JD Bliss (JDB): You’ve become a successful novelist after a successful career as a defense attorney. Could you give a summary of that career, beginning with why you chose to become a lawyer?
McKinney: My intention when I entered college was to become a neurosurgeon, but then I came up against the hard reality of courses like organic chemistry and I decided that I needed to develop a second choice. I was still fascinated with science and medicine, and combined that with an interest in trial law and an enjoyment of dealing with people to become a medical malpractice defense attorney. After I got my law degree from the University of California – Hastings in 1963 I joined the Oakland, California firm of Crosby Heafey Roach & May, which several years ago merged with Reed Smith. I spent more than 25 years there defending hospitals and physicians in malpractice litigation, until I left the firm in 1989.
JDB: Did you enjoy the practice of law?
McKinney: What gave me the most satisfaction as a litigator was the trial itself. I enjoy being a teller of stories, and there is no better opportunity for a lawyer to do that than making the opening statement and closing argument at trial. In the opening statement you set forth the entire outline of your story, in a way that grabs the interest of the audience – the jury. The closing argument is your chance to say, “See, the story I told you was true. Let me remind you why.” The whole process of engaging people through storytelling advocacy was the focus of my legal career. What I disliked was every moment at the office: the politics, the bureaucracy, the paperwork. When I retired I was happy to leave behind the internal strife of a big firm.
JDB: When you left the firm you made a major break in where you lived. Did you also make a complete break from the law?
McKinney: There’s no question that I broke away from the big city, moving three hours north of the San Francisco area to near Mendocino on California’s north coast. I truly enjoy fishing and duck hunting, and in the early 70s bought a recreation property there in order to enjoy the outdoors. I was a pilot, and it took less than an hour to fly to Mendocino, so it was natural to move there. But I didn’t give up the practice of law right away. I continued to work in malpractice defense, representing doctors and physicians who worked in the small towns around the region. It wasn’t until 1995 that I ended my legal career and embarked on being a novelist.
JDB: Was that a completely new direction for you, or something you had always wanted to do?
McKinney: I think many lawyers want to write fiction as either a fantasy career or in conjunction with their practices, and I was no exception. For years I had flirted with fiction writing, and had boxes and desk drawers full of short stories that I had never submitted for publication. Once I left active practice, there was nothing to hold me back.
JDB: What was the genesis of your first novel, and how have you built on that initial success?
McKinney: The genesis was that I was enjoying a good cigar and a martini with a hunting and fishing buddy of mine on the deck of his mother's home in Belvedere, on the shore of San Francisco Bay. We started speculating about the fate of the Cuban cigars that President Kennedy was known to have acquired the night before he tightened the Cuban Embargo. I decided to write a short story about what happened to those cigars and how they may have played a role in the assassination, then expanded it into a novel. With the help of an agent it was published by St. Martin’s Press as Where There’s Smoke.
I’ve since written two other novels, neither of which has yet been published: Dead Enough, about a Bay Area prison physician whose conscience conflicts with his duties when he has to carry out a capital punishment sentence by lethal injection, and Dead Duck, a story in which I combined my love of duck hunting with a tale of greed about the exploitation of natural gas properties in the wetlands of the Sacramento Valley. Dead Enough was to have been published a year ago but the publisher went bankrupt; my agent is now working on a publisher for it. Dead Duck will be published soon. And after doing a year of research I’ve begun a new novel that will be my most ambitious yet, a historical novel that will also be set in the Sacramento Valley.
JDB: So your personal interests have really been more a source of inspiration to you than your career as a lawyer?
McKinney: I’ve intentionally stayed away from writing a “law novel.” There are too many attorneys, active and retired, trying to be the next John Grisham, and that kind of well-traveled path doesn’t interest me. The law is certainly an element in my books, particularly Dead Enough. I approached that book as a proponent of capital punishment, but the research that I did from a lawyer’s perspective convinced me that the death penalty involves too many inequalities, too much risk of executing the wrong person, and too much monetary cost to society in terms of the entire legal process. By and large my novels are about the things that interest me, like the North Coast region, hunting and fishing. And my characters frequently enjoy a good cigar, just as I do.
JDB: What do you find most satisfying about your new career as a novelist?
McKinney: Certainly the greatest satisfaction has been the expanded opportunity to tell a story – the same type of thing that intrigued me as a trial lawyer, but on a broader scale. I also enjoy the idea that I am educating and influencing people with what I write. All of my novels have moral and ethical themes, together with factual research about history or the way that people live, that I hope make them worth my reader’s time. The novel I’ve begun will be my supreme challenge in that regard, and I expect it will take me several years to complete. Meanwhile, writing also gives me the opportunity to work with my wife Susan and other family members in managing the historic Little River Inn just south of Mendocino. It has been in my wife’s family since it was built as the family home in 1863. It became a six-room inn in 1939 and hosted many Hollywood notables like Myrna Loy, Joan Fontaine and Ronald Reagan – a fascinating history that I’ve written a little book about. Today we have 67 rooms, a restaurant and a golf course. The Inn hosts several of the events and a number of the participants in connection with the annual Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference that’s held every June at the College of the Redwoods in nearby Fort Bragg, and I’d like to see us become known as a “writer’s haven,” a place for writers to hang out and experience inspiration.
JDB: From your perspective of a lifetime in the law and a second life as a novelist and innkeeper, what advice would you offer to current attorneys who might dream about following your career path?
McKinney: When college students ask me about going into the law today, I try to discourage them. I don’t believe it’s the enjoyable and rewarding profession it was when I started in the early 60s. There are fewer opportunities for individual expression, and no matter what your practice is you’re faced with too much bureaucracy.
For someone who is a lawyer and thinks that writing would be a source of fulfillment, my advice is to get started and write. You certainly can do it within the context of a legal practice – set aside a couple of hours before you go to the office in the morning or after you come home in the evening, whenever your creativity and energy are higher. But if you want to be a full-time writer, be aware that it’s a discipline every bit as tough as the law. I write for a number of hours virtually every day, starting at 6:00 a.m. when I feel I’m at my sharpest. Every book requires as many as ten edits, and when I approach the end of the editing process I work nonstop until it’s done. Every writer also needs a good editor and I'm blessed with a great one. She's my daughter, Denise, who manages to carve out time for my writings from her very full life as an appellate lawyer with Reed, Smith and mother of my fantastic grandson, Tyler. Don't start to seriously write without a good editor in place -- someone you can trust to be brutal. Writing, like the law, can be very rewarding; but also like the law, or any vocation that a person approaches seriously, it’s hard work.
