Life of Suspense

Ex-lawyer Robert Dugoni went for broke as a writer (almost literally). Now he’s following fast in John Grisham’s footsteps.

Dugoni at his law office on the twenty-fifth floor of Westlake Center in Seattle. Photograph by André Mora for City Arts.

Robert Dugoni, the Kirkland author who just published the legal thriller Bodily Harm, started out as a San Francisco lawyer who studied acting at American Conservatory Theater. “I should’ve married somebody famous, I’d probably still be acting today,” says Dugoni. Instead, he gave up after a successful run as King Arthur in Camelot. “My director said, ‘This will either be the launch of your career or the pinnacle.’ It was the pinnacle.” He gave up acting because lawyering paid better.

But don’t feel bad for Dugoni. He did marry somebody, and when he decided to quit law in 1999 at thirty-seven to write novels, his wife said OK – as long as he agreed to move to her family’s sixty-acre farm in Bridle Trails. “It was her Tara,” he says. “She had to get back.”

Dugoni spent three years writing three novels in a windowless eight-by-eight-foot studio in Seattle’s Pioneer Building. No sales. “My agent died,” he says. “No one at the agency bothered to tell me. That sort of let me know where I stood, right?” One day, his wife dragged him to a party. “I met this guy, Joe Hilldorfer, an EPA investigator.” They collaborated on a nonfiction book about a poisoned teenager, The Cyanide Canary.

“It was four or five years before I saw a penny,” says Dugoni. “I was living on the equity from my California house, and my wife worked at a computer startup company in Issaquah. One day she says, ‘How long are we gonna do this?’” Despair turned to hope when the Washington Post named The Cyanide Canary one of the best books of 2004. Suddenly, ten agents phoned to ask, “What else do you have?”

He sent his three novels. The first, The Jury Master, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2006. It also made a star of his fictional lawyer hero, David Sloane, inspired by Dugoni’s boss when he was a law student. “He’s like King Arthur, charismatic and compassionate. A lawyer with a conscience.” Editors clamored for more Sloane adventures.

In the second Sloane book, Wrongful Death, which came out in 2007 and is now in paperback, Sloane moves from San Francisco to Seattle and represents the widow of a Guardsman killed in Iraq. “Leo DiCaprio’s people were looking to option it, but Leo decided he was not yet ready to play a lawyer.”

Leo probably didn’t want to make yet another flop about Iraq, but The Hurt Locker could make him reconsider. “Since The Hurt Locker won the Academy Award, I’ve had three inquiries from LA screenwriters,” says Dugoni.

For now, Dugoni is concentrating on Bodily Harm, the new Sloane book, about kids done in by evil toy manufacturers. “Sloane goes to the family of one of the kids in – I can’t remember whether I put it in Kent or Redmond, but I like to write about where I live. It’s more authentic.”

Despite his slow start, Dugoni now has “between 750,000 and a million” books in print. But not the third book he wrote in that eight-by-eight-foot Pioneer Square room when he first got to town. It’s not a Sloane book, so it hasn’t sold yet. “That one is still in the drawer.” •