May 22, 2005

"You should understand I never intended to create a series and do not consider myself either a mystery writer or a writer of legal thrillers, a category I did not know existed until I apparently wrote one."

So says D.W. Buffa, author of seven acclaimed legal thrillers and our guest speaker this month.

We can only envy this stumble onto such success. The week The Defense, his first, was published, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, literary critic of The New York Times, called it "an accomplished first novel" that "leaves you wanting to go back to the beginning and read it over again."

There followed The Prosecution, The Judgment (nominated in 2002 for the Edgar Award), The Legacy (which takes place in San Francisco and is as much a political as a legal thriller), Star Witness (about a Hollywood power player charged with murdering his movie star wife) and Breach of Trust. The seventh novel, Trial by Fire, was released in April.

D.W. Buffa was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. After graduation from Michigan State University, he studied at the University of Chicago, where he earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. He received his law degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. He lives and writes in the Napa Valley.

Quotables:

"Fiction is the most important way of telling the truth I know."

"There’s no such thing as a minor character. Tell who they are, even if it’s a line or two."

"Turning your novel into a screenplay teaches you the central thread of the story and tightens all dialogue. It enforces a discipline you otherwise might never have because we all fall in love with what we do."

• Victory by Joseph Conrad
• The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton
• Other People’s Lives by Michael Korda
• Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg