Every Defendant Lies, But So Do Witnesses

I’ve written a number of novels including A Question of Proof or A Question of Proof (Kindle); Star Time: New Version & New Introduction or Star Time (Kindle); and Deeds or Deeds (Kindle); Stalking the Sky or Stalking the Sky (Kindle); and Birthright or Birthright (Kindle). In my novel A Question of Proof or A Question of Proof (Kindle), I wanted my readers to understand what an experienced trial lawyer told me when I was fresh out of law school: Don't expect the truth from any one, not from your witnesses, not from the police, and certainly not from your client. No one ever tells the whole truth. Everyone always has something to hide. A witness might claim the defendant stole the money because he did it himself or because he was supposed to be watching the cash register but had gone to see a girlfriend or because he was bribed. A defendant, even an innocent one, may be protecting a friend she believes committed the crime or may be hiding an affair. At one point I even thought of calling the novel False Witness. 

Here's how Dan Lazar, the protagonist, explains it: 

"Believe me, every client lies. If not outright lies, then murky areas the client tries to keep that way. During the trial you'll do and say anything to save yourself—it's your sole priority, and that's natural. You'll cover things up to me, to the judge, to the jury. Everything you've vowed to me—all that 'truth'—could get shredded into confetti."

"I'm innocent. I have nothing to fear," she said fervently. She was staring into his eyes, measuring his love against hers.

He did not reply.

Read more: A Question of Proof or A Question of Proof (Kindle). bit.ly/PojdHz

Learn Court Tactics to Stop a Corporate Raider

In writing my novel Stalking the Sky, I wanted to show how top-flight litigation lawyers would wage a court battle to gain advantages in a takeover fight launched by a company named Faranco Inc. for control of Global Universal Airline, America's premier airline. I also wanted to demonstrate how a great lawyer can come up with a brilliant ploy at the last second.

Here's an excerpt:

A small, disheveled figure hurried through the halls of federal court in Manhattan. One hand was trying to shove the remains of a tuna fish sandwich into his mouth. The other held a brief on the motion he was about to argue. Behind him, long legs taking one step to every two of Eli Teicher's, Chris Flynn would have moved faster than her colleague (over whom the blond, blue-eyed woman lawyer towered) were it not for the armful of law books she came close to dropping at each step.

Teicher suddenly stopped, nearly causing Flynn to crash into him. His gaze was transfixed by a large color poster. A jet bomber streaked upward over the close-up of a pilot's head, to intercept words that invited the reader to join the Air Force.

"Take my word for it, Eli, this country is in big trouble if Uncle Sam needs you," Chris Flynn remarked caustically.

Teicher did not react. The brief he carried argued, first, that the law required CAB approval before the takeover could commence; and, second, that Faranco had failed to divulge over thirty million dollars in questionable "sensitive payments" abroad. Teicher raced to the courtroom to find Will Nye already there. He had only one question to ask.

"Does Global Universal supply planes to the government in time of war?"
Will nodded, but before he could speak Teicher hurried away.

Two minutes later Teicher was on the phone dictating a third point to the brief. Within half an hour, just as Judge Metucci was stepping to the bench, Eli Teicher's secretary arrived in the courtroom with the new last pages.

For two hours, Eli Teicher and Sam Friedman slashed at each other's contentions. . . . Teicher's final, unexpected point was the issue of national security. With absolute seriousness he conjured up an image of armed Communist nations advancing against freedom-loving America. "In whose hands should we leave our nation's safety: those of a great war hero, and airline pioneer, or those of a mercenary multinational corporation, whose divided loyalties—profit versus patriotism—may well threaten us all in a time of ultimate crisis?"

Read more: Stalking the Sky. bit.ly/PojdHz

The Mystery at the Heart of a Mystery

In writing my novel A QUESTION OF PROOF, I wanted to create a formidable mystery at the dark heart of the novel that would lurk undiscovered until the end.  The trial of Susan Boelter was intended to expose the answer to the mystery: "Did she kill her husband?" It's a simple question, but in A QUESTION OF PROOF, as in real life, no outsider, no one on the jury, not even the prosecutor, ever truly knows whether the defendant is guilty. And as in real life, the novel's twists and turns, new evidence, lying witnesses, are all part of the process of getting at that final immutable answer to a question of proof.

Here’s an excerpt:

Dan’s feet swung down. "Damn it, Cal, I don’t know who she is. She says her husband was alive when she left the house, and not a shred of evidence backs her up. Last night, I ran into someone who . . . knew her slightly at college. He wasn’t sure, but he had this vague recollection that she was one of the great party girls at Bryn Mawr. I mean a top student, editor of the paper, but wild. Does he have her pegged right?"

“It sure doesn’t jibe with the impression she gave us of her college years."

“Who the hell is she, really? The gracious lady of high society or a desperate adventuress who’d seduce her estranged husband, period and all? To meet her socially, all that virtue, it knocks you off your feet, but is it a front? In bed there’s all the lust a man could want."

"Cal’s eyebrows rose. 'No wonder you refused a fee."

"I took her case because I believed her. Now I don’t know what to believe."

Read more: A QUESTION OF PROOF bit.ly/PojdHz

Criminal Trials Are Not About Discovering the Truth

Surprised?  In my novel, A QUESTION OF PROOF, the trial is to determine whether Susan Boelter killed her husband Peter Boelter, a cynical, callous, charming newspaper publisher. I tried to show the reader that a trial is really a contest between opposing attorneys to present a more plausible version of the facts to the jury. The actual truth, however, proves to be very slippery indeed.

As Dan Lazar, Susan's lover and lawyer, explains it:

"Susan, try to understand. A trial isn't about truth, it's about winning. It's a contest to sway a jury, those twelve people. Everybody says they're after the truth, but they're really after something that will sound true—that will be plausible, whether for yea or nay—to those twelve people. But the actual truth is coincidental. By the end of a trial, if the lawyers on both sides have done a good job, the truth is battered beyond recognition or so disguised in new clothes that no one can really be sure what it is anymore."

Read more:  A QUESTION OF PROOF bit.ly/PojdHz

How I'm Using New Media to Reach Readers

Nearly all authors in the pre-Internet age experienced the galling frustration of having a publisher put little or no marketing effort into a book we may have spent years writing. The new media, primarily social media, provide emancipation from that netherworld; we can personally market our books in so many ways that were never before available. In days of yore, we hoped the people reviewing books for newspapers would pick ours to write about or maybe someone would write an article or even that we’d be interviewed on a phone-in radio show. Today, we can reach potential readers with what we hope are intriguing pitches for our books on Twitter, the major resource for my marketing, Facebook, blogs, and web sites like 
Goodreads, where readers gather and exchange opinions on what they've read. I created a website, JosephAmiel.com, which  features all my books and additional material about me and them. 

Everyone with access to a computer can be a reviewer in this new age, and thousands of people with only a love of books as a qualification are conveying their opinions on Amazon book pages and blogs and Facebook pages and Twitter. They are also communicating directly with writers and each other on websites and in online book forums. And just as they can be stimulated to see a movie through trailers, they can be motivated to buy books by watching promotional video trailers online.

To take only one instance of how I'm attempting to use the new media, I’ve always felt that my legal thriller A Question of Proof, a book I loved that received gratifying pre-publication reviews and endorsements (one person called it "a masterpiece of suspense"), was not marketed effectively or vigorously by the publisher and could have reached many more readers. The presence of the new media with its potential to communicate my enthusiasm and belief in my book directly to thousands of potential readers induced me to launch a new edition it in digital and also print form. I updated it so that it takes place in the present and added new material and a personal Introduction to make it as pleasurable for new readers as I believed it was originally. Being an experienced film-maker, I created a video book trailer, which is available both on GoodReads and on my website (and even appeared in it). As I write this A QUESTION OF PROOF is selling prodigiously on Kindle, as well in its new print edition, both with new covers, and it's garnering great reviews, which gives me enormous, if delated gratification.

A similar effort to reach readers via Twitter is expended on my other books now also available in new Kindle and print editions at Amazon: the just-published STALKING THE SKY (formerly "Hawks"), a thriller about America's leading air carrier under siege both from a saboteur destroying its 747s in flight and a corporate raider seeking to seize it; my 3-generation mystery romance DEEDS; my beloved woman's novel BIRTHRIGHT about a strong woman fighting for success in a man's world; and STAR TIME, an TV insider's novel. 

In short the new media is the best tool authors and readers have ever had to find each other.  Please contact me at Joe@JosephAmiel.com and let me know what you think.  And if you enjoy the books, please leave reviews for them here and on their Amazon pages.

The Most Extreme Thing I've Done in the Name of Research

Well before 9/11, I had an interesting reason why someone who was not a terrorist would blow up airliners and thought it might make a good mystery at the heart of thriller about an airline in crisis.   On the basis of three chapters containing the fuzziest research, my agent managed to sell my first novel Hawks to a publisher.  

Knowing little more than the average traveler about airliners, airlines, plane crashes, and explosives, I spent several months learning everything I could.  Fortunately for me, a Congressional committee had recently published volumes of testimony delving deeply into the industry and how it operated; and radicals and others were publishing pamphlets on how to make bombs.  To get a sense of what it was like to be in the pilot's seat thousands of feet above solid ground, I took a flying lesson.  But once I had done all of that research and more, had created the characters and plot, I had to be sure that, at least in principle, one could actually plant a bomb in that part of the jetliner I had chosen for the book.  Making certain of that led to the most extreme thing I've ever done in the name of research.

           

While on a commercial jet flying to a vacation, I locked myself in a lavatory and using only a coin, as I recall, unscrewed a ceiling panel.  There in plain sight, in the area known as the plenum or plenum chamber, running the length of the fuselage above the cabin from cockpit to the stabilizers on the tail, were the hydraulic and other cables essential to flying that plane.  Today, smuggling the constituents for the kind of bomb my villain employed would be somewhat more difficult, but looking at those cables, I became assured that the bomb could destroy them and consequently the plane in flight while he was safely gone.  I had found the plane's Achilles heel.  It felt weird and frightening.  If a writer could figure it out, couldn't someone with single-minded evil intent figure it out as well?  For the briefest moment I debated the morality of revealing the method in print.  But then I realized that I wasn't revealing top-secret information because anyone could figure it out as I had and, to be practical, how many potential bombers are wide-ranging readers.

At that moment, my trepidation at having removed the ceiling panel turned into near panic as it occurred to me how guilty I would look to an airline official: WRITER CAUGHT IN ACT OF DESTROYING PLANE AND PASSENGERS. One of those passengers was my wife, which turned into a sub-headline: DEVIOUSLY AVOIDS COMPLICATIONS OF DIVORCE.  And a third: BOMBER'S OWN BODY NEVER FOUND (okay, survival is a primal instinct).  I'm exaggerating somewhat here, but the fear of being apprehended, with only a flimsy lavatory lock for protection was vividly real.

Heart pounding, I hurriedly replaced the screws, afraid I would drop and lose them.  Then I pocketed my coin and slipped out of the lavatory, too frazzled to remember to use the cubicle for its intended purpose and worried that if I slipped back in to relieve myself, a wary flight attendant would become suspicious: "Only bombers go back into lavatories so quickly!" 

Because of all my research, my publicity campaign centered on my expertise in air crashes.  For years, I was called upon to appear on TV and radio news shows to pontificate about possible causes of the latest crash, while I plugged my book.  Larry King and I spent hours chatting on his late-night radio show.  He wanted the company, and I wanted all the publicity my book could get.  However, my guru status led to my closest call in the talking-head trade.  I flew up to Boston for a TV show and, as we landed at Logan Airport, could see beside the runway the wrecked plane that had prompted my upcoming appearance.  When I arrived at the TV studio, I was surprised to learn that my "counterpoint" would be an airline pilot who was the pilot union's expert on plane crashes. 

For most of the hour, his smug technical assertions were giving him the best of it.   I desperately eyed the achingly slow minute hand on the studio clock.   Miraculously, his final assertion dealt with a crash over Paris with which I was familiar.  To prove that an incompetent foreign ground employee and not American airline expertise was at fault, he said the cause of the crash was the French door handler’s inability to read the directions on the door and close it properly because he was illiterate.  From some hidden synapse in my brain, a small fact wiggled its way into my consciousness.  I responded, "Actually, the door handler spoke four languages and read seven.  The plane took off from Paris.  Why weren't the directions on the door also written in other languages, one of them certainly being French?"  At that moment, the moderator intervened: "Time's up.  We'll have to leave it at that."  And I was out of there, my credibility intact and possessed of the realization that the research we writers insert in our books to make it appear we know what of we speak can sometimes save our asses.

Writing about Hawks has amped my excitement about re-issuing it in a new and updated edition later in the year.  But right now, my attention is focused on my legal thriller A Question of Proof, being launched this week in both digital and print at Amazon (tinyurl.com/c2z5ynk) and, soon after, wherever books are sold online.  But that's a whole other story.

Which Comes First Plot or Character?

               What sparks the creative urge in novelists is as individual as our books.  I’ve heard and read writers who said they couldn’t get a character out of their heads and began writing about them and plot followed.  Others will tell you they have a great idea for a book, which usually means “plot.”  In my own case it’s often a combination of a character I’m interested in who is caught in a situation that leads to suspenseful plot.

                In my first novel, Hawks, which was pre-9/11, I had an idea about why someone would cause a commercial jetliner to crash.  The story rose up around that central idea and became a novel about the airline industry and top executives in crisis at an airline.  A new digital version of that book will launch by the end of the year.

                In my legal thriller, A Question of Proof, the protagonist, a lawyer , was so much like me – same background, profession, concerns, values – that character was in many ways a given, so constructing an engrossing plot was uppermost in my thinking.  The plot about his lover charged with murdering her husband had to twist and turn and the stakes had to be the psychic equivalent of life and death before I could even think the character could become the basis of a novel.

                But what I find most intriguing is when an opening  line pops into my head and that starts me thinking in directions, both of character and of plot, I might never have considered before.  Who said it?  What was happening?  What could result?  That obsessive creativity is why we write.  For that and, of course, for money.

The Importance of Video Trailers -- and Blogging -- for Selling Books

            "A video trailer for an online book launch?  That's crazy!  I've never launched my novels with a video."

My book publicist cynically replied, "What did you use back then: clay tablets?" 

"But a video trailer for a book?  This isn't The Avengers at Imax with popcorn.  Books are the last bastion of artistic integrity in the mud-wrestling pit of commercial . . ."

"You want to sell books?  Videos are what the hot-shot authors are doing.  We'll put your trailer up on YouTube, embed it on JosephAmiel.com, your website, and attach it to your tweets."

"My teats?  Don't try to tell me Danielle Steele puts up with that."

"Tweets!  Authors are out there tweeting and interacting with their fans."

"I already do that on JosephAmiel.com.  All that information you tell me I should be putting up there."

"Not enough.  It's a Grisham eat DeMille world out there.  But you've got an edge: You're also a film-maker.  Don't you have that web series on YouTube about people in prison for life?"

"Ain't That Life is a comedy web series that has nothing to do with prison.  Look, those novelists with videos probably already have loads of fans who'll watch them."

             My publicist wasn't giving up.  "You have fans, too.  We just have to alert them that you have a book about to be released."

"And they'll eagerly crawl out of the burrows and caves where they're hiding."

             "Exactly.  And what better way to announce that you're launching a courtroom thriller than with a video book trailer? Set it in a real courtroom with actors who look like your main characters."

             "It will take a lot of time, but I guess it makes sense."

"And you've also got to blog."

             "Blog?  What could I possibly blog about?"

             "You're not too swift, are you?"

"Ok, I get it: I'll write a blog about creating a video that's about a book I've written.  And I'll tweet about my blog that's about creating a video that's about . . ."

"You're beginning to catch on."

"It seems like I'm doing all the publicity here."

"Check our contract: My title is "Publicity Advisor."

"Just one question: Those successful authors who are making trailers and tweeting and interacting with their fans and blogging, when do they have time to write their books?"

"If you want to hire me as your Writing Advisor, I can try to come up with an answer for that."

In my next blog I start the process of making the video trailer.