HOUR GAME

David Baldacci

Pan, £6.99

David Baldacci has a lot to live up to. If it was not enough to be a best-selling author, his press blurb describes him as ‘incredibly charismatic’.

In London to promote his tenth novel, Hour Game, the 44-year-old writer is certainly an affable man, comfortable with the phenomenal success that has seen him sell almost 40 million books worldwide.


He had been a trial lawyer in Washington DC, specialising in securities and commercial litigation, and also handling some corporate transactions. He would work a full day in the office before returning home and writing, often scripts but also his breakthrough novel Absolute Power, later turned into a film starring Clint Eastwood.


He then gave up the law and seems not to look back with much fondness. ‘I miss some of the people I worked with. But I don’t miss the clients and I don’t miss other people dictating what I did with my life,’ he says. ‘I don’t miss selling my life in increments of half an hour and an hour, and I don’t miss making rich people richer.’


He describes US litigation as ‘war’, recalling how he used to turn off the fax machine when he left the office so the other side could not serve a motion at midnight for a hearing the next day.


There are, Mr Baldacci says, ‘far too many lawyers’ in the US – about 1.2 million – and much of the disdain for the profession ‘lawyers have brought on themselves’ with spurious class actions. ‘The system does need reform. It was never designed to do what it does now’ – which is enriching a few lawyers, in his view. He would prefer the British ‘loser pays’ approach because it holds people more to account, but he adds: ‘It will never happen because the American Trial Lawyers Association is too strong.’


Nonetheless, he says the legal skills of patience and being able to see both the detail and the big picture have proven useful, and when it comes to lawyers in his novels – and there have been a fair few – they are generally positive portrayals.


The most lawyer-focused was his fourth book, The Simple Truth, set in the Supreme Court, with a central character who Mr Baldacci says ‘represented a more optimistic view of lawyers’ because he saw the law as a way to help the poor and abused. ‘With all those legal thrillers out there that show us [lawyers] as scum, The Simple Truth was my way of saying something a little more positive than that,’ he says.


Hour Game’s key character, Sean King, is Secret Service-turned-lawyer-turned-private-investigator. Following his collaboration with another former Secret Service agent, Michelle Maxwell, in the previous novel, they have gone into partnership by the time this one starts and are investigating what seems a straightforward case of theft from the incredibly wealthy Battle family. But soon they begin to suspect it has links to the sudden appearance of a serial killer in their quiet town of Wrightsburg.


The murderer copies a different serial killer of the past each time and leaves a stopped watch at the scene – but otherwise no evidence. The pair soon find themselves brought in by the local sheriff to investigate the murders, and as the body count escalates, it seems the Battle family is involved somehow.


The writing, frankly, is fairly pedestrian, but after a slow start the plot really starts bowling along and takes the reader with it. Mr Baldacci says: ‘I thought it was interesting to have a serial killer who appears to be killing at random but turns out to be anything but.’ He says he wanted to provide the reader with a sense of understanding of why the killer did what they did. ‘Factors in your life can drive people to do really bad things,’ Mr Baldacci insists.


The lack of evidence forces King and Maxwell to think through the motivation. In fact, King does most of the thinking, making Maxwell – through whose eyes the story is mainly told – the ‘muscle’ of the pair. ‘I wanted to flip the stereotype,’ Mr Baldacci says.


He is famed for his in-depth research and links with the FBI and Secret Service. For Hour Game, he spent time in morgues, but unlike some authors Mr Baldacci is thankfully not driven to prove the depth of his research on the page. ‘With research, less is best,’ he explains. ‘I didn’t use 90% of my interviews with medical examiners, but you need to know the lingo and so on. Like the law, there are a few vital pieces [of evidence] but you need to command the whole subject.’


The writer also wants to keep his readers guessing. ‘If you pick up a John Grisham or Scott Turow [book], you know what you are going to get,’ he says.


Thus he does not always write thrillers, does not always write about the FBI, does not always include lawyers. He would consider adding to the ranks of legal thrillers ‘if I can think of something different’. Despite two successive King and Maxwell books, they will not appear in his next book, although there are plans to develop a television series around them.


He has recently written his first children’s book, based, inevitably, on stories he told his own, and has also set up a literacy foundation. Mr Baldacci says: ‘I’m passionate about the effect of poor literacy on democracy. The US was founded on a written document – if you can’t read, how can you aspire to what’s in them?’


He looks for inspiration everywhere, but has a particular affection for trains after he went on a cross-America rail journey to speak to the California State Bar Association, planning to spend the journey finishing up a novel. Instead, Mr Baldacci came away with 60 pages of notes about the people he met and saw. ‘If a writer can’t find a story on a train,’ he says, ‘they need to find another occupation.’


After London, he was looking forward to taking the Eurostar to Paris. He remains fervent about writing and there is no sign yet that Mr Baldacci will be looking for another occupation.