You might say Kevin Davis was born to write about criminal justice: his grandfather scored an interview with John Dillinger for the Chicago Daily Times in 1934. Davis grew up in Chicago, worked the crime beat for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel for ten years, and in 1996 published his first book, The Wrong Man, about a wrongful conviction. At that point, he realized he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in Florida in a comfortable but limited job. “I missed Chicago, and I wanted to write books,” he says, but the idea for his new one, Defending the Damned (Atria), didn’t come right away.
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It’s not easy for him and his colleagues to talk shop with outsiders. Civilians tend to be either repelled by the crimes involved or creepily interested in them. But the public defenders develop a tolerance for gruesomeness and focus instead on the courtroom contest. “To me, it’s a fight,” task force director Shelton Green tells Davis. “I’m not that concerned whether they did it or not.”
Davis appears next Saturday, June 9, as part of the Printers Row Book Fair, where he’ll be interviewed by the Tribune’s Eric Zorn.
In this case, it helped that I hung around there so much, and that I didn’t take out my notebook all the time. And I told them up front, “This is going to be raw. I’m not interested in stock answers to questions.” I think that showing genuine interest helps. We all want people to understand what we do.
I came home and struggled with how, or whether, to tell my wife that story. Eventually I did.
She’d always opposed the death penalty and now was appalled to feel that she could pull the lever on her husband’s killer.
That question is the most terrifying part about being an author. There are lots of great stories out there, but it takes a lot to sustain a whole book. Often journalists will write a book and people say, “It could just as well have been a good long magazine story.” I wanted to transcend that. My friend Robert Kurson [author of Shadow Divers and the new Crashing Through] and I discussed this. He said he thought part of the difference was that a book has to have an arc.
