Robert Rotenberg Talks About Old City Hall

Back in 1991, I was thirty-seven years old, my wife was pregnant with our first child and I was broke. I'd been called the to the bar ten years earlier and spent a decade doing everything I could to escape the work-a-day fate of practicing law.

Magazine editor, radio show producer, film executive. I lived in London, Paris and New York. But now here I was, walking into Scarborough Provincial Court in suburban Toronto, briefcase and Criminal Code of Canada in hand.

Nothing like a mortgage to concentrate the mind. I built my law practice and secretly started writing. I finished my first book in 2001. It was a thriller and I made damn sure it had no lawyers, no courtroom scenes. Then I got an agent in New York.

The day she told me she there were no buyers, I started Old City Hall, named after the central criminal court in downtown Toronto. Stuck a dead body in chapter one. It had taken me a decade to own up to the cliché "write what you know." Perhaps, a la T. S. Eliot, I'd arrived at the place I started and knew it for the first time.

In my law practice, every few days I write out a "to do" list. On the back of the pages I make my secret writer's notes. Things I heard ("Get me a T.V. in my cell and I can do five years standing on my head,") see (lawyer cries when jury convicts client) and feel (another courtroom nightmare, sweated through two t-shirts last night).

Now I have eighteen years of cases all boxed up. Fodder for a lifetime of writing.

The phone just rang. "Hey man, I just got out," a client I'll call E said. I've known him since 1994 when he started getting into trouble. He was fifteen. "I've got to talk to you about something, but not over the phone."

"No problem," I said.

I'm buying him lunch tomorrow.

ROBERT ROTENBERG

author of

OLD CITY HALL

John Murray trade paperback — £11.9