Pick up any novel by Thomas Perry (he’s published 32), and within the first 25 pages, you’ll be hooked—he’s that good. His latest, Pro Bono, is the story of Charles (Charlie) Warren, an attorney with a past. Warren is a one-man law firm whose specialty is helping clients recover stolen or embezzled financial assets. It’s a unique skill, one shaped by an event from his adolescence.
The book begins with a prologue, set in August 2007, in which two convicts, on a bus back to jail after being part of a firefighting crew, come across a wrecked BMW that’s collided with a tree. One of the prisoners, Alvin Copes, is driving the bus and insists that they stop to see if they can render aid. His buddy, Andy Minkeagan, joins him at the wreck, where they discover both a dead body and financial documents the driver carried with him, documents they can use that could set them up for life—once they eventually get out of prison. They secrete the papers in the vent of a fan at a restaurant where they’ve stopped for lunch on the way back to incarceration.
(It’s worth noting, particularly with the catastrophic fires recently in Los Angeles, how Perry captures the essence of such a conflagration: “They had been on the fire line in California for three weeks fighting the Prickleback Fire, a big one made worse by the weather, with temperatures in the hundred and five plus range and winds that would blow one way for a while and then reverse, like something turning back because there was something alive back behind it that it had forgotten to eat. Sometimes the something seemed to be you.”)
The story then shifts to a few years after the death of Charlie’s father when he was eleven. His mother has remarried a man who calls himself “McKinley (Mack) Stone.” He claims to be an “investor,” but Charlie, who’s never liked or trusted him, is suspicious of this interloper and begins researching him online—and finds nothing.
The marriage begins to falter, and his mother tells him that Stone’s investments haven’t been performing well, leading to a visible strain between the couple. Home from a college that Stone maneuvered him into attending, Charlie begins a discreet search of his mother’s and stepfather’s financial documents. Yup, financial chicanery is afoot!
Asked how he approaches the beginning of a new novel (and here, specifically Pro Bono), Perry says, “My books usually begin within a day after I’ve sent the last one to my publisher. I start thinking about a character and start to write. I describe him and the things he’s doing, planning, or remembering right now. That information may never get into the book, at least in its original form, but it starts the engine. Pro Bono began in my mind with the two Nevada firefighting convicts finding the wreckage of con man McKinley Stone’s car with the deposit papers for the money he stole in the trunk. Right after that, we see what killed him—the rage of his victim’s teenage son, Charlie. Then we jump ahead to the present and see the teenage son seventeen years later as a young successful lawyer who has protected clients from people like the one who robbed his mother.”
One of the many pleasures of Perry’s stand-alone novels is the depth of research he does prior to writing. In Forty Thieves (2016), the criminal element is a large group of diamond thieves from Eastern Europe. We learn how a large gang operates—it also presciently involves the now more common “smash and grab” style of theft. In The Boyfriend (2013), it’s the sadistic methodology of a roving serial killer who preys on escorts, and with The Burglar (2019), how to disable an alarm and break into all manner of buildings undetected—lots of juicy details. In his prior novel, Hero (2024), the ins and outs of being a high-end female bodyguard are explored in fascinating depth.
So how does he find out all this stuff? For Pro Bono, says Perry, “since I’m not a lawyer, I needed to do a bit of searching for facts—the bar association code of conduct was useful. The fact that I was once taken in by a large and reputable investment company which guided me to invest in a municipal bond that turned out to be fraudulent and resulted in federal prison terms for several people was useful.
“When my wife and I were setting up a trust for our kids, the legal firm’s conference room with the huge television screen, etc., became the conference room of one of the investment firms in Pro Bono. The peculiar behavior of the victims of Bernie Madoff’s embezzlement was enlightening. Very sophisticated people were willing to believe for years that their investments with him only went up, never went down. Did these victims look for outside verification or wonder how that could be? No. They looked at the first page of his monthly reports and saw that this month’s total was bigger than last month’s total.” He goes on to say, “I like to ground a book in genuine information. I enjoy doing research. It’s what a writer can do on those days when he wants to make progress, but doesn’t feel like doing any actual work.
“Information for a book can come from anywhere. I’ve found that once you begin a story, details and things come to you. You’re curious about a disease you never heard of? Suddenly there are articles about it everywhere. Somebody you know had a boyfriend with that disease, and it was terrible. She’ll tell you every detail. Your wife’s cousin the doctor can explain the disease to you and the various treatments for it.”
The advent of the Internet opened up Perry’s ability to do in-depth research. “For most of my career there was only a prototype Internet used by professors, so when I wanted to know something, I would buy a book about it. My wife, Jo Perry, who is also a writer, used to kid me when I came home with new books. ‘I see you found another book so you can write a bunch of exposition you’re going to cross out.’ We were in an ideal environment when we worked in universities. There were professional experts on every subject. I could call them or walk over to their offices and ask.”
Moving at breakneck speed, Pro Bono includes many of Perry’s trademarks: vivid, believable characterizations, screeching car chases, discreet surveillance, gunshots, and a couple of smoothly lying liars. Charlie’s life is further complicated when Copes and Minkeagan show up with Stone’s stolen documents—they’ve traced him using his mother’s name—and expect to be well compensated. The development of this eventual uneasy alliance between the three is a most creative example of plotting … and orchestrated with skill and verve—everyone wants money!
Los Angeles, too, is invariably a character in its own right in many of Perry’s books. He agrees: “You observed that many times Los Angeles is like a character in some of my books. It’s true that I’ve lived here for many years now. My wife Jo was born and raised here. I came to California in 1974 and met her while I was working at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was a graduate student working on her doctoral dissertation and teaching English for the English Department and poetry writing for the College of Creative Studies, where I was working.
“We married and moved to Los Angeles in 1980. During my lifetime, I’ve tended to go from small places to larger ones, which always brings on a kind of awakening. I was born and brought up in the prototype for the small town where Jane Whitefield was born in that series. It was a place with twelve thousand people. On my first day at Cornell University, I unpacked my suitcase and then walked to the student union, went down to the dining hall in the basement, bought a cup of coffee, and had a conversation with a student who was from Tibet. Moving to Los Angeles was a similar experience. It was not only a kind of doorway to the world, but a world in itself. It’s a place where things are happening every morning that will capture the imaginations of the rest of the world before noon. L.A. is not just a city, but a county with ten million people, and we’re all up to something. What could be better for a writer?”
Perry’s plots, complex without resorting to one twist after another, are a marvel of creativity. So how does he begin? Is he a planner in advance? A “Let’s just see where this thing goes” writer? “I’ve known writers who outline everything,” says Perry. “What I do is try to keep the process open and free, and not feeling like a job. If you start with an outline or a rigid plan, what you have is the best idea for a book you’ve had that day. If you don’t outline, what you end up with is a selection of the best ideas you have over about a year of thought. The way I think about the process is that the reader is a friend. He/she is sort of like me. He/she likes stories. I say to the reader, ‘I’d like to tell you a story. All I can really guarantee is that you haven’t heard, seen, or read it before. But I’ve found it kind of interesting, and you might too.’ And then I tell him the story. I try to get his attention, and then not waste or squander it. As for the issue of how to handle the complexity that’s inevitable in realistic stories, you don’t have to show anybody your book until you have produced a draft that feels right. Nobody knows that it’s the tenth draft.”
Perry’s novel The Old Man was the inspiration for the FX series starring Jeff Bridges. In their early days of novel writing, Perry and his wife worked in TV, writing for major network shows. They came to the small screen in a serendipitous way.
“Our television career started when we were both working at the University of Southern California in early 1984. One day I got a call at my office from an executive at Universal Studios named Jim Korris. He had read The Butcher’s Boy and Metzger’s Dog. He asked if I’d be willing to try writing episodic television. I knew nothing about it, but Jo had at least read some scripts. She urged me to try it and said if I ran into trouble, she would help me. After some discussion, I went to a meeting with him, and he sent me to Richard Chapman, who was the executive producer of the CBS show Simon & Simon. He hired me to write a script. I did run into trouble, and Jo helped me. After that, we always worked as partners.
“After a couple more scripts, we were enjoying it, improving, and making more money on weekends than we did during the week. When the university was preparing to be a site for the 1984 Olympics that summer, we were asked to vacate our offices, which overlooked an athletic field, so the police could use them for security. By then we both felt ready to move on, and so we agreed to vacate the offices, but decided we wouldn’t return.
“We accepted a job as staff writers for Simon & Simon. When our bosses moved to Disney, they asked us to join them, so we did. We worked on Sidekicks and The Oldest Rookie while they lasted. Then we went back to Universal for Snoops. As that show was ending, we were awaiting our first child and wanted to concentrate on raising our kids, so I went back to writing novels, and we accepted assignments part-time. We wrote a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, three 21 Jump Street episodes, and back-up scripts for several shows that weren’t picked up. In all, we wrote television for 11 years.
“It was a good experience for anyone writing fiction. When you write for the screen, you learn to recognize the moment when a scene should end. You learn to use criticism rather than resenting it. You become aware that events don’t just happen, they’re being seen by a camera from a certain angle, distance, a degree of clarity, and certain light conditions. What does it look like? Who is meant to be the one seeing it, and why?”
As Pro Bono ultimately expands from a search for Vesper’s assets that dovetails with the scheme by Copes and Minkeagan to utilize the financial documents of Charlie’s mother, we see that the cliché “honor among thieves” can be true! The two mostly honest men prove to be a different kind of “asset” to Charlie and Vesper. How it all blends together is a classic meld by Perry of disparate people who share a common goal.
Judging from his remark about starting a new book upon delivering a completed one, we can safely assume that Perry has already written at least one, if not two more. So much to look forward to, and let’s hope he has even more up his criminally literary sleeve!
