|
||||||||||
|
Subscribe to the Absolute Write Newsletter and get the Agents! Agents! Agents! report free! Click here.
|
Win a 1-year subscription to Writer's Digest by subscribing to Absolute Markets-- all paying markets for your writing. Click here. |
|
| |||||||||||||
|
|
The
Mystery Behind Phillip Margolin’s Best-Sellers The
true-crime author of Heartstone, The Last Innocent Man, Gone,
But Not Forgotten, The Ties That Bind, and The Associate tells
his story New
York City-born attorney Phillip Margolin, 59, is always on a wild ride. “I’m
like a leaf on the river,” he says now from his Portland, Oregon home.
“Wherever life carries me I go.” His
first published writing was the short story “The Girl in the Yellow Bikini,”
published in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine in 1974. (In mid-2002, it
was re-printed as a booklet and shrink-wrapped to the French edition of Elle fashion
magazine.) Flush with self-confidence after seeing “The Girl in the Yellow
Bikini” in print, he decided to turn a true crime story
he’d learned about while clerking at the Oregon Court of Appeals into a
fictionalized novel. That’s
where the story gets really interesting. “I had five chapters in outline. I had never met anyone who had written a book, or I had never met anyone in the publishing industry. I had no idea what I would do when I finished. As a matter of fact, I was the first published writer that I had ever met, because I’d published a short story. “So
this friend of mine, who I hadn’t seen since we went to law school together,
called me up out of the blue. He said he was going to fly to Oregon on vacation
with his wife and could get we get together. I said great; I thought he was
working in a midtown firm doing commercial law. “He
got off the plane, and I asked him what he was doing. It turned out he was one
of three lawyers with the largest literary agency in the world. I asked him if
he would take my chapters and just show them to somebody, not to sell the book,
but just to see if they were any good. Two weeks later I came back from a trial,
and everyone was sitting around the law office with champagne, and I said,
‘What’s up?’ “They
said, ‘Your agent called,’ which I didn’t even know I had an agent. [My
friend] had just given the chapters to some guy at the agency who had just
started out and who had never sold a book before, and this guy had shown it to
an editor that he knew at Pocket Books, and they bought it. So that’s how I
got published. “That
is an amazing story. And anyone that knows anything about how hard it is to get
published will realize how amazing that is.” That
book was Heartstone, soon to be nominated for best original paperback
mystery of 1978 by the Mystery Writers of America. In 1994 it was re-released,
this time making The New York Times best-seller list. Meanwhile,
Margolin had started a private law practice in Portland. In 1981, he published
his second novel, The Last Innocent Man. Six years later it was made into
an HBO movie. Even
then, “the writing was just a hobby,” Margolin says. “I didn’t really
take that seriously. I appreciated how hard it was to get published and I
appreciated that I was a published author when most people weren’t, but my
main interest was being a criminal counselor. So I just let the writing hang. I
just let it go for 12 years.” Twelve
years later, he came out with novel No. 3: Gone, But Not Forgotten. It
was a run-away bestseller, coincidentally climbing to the same No. 3 spot on The
New York Times list. “I
got the idea for Gone, But Not Forgotten at a dinner party,” Margolin
recalls. The conversation had turned to moral quandaries, and Margolin began
thinking about what he would do if Adolf Hitler asked
him to be his attorney. “And I just started thinking about writing
another book,” he says. Margolin created a female
heroine who represents women in cases involving women’s issues, torn by
personal ethics when she’s hired by a serial killer who dehumanizes women
before he kills them. “I
wrote the thing in, like, six months. It was very fast; that was part-time, too,
because I still had a very busy law practice. I sent it to my agent. If my agent
had called and said, ‘You’re going to get a $20,000 advance and they’re
going to publish 30,000 copies,’ I would have thought I had died and gone to
heaven. Instead, the next thing I know she optioned it, and it sold for a huge
amount of money... six figures.” And Margolin just kept practicing law. “It was very strange because if I were in New York, it probably would have been different; there would have been parties and stuff, but I just went about my business, and I would get these calls from my agent, and all this money, and the best-seller list and everything like that. But I was sitting here doing everything that I normally did.” His
1995 novel, After Dark, was a Book of the Month Club selection. His 1996
novel, The Burning Man, was the main selection of the Literary Guild and
a Reader’s Digest condensed book. That’s when he stopped practicing law to
focus on his writing. His 1998 novel, The Undertaker’s Widow, was a Book of the Month Club selection. His 2000 novel, Wild Justice, was another main selection of the Literary Guild and a selection of the Book of the Month Club. His 2001 novel, The Associate, hit The New York Times best-seller list when it was released in paperback in August. Margolin’s
ninth novel, The Ties That Bind, was released in early 2003. “I’m
bringing back Amanda Jaffe as the main character,” Margolin says. “She was
the lead in Wild Justice and she’s in The Associate — but she
only has a small role in that. She’s the main character again in The Ties
That Bind. I really like the book. I think it’s got my best first chapter
ever. It’s a pretty amazing first chapter. I’ve had a couple of people read
it and I’d just watch their expression for something to happen. And it’s
like, ‘Okay, I got them.’” What
are his life plans now? “I
don’t have any plans. I’m just sort of enjoying myself. I’m writing books.
I’m real family-oriented. We’re doing some traveling. But mostly I’m a
real homebody, because I travel so much for the book tours.” He’s
working on new book ideas, but nothing is set in stone. “One of the most
important things for me is I have no goals. I have no preconceived notions of
what I want to do. It’s counterproductive to think big and have big goals; I
just get projects. Once I have a project, like a new book, my job is to try to
do the best job I can with this book, and when it’s done, then I’ll get
another project. “In school, I never had a nervous breakdown because I wasn’t the class valedictorian. I did the best job I could do, and that was fine. It’s mentally healthy to not have too many expectations of yourself. And,” he says, tapping back into his lawyer persona, “there’s no charge for that advice.” Jennifer
Dirks is the co-author of the 12-week Amazon.com bestseller
|
Sponsored links 
Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer! How to find a book publisher |
Text on this site Copyright © 1998-2007
Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
|
