Twenty-six years ago, spinal meningitis nearly took John Lescroart's life. When he beat the odds and recovered, the experience led the author to create a future for himself that was even better than the life he'd been living before.
"I was in a coma for 11 days," Lescroart said. "When I got out, I said, 'I'm done working day jobs, and I'm done writing practice novels. I'm going to try to be a writer full time."
He sat down and wrote "Hard Evidence" — his sixth book, but the first of what became his trademark series of legal thrillers featuring San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy.
A quarter of a century later, Lescroart, now 67, has published 26 novels, including 17 that have made The New York Times' best-seller list. His books have sold 10 million copies, according to his publisher, and have been translated into 22 languages in 75 countries.
He'll discuss his newest thriller, "The Fall," on Tuesday when he appears at the Baltimore Sun's Book Club.
"The Fall" begins shortly after Dismas' daughter, Rebecca, has passed the California bar and joined her father's firm. She becomes drawn into a case involving the death of a teenage African-American girl in foster care who plummeted from a highway overpass. Did Anyla Paulson* fall or was she pushed?
The case quickly becomes a media sensation. Political pressures are brought to bear on the police to make an arrest, and on prosecutors to secure a conviction. But Rebecca and her father suspect that in the rush to justice, an innocent man is being framed.
"My first five novels were written as a kind of practice," says Lescroart, who lives in Northern California.
"First, I wanted to see if I could write a historical novel. Then I wrote a literary novel, and then I wrote a modern mystery.
"After I got spinal meningitis, I decided that 'Hard Evidence' would be a different, more substantial kind of a novel. It would use a much larger palette and would combine elements from the practice novels. All the books that have come out since then have tried to capture that bigger reality."
An edited conversation with Lescroart appears below.
You became ill while body surfing near Los Angeles. Is it common to get spinal meningitis from the water?
No, it's totally rare. I think they'd had a little freak rainstorm the day before and the sewers weren't working perfectly. No one really knows for sure what happened, but I had a serious reaction to something that got in my ear.
We were down at the hospital at 4 in the morning. We had two infants at the time, a 19-month-old and a 5-month-old, and the doctor told my wife that there was no way I was going to survive. He said I had about two hours left to live.
One of my early roommates was a doctor in Southern California. Lisa [Lescroart's wife] called him and told him that the doctor thought I had spinal meningitis.
He said, "There's two types: viral and bacterial, and if it's bacterial, you have a chance. On the off chance that's what it is, put him on 90 million units of penicillin right now." They did, and that was that. I woke up 11 days later.
What was your inspiration for "The Fall"?
This was a very interesting book. It might seem like I'm overflowing with creative ideas, but sometimes I come in and I'm just dead and have no ideas at all. One of the tricks I've learned over the years to get past that is to decide, "OK, I'm just going to spend today writing first sentences."
On those days, I probably write 20 to 30 first sentences, things like, "Ike pushed the baby carriage toward the edge of the cliff."
That day, the first thing that came up was, "The body fell straight out of the sky."
I thought, "Wow, that is a great first line." I wound up writing the first three chapters of the book in the next two hours.
This is the first novel in which Dismas' daughter, Rebecca Hardy, plays a leading role.
She's always been an ancillary character, but suddenly she wanted the whole book. That was fun. As Rebecca has grown up, she's becoming a little bit like my daughter, Justine. When my daughter passed the California bar and became a real attorney, it was kind of weird for me: I thought, "I'm an artist, and my wife's an artist. How did we have children who became lawyers?" [In addition to Justine, Lescroart's son, Jack, works as a public defender in Fresno, Calif.]
I put lot of the same banter that my daughter and I have with one another into this book, which was a blast. For instance, at the very end of the novel Dismas Hardy says, "Somebody's turned into a wiseass," and Rebecca says, "Well, I wonder where I got that from."
It's just like the way me and my daughter talk to each other.
If you had to choose between being a rock god and the best-selling novelist you are today, which would you choose?
Well, you know, I'm not done yet. I'm still trying for both.
When I was in my 20s, I spent three years singing and playing guitar with a band I formed. We were called Johnny Capo and His Real Good Band. We played the bar/steakhouse circuit in the San Francisco Bay Area. We worked seven days a week for three years, and it was really fun.
Then, on my 30th birthday, I quit. I said, "That's it. I don't have a record deal. I'm not going to make it. I'm done."
Now, I produce other people singing my songs, so I'm still living that side of the dream. I spent all yesterday in the recording studio. Jess Righthand, a singer in the Bay Area, just did three of my songs. I'm also working with a singer named Tommy Lee Moffat who I think will be singing quite a lot of my songs. I don't really have a lot of hopes that I'm going to get rich from my music, but it's a great, fulfilling thing to do.
How did you get the idea to include recipes on your website for dishes like paella and peasant-style spaghetti carbonara?
I've just always been a cook. My mother was the worst cook in the world, though she may have tied with the mother of my college roommate. We had no money, so out of desperation we learned how to cook.
Dismas Hardy has a famous black pan. Over the years, that pan has almost become a character in the novels in its own right.
About the Book: "The Fall" was published May 5 by Atria Books. 320 pages, $26.99
If you go: Author John Lescroart speaks at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Baltimore Sun, 501 N. Calvert St. Tickets are $15; $40 for the three-book series (other Baltimore Sun Book Club events are Sept. 29 and Nov. 3). To order tickets, go to eventbrite.com and search for "Baltimore Sun Book Club," or call Sun Marketing Director Renee Mutchnik, 410-332-6431.
* An earlier version of this story had a different name for the murdered girl.