For a clean-cut guy, David Ellis sure hangs out in some scummy places.
He’s the man who made the legal case for removing former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office. Ellis, chief counsel for House Speaker Michael Madigan, was the lead prosecutor in the it’s-only-funny-now-that-it’s-over ordeal that pried Blagojevich’s grip, finger by sweaty finger, from the reins of power.
But that wasn’t Ellis’ first trip to the seedy side of things.
Turns out that, despite his nice suit, courteous manners and boyish good looks, he feels right at home in creepy, sordid, low-down locales.
Long before Blagojevich muttered his first profanity into a wiretapped phone, Ellis had begun publishing legal thrillers: solid, entertaining, well-crafted novels about crime and passion and greed in the tradition of Scott Turow and John Grisham. His first book, “Line of Vision,” (2002), won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for a debut novel. The next four — “Life Sentence” (2002), “Jury of One” (2004), “In the Company of Liars” (2005) and “Eye of the Beholder” (2007) — are also nifty, fast-moving capers with vividly flawed protagonists that play a cat-and-mouse game with readers’ expectations.
He had already finished his sixth, “The Hidden Man” (Putnam), which was released this month, and had embarked on his seventh when, as Ellis puts it, “our governor started going off the deep end.”
And what had always been a complicated balancing act for Ellis — a demanding job as Madigan’s top legal counsel and an ambitious writing schedule, along with his joyful obligations as a husband and the father of a 2-year-old daughter — became impossible.
“The book-writing stopped. It stopped dead. The lights went out. You’ve got a crash of the computer, and you’ve got to reboot,” Ellis says, which is his way of describing his single-minded focus after Blagojevich’s arrest Dec. 9, 2008, on federal corruption charges.
Chosen by state legislators to prosecute the governor after his impeachment, Ellis had to put his literary career on hold. “It was challenging in all respects,” he says of the trial that resulted in Blagojevich’s removal from office. “It had never happened in Illinois. There was no protocol, very little to go by. It was a blank slate.”
Now that Blagojevich is out, Ellis can get back to what he loves: giving legislation the legal once-over for Madigan, and writing thrillers that call upon his courtroom expertise and his deep feeling for the rhythms and temptations of a big city such as Chicago.
Ellis, 41, born in Park Ridge and raised in Downers Grove, graduated from Northwestern University Law School and worked for several large law firms in Chicago before moving to Springfield two years ago to head Madigan’s legal staff. He knows the city. And even though he doesn’t name Chicago in “The Hidden Man” — Ellis says he enjoys creating a fictional, unnamed city that is just as real as the actual one — the book is filled with a Chicago spirit, from the close-knit neighborhoods to the shady politicians.
“Chicago is a city that can do anything you need it to do in a novel — absolutely anything,” he declares. “At the same time, it has good Midwestern values. And you don’t have to go very far to get an unbelievable amount of diversity.
“This book [“The Hidden Man”] has to be set in a big city, where big things happen, when the stakes are high enough that people have to sometimes do drastic things to protect their power — or themselves.”
“The Hidden Man” is dedicated to his daughter, Abigail. Ellis and his wife, Susan, a lawyer on the attorney general’s staff, are expecting another daughter in October.
So, where does Ellis find the time to read bills, write novels and raise a family?
“I don’t find the time. I make it,” he says with a smile. “I create pockets of time wherever I can. The easiest way to do that is late at night. After everyone’s gone to sleep, I’ll carve out an hour or two — or three or four — and I write my books then. Most nights, at 2 a.m., you find me typing on my keyboard.”
Susan Ellis confirms it. “He gets very little sleep. In the middle of the night, he’s sitting on the couch in the family room, typing.” She reads his novels but sometimes finds them unsettling. “He likes dark things. His protagonists have some darkness in them — and I know that’s part of him too.”
In any case, she wasn’t terribly surprised when her buttoned-down, straight-arrow husband became a purveyor of gritty crime, sudden violence and general mayhem — on the page, that is.
“When we first met, he was already shopping his first novel around,” she says. “I was there at the very beginning.”
With the success of Turow and Grisham, scribbling lawyers have become commonplace. Ellis thinks he knows why.
“Inside most lawyers is a frustrated fiction writer,” he says. “The best lawyers are not just storytellers, but entertaining storytellers. A good trial lawyer is a control freak — he knows the answer to every question he asks at trial. That’s what’s fun about writing. I control absolutely everything. It’s my universe.”
His prosecution of Blagojevich brought about what many saw as a happy ending for Illinois. But what if Ellis had to choose between legal work and writing?
After a long pause, he confesses, “I can’t. I can’t choose. Writing is a devouring passion. I don’t know any other way now. There’s no turning back. It’s a one-way road.”
David Ellis (davidellis.com) will appear at Borders in Oak Brook at 7 p.m. Friday and at Anderson’s Bookshop in Downers Grove at 1 p.m. Sunday 9/20.
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‘These are not the lawyers you see on television’
In “The Hidden Man” (Putnam), by David Ellis, a lawyer named Jason Kolarich is haunted by a family tragedy. But he has no time to brood, because an old friend from his childhood — now on trial for murder — needs his help. So, Kolarich, who never minds breaking a rule or two in service to a good cause, gets going. He’ll be chased and threatened, he just might get his own brother killed, and he’ll have to force himself to go into the dark places where child abduction, rape and murder may occur, but Jason stays on the job.
Here, in an excerpt from the novel, Jason looks around the courtroom and takes a gander at his fellow criminal defense attorneys:
“These are not the lawyers you see on television, the thousand-dollar suits and trendy haircuts, the passionate crusaders. These are guys and gals who work for a living. They take their money up front. If they’re good, they only lose about ninety percent of the time. They don’t like their clients and they have trained themselves not to care too much, else they will never again enjoy a decent night’s sleep. And when the money runs out, so do they, or they’d go broke. They do not have the benefit of an armada of young lawyers performing research and investigation. They have the cards stacked overwhelmingly against them and they know it. … They drink Maalox from the bottle and tell themselves, every day, that they are playing a necessary role in the criminal justice system.”
— Julia Keller
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jikeller@tribune.com
