olson, Tom mcguain, a lot of writers that
I thought were terrific, had had one of these Stanford
Writing fellowships. So that became my great goal, as if
the mere awarding of the fellowships would have turned me
(04:19):
into a novelist. But I was lucky enough to win one,
and I went off to California and ended up staying
for five years. My particular fellowship lasted two years. After that,
I was hired as a lecturer in the English department,
and what I discovered there, in addition to the fact
that my own writing wasn't going especially well, was that
(04:43):
I really was not interested in becoming an English professor,
which is the path you're almost immediately started on when
you have even the most junior of faculty appointments in
the English department. At Stanford, and as I be began
to think about what else I was going to do
(05:05):
aside from remain a aspiring novelist, I noticed how interested
I was in law, and there was somewhat surprising. My
father was a physician. He hated lawyers, long before it
was common in this country for physicians do that.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
I knew none.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
But when my college friends became lawyers, I was really
copsmacked by how intriguing what they were doing seemed to me.
And I eventually started asking myself, do I really want
to be a lawyer? And the answer seemed to be yes.
So I turned down a tenure track appointment elsewhere and
(05:52):
went to law school. And, as I like to say,
the great break of my literary career was going to
law school because for me any different reasons, the most
important being that it gave me a subject to write about,
which I truly was passionate, But beyond that, when I
announced to my agent that I was going to go
(06:13):
to law school, what came back in the mail was
a contract from a publisher she'd been having lunch with,
who wanted me to write a nonfiction book about law school,
which I did. That book one l remains in print today.
It's been read by I dare say, thousands and thousands
(06:35):
of American law students and their parents and people.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Go and never go.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And it became sort of the first stepping stone in
my literary career, and I think it provided me with
something of an audience when presumed Innison came out ten
years later.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I'm going to take you back a little bit further
to an earlier stepping stone. So this is some in
which you've said somewhere online. While I was doing the research,
I came across this I found quite interesting. And you've
said that, as you just told us, so you wanted
to be a novelist from a very young age, but
young age. But you also said you began your career
with a story plagiarized from one of your school texts.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
Yeah, that's true. Well that story that you that was true.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
I mean I I guess I was eleven, so that
would put me in roughly what we call sixth grade.
And I had read a story I still remember this.
I had something to do with skiing and a young
man named Bobby Hanson. And just to prove my bona
fhides as a novelist, I sat down and rewrote that story,
(07:45):
and you know, gave it to my mother and see this,
you know, this brilliant work. And I'm not sure I
think I knew even intuitively at that point that that
was not the right way to go about writing. But
eventually I had a subject of my own, although as
I say, never really one that reached my core the
(08:10):
way the law did.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Once I arrived there.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Tell us the genesis of the book that changed I
wouldn't say it changed your life, because you still had
a very long and successful legal career. You didn't abandon
the law at all for a very long time, I
believe you. You kept going to the office and then
you sort of balance things out with your law fun. Well,
what was the genesis moment for Presumed Innocent?
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Well, I was lucky enough when I left law school
to get a job as a federal prosecutor in Chicago.
And you know, as I look back at my time
at Stanford, there were all kinds of reasons that my
writing didn't go as well as I might have hoped.
(08:54):
But one of them was that I was really undecided
about what the purpose of you know, the novel ought
to be. And and you know, and that you can
make whatever decisions about what the novel ought to be.
But what any writer is really asking is what kind
of novelists I bought I to be.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
And I got.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Into a debate with one of my professors, whom I
was very fond of, but he was very much an
avant gardist. He thought andre Gid was the you know,
the be all and end all of twentieth century fiction.
And I told him, I said to Alford, I think
that the greatest novel could be read by appreciation, read
(09:41):
with appreciation by a bus driver and an English professor.
That this he didn't believe it, you know, he really accepted.
You know, Hollins maxim that the poet is the antenna
of the race, and thus if the second line goes that,
not as many people remember, and thus he will will
never be.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
Understood by the bullet headed many. And I just.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
I couldn't accept that. And so I was in a
courtroom in Chicago, well on my way through my career
as a prosecutor, and still writing assiduously on the morning
commuter train. That was the only time I had but
I kept doing it, which was the remonstration I'd gotten
(10:29):
from my teachers at Stanford, especially Wallace Stegne, and I
suddenly turned around in this courtroom.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
I was up there observing a couple of younger lawyers.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
And I looked at everybody who was sitting there. And
you know, characteristically the people who are spectators in a
courtroom are generally older folks who are looking for some
form of free theater which God knows, trials. But this
happened to be a particularly broad cross section of people
(11:05):
who were there, not only elderly, but also younger, different races.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
And different genders. And I suddenly thought to myself, this
is it. This crime is the story.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
That entertains both the English professor and the bus driver.
And at that point I decided to begin what became
presumed innocent. I had been chastened by the experience of
writing One l which had been a nonfiction book in
which everybody, even though names were changed, could clearly pick
(11:43):
out who they were.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
So I knew I couldn't set this novel I.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Started working on in the Prosecutor's office where I was working. Instead,
I chose as a backdrop the Boston DA's office, where
I'd spent my last semester in law school, working as an.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
Intern or a clerk.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
And as I said, that provided the background, I transmogrified
one of the murder cases that I had worked on
in Boston on the prosecutor's side, and that became the
murder of Carolyn belimas you know, with the victim tied
(12:24):
up and and and that that was in fact the
circumstances of the first murder case I worked on doing
research for the prosecutor, guy named Phil Bea Shane.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
And in that.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Case, of course, it was her pimp who was accused
of actually murdering this woman and trying to make it
appear that the murder had been the work of an intruder.
But you know, in the election, that's going on in
the background and presumed innocent, was exactly what was going
on in the Boston DA's office while I was there.
(13:00):
And uh, you know Nico de la Guardia, who's supposed
to be a little bit of a demagogue, who you know,
made points by prosecuting a black o bg y n
for what he claimed was murder by performing on abortion.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
That that's those were the facts. That's that's what that's
what that's fabulous.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
I had no idea that there was a true story
behind this that you'd you'd reference from your your days
in court.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
And and when Presumed Innocence came out, how did your
life change? Was it instantaneous or was it a gradual
thing that that that it picked up the success that
it did well.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
I always say that, you know, writing Presumed Innocent was
like writing a rocket ship, and you know, and suddenly
all these dreams are coming true. I never i'd written novels,
I'd never succeeded in publishing one. All of a sudden
there were several publishers who wanted to publish this manuscript.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
And.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
No more than three weeks after I had accepted the
offer of Ferris Strauss and Jeru, there were offers from
the movies. And then the New York Times started writing
about this because mostly because it was so unusual that
I had turned down a higher offer for Presumed Innocent,
(14:34):
because I wanted to publish with FSG, and because I
then gone into private practice as a lawyer, and I
really thought, you know, that'd be kind of foolhardy to
let money rule the day when, in point of fact,
I know was no longer on a public salary and
(14:55):
presumably would make plenty of money as a lawyer. So
that again, that was unusual. So the New York Times
started to write about that, and you know, all of
this was happening. And I remember, you know, just to
just to answer the question, coming through the back door
(15:15):
to my house and you know, putting down my briefcase
and taking off my boots.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
You know, it was winter.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
By then in Chicago, and I as I opened the
door to the house, I had just this sudden recognition
that I was living inside a dream. Not none of
this had really happened. It was a delusion. But I'd wanted,
you know, a successful literary career so much. Uh, and
(15:47):
that you know, I I was just imagining all of this.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
It couldn't really have happened. But and it went on
that way.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
You know, the book came out, there were these two
leirious reviews. It slowly climbed the best seller list. I
remember the wonderful Helen Antwin, who ended up as the
publisher of Beacon Pressed here, calling me and saying to
me that once Presumed Innocent hit number two. She says, well,
(16:18):
you're never getting the number one, because Mitch Nur's got
a book coming out next week and then Stephen King
will publish after.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
That, and she was wrong. We were all wrong.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
You know, as I like to tell people meaning it you,
you will meet very few people in your life who
can say to you, my dream came true. But my
dream did come true and I lived my dream.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I think we can we can relate to that feeling,
although our journeys are probably less like a rocket ship
and more like a sort of three legged donkey.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah, a rather ill three legged donkey.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
Well, that describes my legal career.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Do you want ask you about the film? Were you
ever tempted? Because it's one of my favorite legal films?
That and another film which I'm sure you must have seen,
although I'm not sure as a lawyer what you think
what you make of it? A few good men, So yeah,
I mean that's the way I think all American lawyers
approach getting out of witnesses. You just shout I want
(17:19):
the truth loudly enough, and.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
They did right, works off it all works all the time.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Did you ever were you ever tempted in the negotiations
with the film company to ask for a part for
a little cameo.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
On the bench or I drove that stuff?
Speaker 2 (17:38):
I once you know, when a miniseries based on one
of my books was being filmed. The the director my
dear friend Mike Robe, because my family was there talking
talk to us into being in a scene, and the
family that the camera was trained on was eating dessert.
(17:59):
H and the rest of the players were not doing
what they were supposed to do, And so there were
seven takes, and by the time that you know, my
ex and my daughters and I had eaten our seventh
piece of Boston cream pie, we knew that the being
(18:20):
in the movies was not all that it was cut
out to be.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Oh, I mean, I can see you as a if
you pardon, no disrespect intended, but I can see you
as a sort of charming yet slightly sinister mafioso. Yeah,
in a modern Scorsese good fell.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
It might happen. You know.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
When I was young, I thought I was an actor,
and I was briefly offered a professional role at the
Goodman Theater at Chicago.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
But you know, years later.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
There was a pilot filmed based on my novel Pleading Guilty,
and it was written by really good TV writer named
Hart Hansen, and Heart had written bones on you know,
American TV for years I'm sure it's been shown in
the UK. And the director was a guy named John Abner,
(19:14):
another very dear friend who you know he wrote he was.
He directed Fried Green Tomatoes by you know, just one example.
So and John got this idea that Heart and I
should appear in this one scene. And the hero in
this movie was being played by Jason Isaacs, and we
(19:37):
were becoming by a dumpster and mocking Jason. Well, we
literally couldn't even walk together. We couldn't get our stride straight,
let alone when we came out with lines, you know,
they were completely off. Either we muffed them or we
(19:57):
talked over one another. We forgot what we're supposed to say.
And you know, I'm not finally just screaming, oh forget it,
he says, I'll cut around it.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
So fair enough to summarize Scot Trow brilliant writer, brilliant,
brilliant lawyer, absolutely crap extra on set. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
I think the issue there, Scott is that you weren't
the lead character. I mean, it sounds like it's everybody
else's fault there, people talking over you, not giving you
the right part.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
No, I don't think even the eating the seven pieces
of Boston cream piles even do that properly.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
I'm going to close the loop here because you've had
lots of best sellers in between Presumed Innocent and your
latest novel. But your latest novel is a return to
Rusty sabeech Am. I pronouncing it correctly, So I've always
had it as Sabeach in my head.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
You you probably are pronouncing it more correctly.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Than I do.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
How do you pronounce it?
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I pronounced it savage. Yeah, so that in Presumed Innocent,
the cops who don't know any better call him savage.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Okay, So I've just finished reading Presumed Guilty, another brilliant
book with your trademark way of writing, your pros and
the way that you lead us in to the story.
And this one, of course has a racial dimension to
the story. So tell us give us the elevator pitch
for this book and then we talk a bit more
(21:28):
about it.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Well, Rusty Savage is, you know, nearly forty years past
the events Presumed Innocent. He's been you know, cuffed around
the years by the legal system more.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Than once, and he's fled Kindle County.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
My imaginative imagined landscape for an area to the north
where he's long had a vacation home, and he's intending
to really become a hermit up there, and gradually gets
drawn into life, including most noticeably by falling in love
with a woman more than twenty years younger than he is,
(22:07):
who's agreed to marry him, and they have a remarkably
contented life, far better than what Rusty has managed to
achieve previously in his relationships. The one fly in the
ointment is that her adopted son, and you mentioned race,
Aaron is black or half black, you know, but he's
(22:29):
what Americans call black. And he's been convicted of a
drug of fancies, spend a little time in jail. He's
now on probation, and one of the conditions of the
probation is that he has to remain under Rusty and
Bee's roof and remain in contact.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
At all times.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
And the novel opens when he's disappeared, and it turns
out that he has disappeared.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
With his on again, off again girlfriend, May.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Potter, who's the daughter of a very prominent local family,
and you know, she's brilliant.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
And beautiful and absolutely nuts, and.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
So he's gone with her and out of contact for
several days, when he returns, he's got her phone or
telephone for reasons that seem hard to explain. Pretty soon
Rusty gets up in the middle of the night and
finds him burning his clothing and his sleeping bag and
the you know, in the outdoor fire pit. And May
(23:35):
does not return. She's unseen, and suspicion mounts and focuses
on Aaron, And when he's charged with May's murder, Bee
gets the inspired idea that to defend Aaron, the perfect
lawyer would be Rusty, who regards this as a laughable
(23:59):
no initially uh, and for a variety of reasons, eventually
becomes persuaded that he's got no choice but to do this.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
And I have to say, I've gotten quite good over
the years that at at least narrowing down the killer
to the to the one or two who eventually turned
out to be it. But I did not. I did not.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Most people seem very surprised, which I you know, I
there's a point in the book where I think I've
completely given this away, and but people go right over it, go.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Right past it.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
What you're saying is I'm too stupid to have picked
up I.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Well, if you are Luss. You've been joined by a
vast horde of very literate, uh and intelligent people, So.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
It's the best.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Scott's being very polite there of us. You know, I,
having known you for long enough, can say that that's
probably the case. What are you working on right now, then, Scott.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I've started a new novel, and I'm I'm moving very slowly,
mostly because I've been, you know, busy doing what's required
of a author with a new book out and in
two countries, so there hasn't been all that much time
(25:33):
to write.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
I still have.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
One pro bono case left from my legal career, and
I spent the morning writing a memo in that case.
So there's all kinds of things right now getting in
the way. But I've got the concept for the next book,
and I really am making very steady progress with it
on a kind of daily or weekly.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Can I ask you a question, I mean, with everything
that's going on in the world, politics, especially American politics,
affect your ability to write and what you write and
how you write.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
I don't know whether it was Samuel's goldwinner Darryl Zanik,
who told one of his writers who showed up with
a kind of political tract of a screenplay in the
nineteen thirties. If you want to send a message, use
Western Union. I think, I think art, narrative art is
(26:32):
fundamentally about ambiguous circumstances, where, to use an elegant phrase
of Faulkner's, the human heart is in conflict with itself.
And I don't think novels can be reduced to a
sentence or even a paragraph in terms of their core concerns.
(26:53):
And I think, you know, when you start getting into politics,
and it's no secret to American readers in particular, who
have probably seen my opinion pieces here and there, how
I feel about what is going on in the United
States politically, which is to say, in a word, horrified
(27:16):
and also.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
Deeply afraid. But I don't, I really don't.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Think it's the place of a novel to be delivering
lectures on public well.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
I think the opposite is also it can be true,
right escapism is what people need right now, people.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
I tell people, and I mean it that these days
I read the newspaper in the morning the way I
did when I was ten years old, which is to say,
I turned to the sports pages first, and I read
all about you know, the Cubs in spring training, and
what's going on in the NBA and the NFL, and
(27:59):
then I will scan the headlines just to see what
depressing event occurred the day before. But I don't have
the heart to delve into that deeply.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
I think you're not alone in that. I think you
know I do that as well. I think there's so
many of us now that are emotionally drained, and you know,
we cannot focus on that. I hope there's a time
when we can re engage, but it doesn't seem to
be right now.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
You can make up some of the headlines well, I.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Mean, I think sync to the political if some novelists
wrote a plot saying that a guy had been defeated
in his quest for reelection, had staged an attempt at
a coup, was then indicted for that and tried along
the way on a unrelated offense for which he was convicted,
(28:55):
and then you know, wanted a campaign for president again
and got elected. You know, nobody would believe that that
would seem utterly impossible.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Wild story. We're going to finish Scott by something I
saw again in the research, which was your appearance on
the Time cover back in nineteen ninety, which was accompanied
by a description of you as a bard of the
litigious age. What a lovely phrase. I mean, how do
you interpret Do you think now, all of these years later,
(29:29):
do you think that that's an accurate summary of you
and your career?
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Well, it's certainly the case that Presumed Innocent came to
prominence at a time when, for all kinds of reasons,
including the re litigiousness that was growing in the United States,
that the law was preoccupying Americans, and there was great
(29:58):
interest in the law. That's why, that's why I Presumed
Innocent soul.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
So well, that's one of the reasons.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Excuse me, however, I flatter myself about you know, what
an inspired work it was.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
So was it algigious age? Yes?
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Was that representative of the booming American interest in the law?
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Yes, it was.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
And you know, certainly Presumed Innocent does occupy an important
place in that in terms of the public imagination of
what was going on in the law. I will add that,
you know, in nineteen ninety, unlike today, being on the
(30:43):
cover of Time magazine.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
Was a.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Really unique piece of public attention, so much so that
when I had been at my college reunion a few
days before, I had felt the need to gather my
friends and warned them in advance that this was going
to happen in the next couple of days, because they
would be really ticked off at me had I not
(31:08):
told them while we were to get So, you know,
I've had all kinds of amazing, great things that have
happened to me as in which are ancillary to my
career as a.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Novelist a consequence of it.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
But you know, I tell people, and I really mean it,
that the.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
The best part.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
The best part is still writing well, feeling you know,
that wind under your wings as a as a as
a writer, and feeling that you know, you're just using
so much of your experience, which I have to say
was something that I felt while I was writing Presumed Guilty.
(31:53):
I just felt I got this one.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
I think that you you y, You're a very modest
and humble man, Scott. So we've come to the end
of this session. We're not going to keep you any longer,
but just to say that, you know, if we have
a doe meet in person, I am going to get
you to sign this twenty palisman, a copy of Presumed Innocent.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Let's let's expand on that, Scott, are you going to
be on this side of the Atlantic anytime soon?
Speaker 4 (32:19):
I don't anticipate coming to the UK.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
My Italian publishers typically bring me over and I'm scheduled
to come in May, but I don't presently anticipate any
STAPs in the United king.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Well, we would love to see you if you are
coming this way. You know, both Vas and I sit
on the board of festivals and we'd love to have
you and we'll follow up on that.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Thank you very much, No, no, thank you.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
It's been an absolute pleasure and honor talking to you,
so thank you so much, sir.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Do you want me to please do leaders?
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Does that okay?
Speaker 3 (33:01):
And well, ladies and gentlemen. That brings us to the
close of another episode.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
Vas.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
If you and I were to have a cameo in
in a production of something, what would we be? Who
would we be?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
It wouldn't be presumed guilty, It will be definitely guilty.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Definitely guilty. I think we would be Statler and Waldorf
right from the Moe pits, right in the gallery.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
So far.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you've liked the show,
can we ask you to please leave a review, sign
up for regular episodes using your favorite podcast app, and
please do spread the word. We have been once again
your friends, Vassinabier, the Red Hot Chili writers on Murder Junction,
Thank you very much
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