Stranger in Fiction
Utah author works a lifetime for overnight success
By Christy Karras
In the publishing world, certain things just don’t happen. Booksellers don’t agree to read their customers’ unpublished manuscripts. Even if they did, they wouldn’t track down editors at publishing houses and ask them to publish those customers’ books.
Editors rarely take advice from booksellers, nor do they read unsolicited manuscripts from people who don’t have agents. And editors don’t turn around, upon reading manuscripts, and tell their bosses to snap up the book in question or offer a big advance check to a previously unpublished, unknown author.
Those things just don’t happen. Except to Gordon Campbell, a semi-retired Utah trial lawyer whose book, Missing Witness, hit stores at the end of September.
“I was very, very lucky,” says Campbell, a lean man with a neat gray beard who hauls his laptop to a downtown coffee shop so he can write unbothered. He has a distinctive, thoughtful way of speaking and before answering a question, he looks off into space for a few moments, chin cupped in his hand.
Betsy Burton, the bookseller who reluctantly agreed to read just the first 50 pages of Campbell’s manuscript, says it’s not luck—that this would never have happened if Campbell’s mystery novel hadn’t also been a good book.
“People are forever giving me manuscripts,” Burton says, adding diplomatically: “Some are better than others.”
But in this case, “I literally couldn’t put it down. It’s just a great book,” Burton said. She has always been a mystery lover, but “I kept thinking, ‘This is more than that. It’s a multilayered story, and the characters are great. Nobody is simplistic.”
Missing Witness is a courtroom drama set 25 years ago in Campbell’s childhood home, the sprawling, sun-baked desert near Phoenix.
Campbell has distinct similarities to his narrator, Douglas McKenzie, a junior lawyer who gets sucked into a murder defense case. Like McKenzie’s, Campbell’s father worked long hours as a bookkeeper for a ranching company. Like his narrator, Campbell briefly attended Brigham Young University to shape up after a few years of undergraduate partying. And like him, Campbell started his law career in Arizona, working for irascible old-school lawyers who inspired central characters including Dan Morgan, his narrator’s complex and mysterious mentor.
In the book, Morgan is defending a wealthy cattleman’s daughter-in-law, who apparently just murdered his son.
What everybody wants to know about defense lawyers, Campbell says, is “how can you defend someone when you know they’re guilty of an awful crime?” Campbell doesn’t see that scenario in such a problematic light. The worst thing that can happen, from the defense lawyer’s perspective, is losing the case and sending a guilty person to jail. Win or lose, the lawyer moves on to the next case with a clear conscience. “You never really have to confront the result,” Campbell says.
For this book, Campbell said, “I wanted to come up with a story where the chickens really do come home to roost, and a lawyer is faced with the results of his own competitive zeal. I didn’t think I’d ever seen that done.”
Like many perceived overnight successes, Campbell’s took years to bring to fruition.
The germ of this book was always in his mind. He started writing it in 1979, when he took a camping trailer to Ketchum, Idaho, and parked beside the river, writing in the morning and fishing in the afternoon. A few years after that, he took another few weeks off and came up with a draft.
Writing a novel “was all I ever wanted to do, all my life,” he says. “Most of my colleagues who had Walter Mitty dreams, it was to play in the NBA or be professional actors … I had daydreams of walking up Fifth Avenue in New York and going to see someone about my book.”
He devoured great American works by Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway’s son, Jack, became an acquaintance; he and his wife told Campbell Hemingway stories over fishing and coffee in Idaho) and F. Scott Fitzgerald and admired the work of great fiction editors like Maxwell Perkins.
Campbell moved to Utah because he loved skiing the Cottonwood Canyons; he also golfs (he says finishing the book and publicizing it have cost him his one-stroke handicap) and loves fly fishing. He married—his wife, Tena, is now Chief Judge for Utah’s U.S. District Court—and had two children.
He submitted the manuscript to a publisher, who considered it but ultimately declined. He got an agent, who wanted Campbell to change his main character. But Dan Morgan was the complicated, multilayered defense attorney who held the story together—and who best represented Campbell’s idea of what a lawyer could be. He said no.
His dream buried under a pile of rejection slips, Campbell lost hope. He put the manuscript in a closet and forced himself to forget about it.
His daughter, Mary, a lawyer herself, pulled it out, read it, and convinced him to try again.
“She said, ‘You can’t abandon this,’” and offered to edit it for him, he says now. Looking back at all the editors who finessed the manuscript, he thinks she may have been the most brutal.
It was that draft he took to Burton, owner of The King’s English bookstore and author of a memoir, The King’s English, about a career spent befriending some of the world’s most noted authors.
Campbell, a King’s English customer for years, respected Burton for her advice on books and her skills as a writer. He approached her with some trepidation. “When she said she would read it, I had two emotions: I really want her to read it, but I’m afraid she’ll be embarrassed to even see me again in her bookstore,” he says.
Busy with running the store and the nonprofit Local First Utah, Burton didn’t really have time to read another author’s work, especially one whose writing she’d never seen before. But she reluctantly agreed to read the first 50 pages.
Campbell was surprised when she called him days later and gave him three pieces of advice: Don’t change the main character. Get an agent. And let her, Betsy, contact a book editor she knew to see if she could help get this published.
Burton sent the manuscript off, warning Campbell he probably wouldn’t hear back for a year.
But days later, she called him with good news: She had contacted a representative she knew from a major publishing house. He told her to send the manuscript to an editor, who may or may not agree to read it.
But like Burton, that editor stayed up all night reading it. She sent it to her boss—who sent it to her boss, who was going to recommend that they offer Campbell a deal.
Again, the news came with a warning: These publishers are busy. You could wait months for an answer. But again, the answer came quickly: They wanted it.
Burton was stunned, as were most who learned the story. The publisher’s rep Burton first contacted told her he’d never seen anything like it in 28 years. “This literally never happens. How could this happen? This never happens.”
In a week, Campbell went from unknown author to hot commodity. The agents who wouldn’t even reply to his
queries began calling him. And he found himself, just as he had dreamed, flying to New York to have lunch with his
publisher. As he walked up Fifth Avenue, he gave a little wave to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Perkins.
“When all this time goes by with no prospect of having anyone read the damned thing, you start to feel foolish. When Betsy told me it was good, that was enough for me,” he says, noting that Burton “commands a big, big respect in New York.”
And when the publisher bought the book, “I was vindicated. I told my daughter, ‘I won’t have to grow old feeling like a failed novelist.’”
It remains to be seen whether readers are as enthusiastic about the book as Campbell’s editors have been. In an early review, Publishers Weekly wrote, “Campbell delivers an intriguing, if often overly technical, story of long-buried family secrets and the blurred line between lies and the truth … Despite an outcome that's not as surprising as it should be, legal suspense fans will be well rewarded.”
Part of the book’s appeal is that it is as much about a sense of the place and time as it is a taut thriller. He recreates a hardscrabble farming and ranching community where cattle barons rule vast sagebrush-carpeted acreages and towns like
Tempe and Mesa are small enough that a single man can hold sway in politics and law enforcement. It’s a landscape far from the sprawling metropolis of today.
Lynn Grady, the HarperCollins vice president and associate publisher who finalized the deal, calls the book “a good old-fashioned thriller” that “realistically recreates a world of hard-drinking and hard-driving lawyers who never quite know when to slow down—or to give up.”
Though many cases are settled before they go to trial, Campbell always preferred to fight things out in the courtroom. What’s his favorite thing about trials? “I just like to win,” he says, smiling and without hesitation.
He’s working on a second book the publisher has already spoken for. This one is set in Utah.
Campbell says he never realized how hard it was to write a book until he started on his second. “I wrote (the first book) as an amateur, for love,” he says. “Now, they’re telling me I’m a professional.”
But, he says, “I can’t be stopped from telling people stories. It’s a character defect.”
Christy Karras is a former associate editor of the Wasatch Journal. She writes travel guides to the American Southwest, spending much of her time doing research from the back of a motorcycle. She lives in Seattle.
