Biglaw Partner Turns Author In Historical Debut Novel

A Q&A with the Biglaw partner who gave it all up to be a novelist.

Jonathan-Putnam-Author-Photo

Jonathan F. Putnam

Biglaw life is not for the weak. It takes countless hours (scratch that, the hours are meticulously counted and billed out accordingly), hard work, and dedication to be successful there, and the biggest Biglaw prize is partnership. Not that the hard work is over when you make partner — much like a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie, once you reach this summit of the profession there is work to be done to stay there.

But what if  you don’t want to do it anymore? Perhaps you have other goals in mind, ones that are not compatible with time requirements of a Biglaw partnership? Would you have the guts to turn your back on the only professional life you’ve known and take a chance on a creative dream?

Meet Jonathan F. Putnam, a former litigation partner at Kirkland & Ellis. His longtime dream of being a novelist is finally coming true with today’s release of These Honored Dead (affiliate link), a historical mystery featuring the adventures of Abraham Lincoln and his friend, Joshua Speed.

9781629538204The novel is an engaging mystery that is written with an authenticity towards the historical details that speaks well of the research skills Putnam learned in Biglaw. The first in a planned series, the book has even been optioned by a director and may be making its way to the big screen soon.

I had an opportunity to interview Putnam, and find out what exactly motivates someone to switch careers, balancing Biglaw and creative pursuits, and the intricacies of writing historical fiction.

According to your bio materials, you left your position as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis to be counsel there and to be an author. Why’d you make the decision to leave the top of your profession?

Sponsored

About 10 years ago I had the idea for a series of historical legal mysteries starring the young Abraham Lincoln, with the stories told by his real-life best friend Joshua Speed. My conception was young Lincoln and Speed as a sort of Holmes and Watson on the American frontier, with Lincoln as the great man, representing clients and solving mysteries in the courtroom, while Speed was his right-hand man, sometime sparring partner, and the chronicler of their shared adventures.

At the time I was working long hours at my job, having tried a number of big cases in the past few years.  So I didn’t really have time for reflection. A while later I got some breathing room and the space to reflect. I had been practicing law for 20 years, and I wasn’t positive what I wanted to do for the next 20. Ever since college, writing had been the path not taken for me.  I always would have regretted it if I hadn’t given it a shot.

I’ve also read that your parents were excited you made the move to be an author. Is it safe to say writing a book has been a long-term goal of yours?

My entire family has been very supportive of my new career.  When my wife Christin and I first met, a long time ago — we were both still teenagers — we talked about a life together in which I was a writer. It only took about 30 years, but finally I’ve made that come true.

Do you find writing fiction to be more fulfilling than being a Biglaw partner?

Sponsored

I really enjoyed my legal career and I’ve been fortunate to spend it all in the New York office of Kirkland & Ellis, which I think is the best litigation firm in the country. (I remain of counsel at the firm, which has been incredibly supportive of my new career.) So I don’t regret devoting so much time and energy to being a lawyer.

But — I was ready for a new challenge. Fundamentally, being a trial lawyer is about telling someone else’s stories (your client’s), while being a writer is about telling your own stories. I’ve found that I greatly enjoy telling my own stories.

Was writing something you were always able to integrate into your life, even while in the midst of Biglaw practice? How did you balance the two? Did you miss writing when you had to take a break from it for particularly big cases?

For several years while I was still a Kirkland partner, I tried to write in my spare time.  But I made almost no progress. Part of this was a “there’s only so many hours in the day” problem, but more of it was that I could never find the mental bandwidth to be creative alongside my day job as a big firm trial lawyer. I literally wrote about three pages in four years. On the first day when I was “of counsel” and therefore didn’t think of myself as a full-time lawyer anymore, I think I wrote six pages. Now, in retrospect, those six pages weren’t much good, but it was a start and I was off and running.

So the short answer is that I was not able to balance the two. I’ve continued to work on some cases as a Kirkland of counsel, and when one of those cases has heated up I’ve put my writing aside to focus on the case. I know some writers can successfully juggle the two careers simultaneously, but I definitely haven’t been able to.

What was the biggest challenge in deciding to take the plunge and be an author?

I had been at a great firm, Kirkland, for 20 years (my entire career since being a summer associate at K&E/New York in 1991); I had a corner office and worked every day with talented, hard-working lawyers and staff; I was good at my job; and I got paid a lot of money to do it. So, there were a lot of reasons beyond inertia keeping me there.

“Taking the plunge” is the right metaphor. I remember like it was yesterday walking down the hall to tell a partner on the management committee that I wanted to take a leave of absence right in the middle of my career and thinking to myself, “Is this a HUGE mistake?”

What advice do you have for Biglaw attorneys who find the law doesn’t provide enough of a creative outlet for them?

Take a deep breath, make sure your family is fully behind you (because they’ve probably invested as much in your career, in their own way, as you have) and take the plunge.

And don’t expect “success” — however you choose to define it in a new field — to come easily or all at once. It was four years from when I left the Kirkland partnership until I sold my novel to Crooked Lane Books in New York. There were lots of days when I was frustrated about how long it was taking, but I tried to remember that it took me three years of law school plus several years of being an associate before I started to feel confident in my law job. And it had taken me 20 years to get to where I was in my law career.

One of your main characters, Joshua Speed, exhibits some of the casual racism and sexism that were typical for the time period the book is set in, but modern readers may find jarring. Was it difficult to convincingly write such a nuanced character? Without spoiling any plot points, we also see his opinions on these issues start to evolve by the end of the book. Did you think that was necessary to make Speed sympathetic to the audience?

This is one area where I think the actual history is more interesting than anything I could invent.  Lincoln is one of the seminal figures in U.S. history, the man who freed the slaves and saved the nation. Yet for the four years in which my series is set (1837-41), Lincoln shared a room — and, indeed, the same bed — every night with this son of a large slave-owning family from Kentucky. Speed remained Lincoln’s “most intimate friend” for the rest of Lincoln’s life. As the great friend of the great man, there must have been something remarkable about him. I tried to capture that in my portrait of Speed.

At the same time, it must have been that Lincoln affected Speed’s worldview and vice versa.  How could it be otherwise when you share a bed for four years with your best friend? One of the things I imagine in the book is Lincoln influencing Speed (slowly) on the issue of slavery. And I imagine Speed influencing Lincoln, too, on other matters.

First and foremost, I wanted to write an entertaining, lively mystery story. But I think any good historical novel also gives you a new way to think about some aspect of that history. By portraying the interplay between Lincoln and Speed over the issue of slavery I was trying to capture the debates that occurred at the time and I think you can see the Civil War looming in the distance.

On the role of women, Lincoln and Speed are joined in their detecting by Speed’s younger sister, Martha. I’ve portrayed Martha as a very independent-minded young woman, and Lincoln and Speed’s interactions with her illuminate the things women could and could not do in the society at the time.

Your main characters are historical figures, one of which is very well known. Did you feel a responsibility to portray them as realistically and accurately as possible? How did you approach the task of researching personalities who lived so long ago?

I tried to stay very true to Lincoln’s history and character, because he’s so well known. I thought people would have objected otherwise, and the fact that I am historically accurate with him makes the less well-known aspects of his biography (such as that he shared a bed with Speed) all the more effective, I think. The first chapter of the novel, which tells the story of Lincoln and Speed meeting, is essentially non-fiction. The close friendship at the core of the novel is all fact. I felt a little more freedom to shape Speed’s story and more still with the minor characters. There’s a “historical note” at the end of the book that separates fact from fiction.

As for research, I read Lincoln and Speed’s extant correspondence, everything that’s been written about Speed (which is not much) and a sampling of the huge literature about Lincoln. Lincoln’s legal career has been very well documented by historians who scoured the clerk’s offices in courthouses throughout central Illinois for all of the pleadings and papers filed by Lincoln, and I’ve read many of those as well. In addition, I read a bunch of 19th Century newspapers and travel diaries and the like to get the texture of the times right.  I also visited Springfield, IL, and the other places depicted in the book. And I talked with a number of experts in the field.

Did your training as an attorney help in your historical research for this book?

Absolutely. As a litigator you’re trained to go through a mass of material quickly, looking for what’s most useful and relevant. And this was a lot more interesting than document review.

What are the biggest differences between writing drafts of a novel and writing drafts of an appellate brief?

Writing a novel is a lot closer to writing out an opening statement for a trial, because you need figure out how to tell a coherent, compelling story that will resonate with your audience — your readers as a writer; the judge and jury as a trial lawyer.

The big difference is that, as a trial lawyer, you are telling your client’s story, while as a writer, you’re telling your own. This is enormously freeing and exciting, but it’s also more than a little scary, precisely because no one tells you what the story is about, to say nothing of what the beginning, middle or ending is.

One of the themes of the novel is the quest for justice. Given your legal background, did you always suspect justice would play a central part in your first novel?

One common piece of good advice for writers is “write what you know.” I spent two decades learning about law and courtrooms. It’s pretty much the only thing I could write about — except for fantasy football or running (I’ve run a number of marathons, closer to the back of the pack than the front.)  And no one else is actually interested in my fantasy football team or running split times — I know this from personal experience.

The book provides some vivid and disturbing descriptions of the life and circumstances of the poor and the mentally ill in the 1800s. In the course of your research, what were some of the most surprising things you learned about how society’s less fortunate used to be treated?

The scenes in my novel regarding the poor and the mentally ill are based directly on 19th Century sources that I read.  The United States of the 1830s was an incredibly harsh society, especially on the frontier, where the novel is set, where no one had any time or excess resources to expend on persons less fortunate or less capable than themselves.  The mentally ill were very often locked away in attics or basements.  And the poor were sometimes confined to poorhouses, where conditions weren’t much different from the infamous Victorian workhouses described by Dickens. 

Will there be more adventures for Speed and Lincoln?

Yes. These Honored Dead is the first in the Lincoln and Speed Mystery series. The sequel, called Perish from the Earth (like ‘these honored dead’, a phrase from the Gettysburg Address), will be published by Crooked Lane next summer. I’m hoping to publish a book a year going forward. And a movie director recently optioned These Honored Dead, so hopefully Lincoln and Speed will be coming to the cinema or series TV before long, too.


Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).