The best defense is a bestseller

Richard North Patterson honed his storytelling craft by learning how to hold the interest of jaded judges and juries.

By Joan Smith

Dec 30, 1995 | Of all the settings in which we have come to expect a good mystery -- the great English country house, the luxury train, the scientific laboratory -- there is none more popular than the courtroom.

But to Richard North Patterson, who since the publication of his 1993 bestseller "Degree of Guilt" has become known as one of the genre's finest practitioners, a court of law is more than a literary device. The former San Francisco attorney says -- with little irony -- that it is one of the best places to practice the art of fine fiction. "Obviously not every lawyer has a knack for writing fiction or we'd have no lawyers left," quipped Patterson, who has happily given up his lucrative law practice with the San Francisco firm McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen to write full time at home in upscale Pacific Heights.

"But the skills of a trial lawyer are the skills of a storyteller. You learn to weave the disparate facts of a case into a coherent narrative interesting enough to command the attention of a judge, probably the world's most jaded reader. And you have to make your client human enough to elicit the sympathy of a jury. Which is very much the work of the novelist." Patterson has always been at his best in the fictional courtroom. His characters' legal maneuvers are clever and suspenseful, his exchanges among witnesses, attorneys and judges utterly convincing. But he says he has become increasingly interested in what happens to his characters outside the courtroom. "In my new novel, the trial scenes seem in some ways the least important parts of the book," he says.

"The Final Judgment" is the story of Caroline Masters, a character who first appeared as the intimidating but ultimately benevolent judge in "Degree of Guilt," and again in last year's bestselling "Eyes of a Child." Masters is widely admired by her colleagues, but her personal life is a mystery.

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