Book Case

Mark Lindquist is telling the most important stories of his life. He’s putting some of them in his novels, but most are turning up in the courtroom.

Photography by Young Lee for City Arts.

For a nationally known novelist, Tacoma’s Mark Lindquist has an odd problem: he can’t make stuff up. “I’ve always been heavily dependent upon my personal experience for my material,” he explains while sitting in his Pierce County Prosecutor’s office on Tacoma Avenue. “I’m not James Fenimore Cooper,” he says. “I couldn’t write The Last of the Mohicans from a Paris apartment. I’m just not imaginative enough. Therefore, if I want to keep writing books, I have to keep having an interesting life."

Lindquist has managed to do that, having written four novels and numerous scripts, in addition to leading Pierce County’s twenty-six-million-dollar, 225-person crime-busting operation. Unfortunately, Lindquist can’t talk much about the most interesting things in his life right now: his cases against the alleged Craigslist killers, the Hilltop Crips, and Dorcus Allen, the man who allegedly drove the getaway car after last fall’s Parkland police shootings. All Lindquist will say about the Allen case is that it will take time. “If we go death penalty, this case is going to be two years before it goes to trial. If we don’t go death penalty, it’ll still be a year.” This month is the deadline for the attorney’s life or death decision.

What he can talk about is his plans, which include running for the prosecutor’s job he was appointed to last year, as well as writing his fifth book, a follow-up to his Northwest bestseller The King of Methlehem. “I’m going to do a series of novels about Wyatt James, the lead detective of King of Methlehem, on the advice of my editor and former publisher Morgan Entrekin,” he says. “Methlehem detoured pretty badly from the standard genre.” It was a portrait of a whole parallel world, a Pierce County netherworld. “It was literary fiction disguised as detective fiction. My next books will be detective fiction with, hopefully, some literary merit.”

How Lindquist decides to tell the story of Allen and the alleged shooter Maurice Clemmons will, quite literally, help shape society. Like any screenwriter worth his salt, Lindquist often tries to cast defendants as players in a larger drama, as opposed to mere individuals. Even though not all the Craigslist killing defendants held the gun, Lindquist charged all four, saying, “When you help a criminal you become a criminal.” It is alleged that only Maurice Clemmons killed the four cops, but Lindquist cleverly dubbed Clemmons’ alleged helpers “the Clemmons Seven” – which sounds like a movie title.

The Hilltop Crips present a considerable narrative challenge to Lindquist. It would be more efficient (and at least four hundred thousand dollars cheaper) to charge them collectively as members of a criminal conspiracy than to pursue three dozen defendants on scads of charges in several multi-defendant cases.

Yet that’s what Judge Thomas Felnagle ruled last month that Lindquist must do, saying, “I reject the idea that everybody is guilty of every crime that the Crips have committed because they’re a member of the Crips.”

“This is a really weird, limited ruling,” rails Lindquist, “He’s a good judge, but he’s wrong on the law. We know why people join gangs. They’re not ignorant of the gang’s purpose.” He mocks an imaginary Crips membership applicant who’s shocked, shocked that it’s a criminal enterprise. “They don’t sell cookies? It isn’t the tutoring program?”

The News Tribune editorialized in favor of Lindquist, but others are wary of conspiracy charges. Though former U.S. Attorney for Western Washington Kate Pflaumer has no comment on the Crips case or Lindquist, she says, “I am not that big a fan of conspiracy law. I understand the logic of responsibility for agreeing to a criminal act, but the problem is, once in, you are responsible for everything your coconspirators do – and prosecutors sometimes stretch the scope of that responsibility.”

Lindquist knows too well that facts never speak for themselves. Facts become dramas, and every drama is scripted. Even the most dedicated and fair-minded writer is actually stacking the deck for effect, sometimes unconsciously. O. J. Simpson’s prosecutor had all the facts for conviction, but defense attorney Johnny Cochran told the better story.  Lindquist strives to turn the facts not into an abstract argument, but into a story with a human meaning that people can connect with.

“There’s no such thing, no truly objective writer,” says Lindquist. “It’s not even possible.”

Lindquist’s new book will focus on a single literary hero – which is just what Lindquist wishes real people would do, especially criminals. They should make themselves heroes in a narrative, Lindquist maintains, and they will see that they can revise their lives, just as Lindquist keeps reinventing his. “Criminals often seem like they are under the thumb of an omniscient narrator,” he says. He’s only met a handful of truly evil defendants; most are just self-destructive, like the great author turned big loser Delmore Schwartz, who observed, “I no more wrote than read that book which is the self I am.” Lindquist wants people to start writing themselves a better role. “As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, ‘Action is character.’ We are the sum of our actions, so we have to choose.”

It all boils down to this, the attorney says: “You can write your own story.”

Lindquist knows something about forcing your own narrative. His own life first got interesting in the ’80s, when he left Seattle, his hometown, for LA and wrote (or rewrote) dozens of film scripts. He ran in the showbiz fast lane while penning his first two novels, Sad Movies and Carnival Desires, about self-destructive showbiz kids. This made him a hip young pop novelist in the celebrated Brat Pack with Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) and Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho). He romanced Molly Ringwald, chatted up Drew Barrymore and Goldie Hawn and got chronicled in Vanity Fair and People, which named him America’s 19th Most Eligible Bachelor, after Ben Affleck (No. 18) and ahead of George Stephanopoulos (No. 24) and Conan O’Brien (No. 88).

But Lindquist was different from the other Brats, besides being the best looking. They were obsessed with literary style and decadence. He was obsessed with stories with morals: “I’m a Kerouac fan,” he says. “Bret hates Kerouac. Kerouac was interested in chronicling a group of people and a certain place and time.” Unlike Lindquist, Ellis loves Stephen King and horror fiction. Both like Joan Didion, but Ellis has built a career aping her glamorous, brilliant prose, while Lindquist has focused on her reportorial approach. Ellis’s world is amoral; Lindquist perceives people as moral agents in a changing society. “I’ve always believed Joan Didion, who said, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ The way people understand themselves and other people is through narrative – not through accumulated facts.”

Lindquist knew himself well enough to see that making a million may not make you feel like a million if you can’t control the story and your movies don’t get made. Besides, he’d always meant to be a lawyer. So he did a script polish on his life and quit showbiz storytelling to go where the real stories are – the prosecutor’s office, by way of the University of Puget Sound law school, where he was a student from 1992 to 1995 (when it became Seattle University law school). “It was my life, but I was consciously gathering material,” he says. The courtroom was like a movie, only more vivid. While Ellis was inventing a fictional cannibal necrophiliac rapist psycho killer, Lindquist started helping put real killers away: people like cabdriver Mohamud Ahmed’s murderer Jaycee Fuller.

“You can almost see that on a movie poster,” he says of the 2009 Fuller case. “If you were going to pitch this to a studio, you’d say, ‘OK, here’s this guy from horrific, war-torn Somalia who moves to the U.S. for a better life, and this loser in America whose life was in a tailspin, he lost his job, his apartment, pawns his possessions. And he commits this robbery that becomes a murder. Two intersecting story lines, one guy moving up, the other spiraling down. And ironically, the cabdriver’s murderer was a former cabdriver! Who deeply resented foreigners for taking what he considered to be American jobs.’ It’s a good story! And a moving story.” The jury gave Fuller twenty-eight years.

While Lindquist was learning law, he spent nights in rather lawless Seattle rock clubs right when Nirvana was making them famous. Lindquist was introduced to grunge royalty by childhood classmates Kurt Bloch and Kim Warnick, who both play in the Fastbacks. He befriended REM’s Peter Buck (who played at the June 5 kickoff to his campaign to be elected prosecutor), he rented Nirvana cofounder Krist Novoselic’s loft, and he immortalized the local scene in a 2000 novel, Never Mind Nirvana. It’s a terrific chronicle of those times, taking second place to Peter Bagge’s graphic novel Hate but closer to the actual facts.

Unlike a lot of lawyers who write – say, Washington writers Robert Dugoni and Steve Martini – Lindquist isn’t yearning for the day he can quit law to be a writer. “I love this day job. Writing has become more of an avocation than a vocation. To me it’s an ideal life to do both.” Moreover, the two story lines of his life don’t just intersect. They are fused, twin expressions of his urge to tell a story and study society and the human heart. “His book is a pretty accurate portrait of the [’90s grunge] scene,” says Kurt Cobain biographer Charles Cross. “Everybody’s disguised, it’s hard to tell who’s who.” In part, Never Mind Nirvana is a fictionalized version of a notorious date-rape case involving a local musician. “He has a pretty good grasp of the gritty underside of the music scene, the dark side,” says Cross. “Maybe being a writer makes him a better law enforcement officer, because his imagination is so wide.”

“I always think of novels as a way to explore moral issues without preaching about them,” says Lindquist. “As a young writer I latched on to E. M. Forster’s notion that fiction captures a time far better than history. So I have made a conscious effort in my novels to capture a time and place.” His first books nailed Venice Beach and Hollywood; after capturing Seattle, he set his sights on Tacoma, both as a prosecutor and as a novelist.

“Pierce County was one of the top five counties in the entire country for meth labs when I was writing King of Methlehem,” says Lindquist. The novel won praise from critics, and meth heads wrote Lindquist from prison, eager to share their stories. “In the time I headed up the drug unit, meth labs reduced by about 90 percent here.  Unfortunately, meth use has not come down proportionally.  But the labs have gone way down. And that’s a good thing for the community because the labs themselves were toxic for the neighborhoods, toxic for the environment and toxic for the children that we sometimes found in the labs.”

The meth heads he busted reminded him of failed artists, though he’s too discreet to discuss his many successful friends who once imperiled their artistic gifts on binges (including McInerney, Ellis and Buck). “There’s an obsessiveness that goes with being an artist oftentimes, and you see some of that same obsessiveness in tweakers,” says Lindquist. “Furthermore, tweakers are often self-medicating. That they have in common with some artists. The only thing that separates some very successful artists from some very unsuccessful drug addicts is a channel for their energy. A constructive channel. Artists turn their demons into something constructive and useful, and losers turn their demons into something destructive and useless.”

And Lindquist turns other people’s demons into art. •