Mystery Author Interviews

MBTB assistant manager David Thompson interviews Alafair Burke, the author of Judgment Calls (St. Martins; $6.99) and Missing Justice (Henry Holt; $19.95).

David: Alafair, your heroine, Samantha Kincaid, is a great new character, a strong-willed deputy district attorney in Portland, Oregon, a job you once held yourself. How much of what we see in Sam is based on yourself? And can you distinguish Grey Goose from Smirnoff?

Alafair: Samantha's educational and professional experiences are definitely based on my own. Like me, Samantha graduated from Stanford Law School and turned down more lucrative job offers to work as a state court prosecutor in a city she loved. I like to think that her most noble characteristics – her desires to stand up to perversions of justice and always feel good at the end of the day about the decisions she made – are shared not just by me, but by most of humanity. In Judgment Calls, we see Samantha allow those shared human traits to materialize in unusual and occasionally extreme ways, but hopefully the reader gets a sense that this is a woman with an almost consuming determination to do what is right, no matter the personal cost. I saw that obsession in some of the people I was lucky enough to work with in Portland. They’re some of the finest people I’ve ever known, and I intended Samantha to embody their fortitude.
In some ways, Samantha’s clearly better than I am. She’s taller, more diligent, and could beat me in a race without breaking a sweat. As for some of Samantha's more neurotic traits, I plead the Fifth. I will confess, however, to an ability to distinguish Grey Goose from all other inferior vodkas.

David: In Judgment Calls, we find Samantha, a DDA whose job is prosecuting drug and vice cases, taking on the toughest job of her career: charging a career criminal with the brutal assault on a teenage girl. This case obviously matters to Sam and touches her emotionally, and it's apparent, through your writing, that it means a lot to you as well. What may have inspired this particular plot, or did you come it with it solely from your imagination?

Alafair: The plot is a fictionalized amalgam of multiple cases I encountered at the D.A.’s Office. For example, the story line involving letters to the newspaper from a self-proclaimed killer is based on an actual serial killer who was caught after writing a series of letters to the Oregonian. The prosecution at the heart of the plot is based very loosely on a case that was handled not by me, but by my dear friend, David Lesh, whose name appears in the book. One of his first major crime prosecutions was for the rape of a teenage girl who had initially lied to the police when she reported the offense. She said the man had abducted her, when in fact she had arranged to meet him after chatting with him on the Internet. That initial lie, about that limited fact, didn’t change anything about the horrible crimes the man committed against her, but it threatened to derail the prosecution. A lot of lawyers would have dumped the case or pled it out, but I remember watching Lesh pour everything he had into it. That stuck with me, and it seemed like the perfect introduction to Samantha Kincaid.
Most accounts of the criminal justice system – both fictionalized and not – tend to tell the story of a trial from the defense perspective. One gets the impression that a crime is committed, the police either get their man or they don’t, and then the defense goes to work trying to prevent a conviction. The story that rarely gets told is the role of the prosecutor. A bad prosecutor can blow a good case through incompetence or apathy or press a bad case out of blind ambition. Prosecutors are entrusted with a tremendous amount of power and responsibility. Doing the job well requires incredibly hard work and good judgment. A guy got the maximum sentence last week in New York in a high-profile case involving the murder of a doctor. At the sentencing, the doctor’s widow acknowledged the prosecutor personally, saying she’d seen him pursue the case with sweat and tears for five straight years. But that’s a guy no one’s heard of, who works his tail off in some run-down office for a third of what he could be making in a different line of work. I know this book is a drop in the bucket of pop culture, but I hope it begins to humanize prosecutors.

David: Your father, James Lee Burke, has won two Edgar Awards for Best Novel and been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and other extended family members (Andre Dubus and Andre Dubus III) have been lauded extensively for their work. How has their work influenced your writing? Did you feel you had to work harder to establish your own voice because of the family literary legacy?

Alafair: Wow. I never thought of myself as inheriting a literary legacy. Now might be a good time for me to freak out.
Seriously, I think that someone who wanted to find some unifying commonality among our family’s writers could do so, probably in the ethos of the characters. But that probably has more to do with coming from the same family and sharing many of the same values than it does with our writing styles. What I really think I inherited from my family more than any particular writing style (or talent for that matter) is a narrative tradition. The Burkes are people who tell stories, and I grew up watching my father work a full-time job and then come home and write every single day to get his stories on paper. That clearly affected me and turned me into someone who is able to sit down and write.
The works themselves, though, are incredibly different. My father is a man of his generation raised in the south, and I’m not. I didn’t have to work to get my voice to be different. It just is.

MBTB assistant manager David Thompson's review of Judgment Calls:
Fans of James Lee Burke who may have had the delightful pleasure of making his acquaintance at one of his MBTB signings might recognize the man in Samantha Kincaid’s dad. (“I love it that my father laughs louder at his own jokes than anyone else. I wonder if he knows that the people doubling up around him when he talks are enjoying Martin Kincaid’s contagious delight with life and not the substance of what he’s saying.”) The father of Alafair Burke’s heroine is modeled after the debut author’s own papa; this is only fair since Burke patterned Dave Robicheaux’s adopted daughter after his own flesh-and-blood. But while Alafair may borrow her father’s fictional presence, she doesn’t make her sensational crime fiction debut mimicking JLB’s style or setting or characters. Alafair may share her family’s story-telling ability, yet she’s very much her own writer. If anything, those looking for scripting influences, may find a bit of Sue Grafton or Michael Connelly in Alafair’s work.
The pacing is quick – after a very brief overload of character introduction in the first few pages, the plot takes off like a flash – and the setting of Portland is as new and fresh as it is well-realized. To create Deputy District Attorney Samatha Kincaid, Alafair draws upon her own experiences as a Portland DDA, and this assured knowledge is evidenced in the narrative – never intrusive, but rather complimentary to the story.
Sam is first drawn to an attempted murder case because it may mean great things for her career, but her emotional involvement – both in aiding the young victim of a brutal assault and in working to convict the scum accused of the act – makes her fight ever harder. This fight is believable in both its execution – whether Sam is pounding the streets with the cops working her case or making her case before a jury – and in its motivation.
Alafair Burke is a writer to watch. She’s being billed as the “next Sue Grafton,” which sounds good to me! Judgment Calls would surely appeal to Kinsey Milhone followers, as well as readers of Linda Fairstein, Marcia Muller, and Lisa Scottoline. James Lee Burke fans also should not pass up the opportunity to see the family tradition live on!

Interview added 06/16/2003.