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Phillip Margolin shares insights on The Associate, and where the idea for the book came from.
One of the questions that I am most frequently asked on my book tours is,
"Where did the idea for your book come from?" The idea for The
Associate came from three unrelated events. In 1997, I was asked to be part
of a month-long promotion of thrillers in The Netherlands. As part of this
promotion, I was required to write a novella that would be published only in
Holland. The story I wrote was based on the disappearance of a court reporter in
Oregon in the late 1970s in a murder case that I was handling. I liked the
novella and I toyed with the idea of expanding it into a full-length novel, but
I was always side-tracked by the other books on which I was working.
Some time after I wrote the novella, my wife, Doreen, and I were in an
art gallery in New York looking at a photo exhibition. Doreen got the idea for a
story in which a person viewing a photo exhibition sees something in one of the
photographs that is truly shocking. (I am being vague on purpose here because I
don't want to spoil one of the surprises in The Associate).
I was a criminal defense lawyer for 25 years. One of the cases I argued
in the Oregon Supreme Court challenged the use of hair identification evidence
to connect a defendant to a crime scene. (This was before DNA tests.) When I
undertook the appeal, I assumed that there must be a lot of scientific validity
to conclusions you could draw from hair found at a murder scene because the FBI
and other police agencies testified about their ability to connect hair to a
specific individual.
After researching the topic, I got interested in the idea of "junk
science"; that interest was heightened by a widely publicized product
liability lawsuit in which claims were made that leaks from silicone breast
implants were causing serious illnesses in women. When the manufacturers agreed
to a billion dollar class action settlement I assumed that there must be
validity to the plaintiffs' claims. Then I began reading about the results of
scientific studies - which uniformly showed that there was no connection between
the leakage from the breast implants and the specific types of injuries the
women were claiming. I was shocked that a major corporation like Dow Corning
would settle cases for huge sums of money when there was no factual basis for
the claims.
This got me thinking about how science could be misused in a major
product liability case. And at some point these three separate ideas came
together to form one complete novel. It is not unusual for my mind to work this
way. I will frequently get an idea for a book that I'm unable to develop into a
complete novel - at least not right away. Later I'll get another idea for
another book that I'm similarly unable to develop into a complete novel. At some
point it will dawn on me that I might find a way to put the two ideas together
to make a good book.
The Associate starts with an Arizona lawyer being shocked by
something he sees in a photograph in a Soho art gallery. The bulk of the book
centers on Daniel Ames, a young associate in a huge law firm who is part of a
team defending a pharmaceutical company against charges that it is manufacturing
a pregnancy drug that causes birth defects. Daniel uncovers information about
the validity of the lawsuit that makes him the target of a killer. The back
story that eventually leads to the discovery of the identity of the person
behind this conspiracy is in large part the novella I wrote for my Dutch
audience.
I hope you enjoy The Associate!
-- Phillip Margolin
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