There has been a character named Sandy Stern in almost every book I have written. Even in One L, my memoir of my first year in law school that was published in 1977, where I changed the names of classmates and professors to protect their privacy, there was a “Sandy Stern,” albeit nothing like the man I invented a few years later when I began writing Presumed Innocent on the morning commuter train, on my way to work as a federal prosecutor in Chicago. The new Stern—Rusty Sabich’s clever and urbane defense lawyer—bore little resemblance to the somewhat pompous “Sandy Stern” in One L, and so I never made the connection. When my editor, Jonathan Galassi, first bought Presumed Innocent for Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1986, he was dedicated enough to go back and read One L. Thus it was Jon, who brought me the shocking news that there was a Sandy Stern in that book, too. I was panicked, because the name for the defense lawyer somehow seemed perfect to me, capturing so much of the character—named Alejandro Stern at his birth in Argentina, he decides, after his emigration, to call himself ‘Sandy’ in his tireless quest to be a real American. I was depressed by the thought of having to make a change. But Jonathan laughed off my concerns. ‘Let it be,’ he suggested. The coincidence could be a source of amusement for eagle-eyed fans—and, as Jon guessed, dozens of people have written to me in the decades since asking for an explanation of how the same guy could appear in the fictionalized world of Kindle County and the real-life universe of Harvard Law School. Just happened, I say. Like meeting two guys named Joe Smith.
The inspiration for the fictional Stern was a suburban neighbor of my parents, who’d fled to the U.S. from pre-Castro Cuba. He was not a lawyer—he worked in finance— but he was a person of such understated elegance that he remained live in my memory. His roundish form, bald head and trace accent became Stern’s. Why? For the same reason that most fiction writers make their choices—because he was unusual, compelling and thoroughly known to me, given his origins in real life.
The late Raul Julia portrayed Sandy in the movie of Presumed Innocent as a suave figure like Raul himself, tall and handsome with the wavy dark hair of a 50’s teen idol. But part of Stern’s magic to me, which I’ve routinely described, is that he is far from physically prepossessing. Rusty’s son, Nat, describes Stern in Innocent, the sequel to Presumed Innocent I wrote twenty years later:
“I have heard about Sandy Stern’s magnetism in a courtroom since I was a boy. Like a lot of things in life, it’s pretty much beyond anybody’s ability to explain. He is short—barely five feet six, if that—and to be honest, pretty dumpy. You would walk past Sandy Stern on the street a thousand times. But when he stands up in court, it is as if someone lit a beacon.” Making allowances for the standard attractiveness of movie stars, the wonderful Hector Elizando, who played Stern in the ABC mini-series that was made from my second novel, The Burden of Proof, was closer to the physical type I imagined.
I loved Stern from the time I first started writing about him during my morning commute. As I was to learn in the ensuing decades, if things are going well with a novel, there is always a character who runs away with the book, someone you barely planned on when you began writing, who ends up forcing themselves into a more prominent role. Long before I finished Presumed, I knew I had to give Stern a book of his own, which is how I got to The Burden of Proof, where Stern struggles with the mystery of his wife’s suicide. Yet even after that, I could not stand to part with him completely.
All my novels have been set in whole, or in part, in the mythical Kindle County, a metropolitan area of three conjoined cities, whose population is about half that of metro Chicago (“Chicagoland” to the locals.) Characters come and go from book to book, star in one and fade into the background in another. But no one has appeared with the regularity of Sandy Stern. He has emerged as the First Citizen of Kindle County, more or less, the most eminent lawyer in my law-dominated imaginary universe.
And thus Stern pops up in every novel that followed Burden, sometimes mentioned only in passing, as in Reversible Errors or my last novel Testimony, but more often having a decent little cameo, a small but significant role. (The one exception is Ordinary Heroes, but that is only because the book is set in Europe in 1944 and 1945, and I couldn’t manage the contortions required to arrange the appearance of a character, who at that time would have been a child in Argentina. Also, for obvious reason, there is no Sandy in Ultimate Punishment, my nonfiction reflection about my experiences as lawyer in dealing with capital punishment.)
In Innocent, Sandy returned to a prominent role, defending Rusty again, despite the fact that Stern is dealing with lung cancer and chemotherapy. He clearly seemed to be heading to The Last Roundup, and many readers wrote to ask me if Stern, in fact, had died after the book’s close. Frankly, I couldn’t stand the thought. But how could somebody struck so hard by lung cancer be lucky enough to survive so long, into what would be a very late age?
In that question are the roots of The Last Trial and the miracle cancer drug, G-Livia, whose discoverer, Sandy’s old friend Kiril Pafko, Stern is called upon to defend. Again spending every writing day with Stern was, as before, a joy for me. In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book, I expressed my gratitude to the many people who’d help me along the way in the writing of The Last Trial—editor, agent, early readers. As a final thought, I said this:
“I initially started writing about Sandy Stern in the mid-1980’s, and he has appeared as a character, sometimes centerstage, usually in the background, in every novel I have published. I feel like thanking him too, for the pleasure of living again in his skin.”
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