Serial Murders: Phillip Margolin

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PHILLIP MARGOLIN IS a New York Times best-selling author and retired lawyer based in Portland, Ore. But for "Executive Privilege," the American University grad returns to D.C. — specifically, the White House — for the setting of his latest page-turning murder mystery.

After private eye Dana Cutler snaps some incriminating pictures in the middle of the Virginia woods, all signs point to the President of the United States being a serial killer.

Meanwhile, Brad Miller, a junior associate in Portland law firm, is working the appeal of a convicted killer — who admits he's slaughtered plenty of women, but not this one in particular. And it just so happens this murdered lady was one of the president's many mistresses.

Soon Miller, Cutler and all the president's nefarious men come together for a rip-roaring conclusion that has more twists that the Columbia River Gorge.

Does it sound like a preposterous plot? Mos def.

But is the book fun? A helluva lotta.

Margolin will discuss "Executive Privilege" at the Georgetown Barnes & Noble on Thursday and the Gaithersburg Costco on Friday. Express spoke to the beach-book brainiac about his undergrad days in D.C., the influence of chess on his tightly planned novels and readers' enduring appetites for destruction in the form of serial killers.

» EXPRESS: It's obvious how law school affected your writing, but I see you're the head of the Chess for Success program that helps teach at-risk kids about the game. How does chess influence your novels?
» MARGOLIN: It really helped me with plotting. What I tend to do is get an idea and then I start trying to say what can my characters do. Chess teaches you to say, "OK, if my knight is here, this and this and this can happen. But if I move it moves here? Or what if I move the bishop instead of the knight?" It's sort of s system I used when I was a lawyer. Anything you do that involves solving a problem, if you play chess correctly you chances of getting the right answer to the problem go way up.

Chess really turned my life around. I was a bit of a delinquent when I was a kid and I was a very bad student. I was a C, D student and hated school and had the attention span of a gnat and was in all the dummy classes … all the way up to the 9th grade. And I started getting involved in chess and taught me how to slow down and think analytically and not get frustrated — I used to get frustrated if I couldn't solve a problem immediately. It teaches you how to sit and take a long time working through something without getting emotional about it. As a result of chess, my grades went way up.

That what we do with Chess for Success. We're in Title I schools — they're the poorest schools. It's a federal designation for kids who quality for free federal food programs. The kids in our program have to be Title I, and we pay a teacher in a school—we have middle school, too, but it's mostly elementary — to run an afterschool chess program.

We don't really care if the kids do great at chess, but we want them to learn how to sit still and focus and develop a system of analysis. It really helps with test scores. The Congress paid for a two-year study of the program, and 93 percent of the kids in our program meet or exceed the state math standards in Oregon, compared to 88 or 86 percent in the rest of the state, and 91 percent meet or exceeded in reading. ... We're in 73 schools in 15 school districts in two states; we just expanded into the state of Washington last year with two schools. We started with nine schools in 1992. We have roughly 3,000 students in the program.

» EXPRESS: Since the book takes place in D.C, Maryland and Virginia, and a major plot point hangs on the navigation between these places, how much time did you spend here researching the book?
» MARGOLIN: I have many, many connections with D.C. My undergraduate work was at American University; I got my bachelor's degree there. I actually worked in the U.S. Senate — not in any major capacity — but when I was in college I was a file clerk there. I majored in government.

More recently, my daughter was in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic and when she came back she got her master's degree at American in international service. Then she was a presidential management fellow for two years after that, so my wife and I used to fly back and forth and visit her a lot. And her husband, who she met when she was getting her master's, grew up in Maryland.

Another one of my books, "Lost Lake" [2005], is also partially set in Washington, D.C., and [my son-in-law] would drive me around the Adams Morgan area. I have Adams Morgan in both of the books. … I asked him where I should put the farm where the CIA safehouse is, and we had to work out the distances. He said, "You should use this mall," and he said, "You should do this place for the farm," and he did MapQuest so I would know what the distances were. Then we got the distance from downtown to the [suburban] mall. It's fairly accurate; it might be off. I never drove the routes. But I did rely on my son-in-law for getting me stuff because they were back there at the time; they have since moved back to Oregon.

» EXPRESS: There's really not a single sympathetic government character in "Executive Privilege." Is that just because there's such an evil administration represented in the book, or are you making a larger commentary about government?
» MARGOLIN: [Laughs] It wasn't necessarily on purpose. I had to have people evil because one of them is a killer — and they're all involved in bad stuff, so they're evil to start with.

I have a funny story. I'm a died-in-the-wool Democrat, and I've never voted Republican. And in a number of my earlier books, there was a Senator or a state legislator and I always made the bad one Republican. Well, I got a couple of letters from people in Oregon who said they really liked my books, but they were Republicans and they were sort of upset by the fact that every time I had a bad politician he was a Republican. And it was sort of subconscious; I wasn't doing it to trash Republicans. And I realized since I'm writing a book that's supposed to be fun to read, and entertainment, I really shouldn't be putting my political views in. … So I scrupulously keep party names out of the books now.

But ["Executive Privilege" is] not a political polemic; it's really supposed to be a fun book. They're just evil people.

» EXPRESS: Serials killers are an overworked bromide in crime fiction, but you take it over-the-top in "Executive Privilege" with the implication that President Christopher Farrington could be one.
» MARGOLIN: The idea of the president being a serial killer is certainly different from anything anyone else has done.

This is my 13th novel, and I try to make each one completely different. I've had two writing careers: I wrote my first book ["Heartstone"] in 1978 when I was in my 30s and my second one ["The Last Innocent Man"] in 1981. [But] I always wanted to be a lawyer, not a writer. And the same year my first book was published, I interviewed at the United States Supreme Court. And between the first and second, I started doing major murder cases, big federal drug conspiracy cases. I was the first lawyer to work in the use of Battered Woman's Syndrome to defend a battered woman accused of killing a battered spouse — I did that between the two books. So, I stopped writing for quite some time.

In 1993 my next book came out — and that one's a very scary serial killer book. It's "Gone, But Not Forgotten" — and that one really freaks people out. It's not because of any graphic violence. I've represented serial killers, and I've represented people who are sociopaths, and I think one thing I do well is portray the way this type of individual thinks, and most people never come in contact with a person like that, so it freaks them out.

But my fourth book ["After Dark," 1995], I was tempted to use my main character, Betsy Tannenbaum, again with a serial killer, but I thought, "What if that's twice as successful?" [Because] "Gone" was huge — it was on the [New York] Times list for 10 weeks. So, if it's twice as successful , I could only write Betsy Tannenbaum serial killer books for the rest of my life. So, "After Dark" was sort of like a love story — even though it had a lot of dead bodies in it, a lot of stuff going on, but was really like "Beauty and the Beast" with lawyers.

But in "Wild Justice" [2000] I do have a really freaky serial killer again, and "Sleeping Beauty" [2004] has a pretty violent murderer, and I think that's it. But I try not to repeat myself, so I don't want to overuse the serial killer thing — or any other of my themes.

» Barnes & Noble, 3040 M St. NW; Thu., 7:30 p.m., free; 202-965-9880.
» Costco, 880 Russell Ave., Gaithersburg; Fri., 12 p.m., free; 202-965-9880.