Lawyer, writer addicted to work

"I have been very lucky," confesses Pierce County prosecutor Mark Lindquist, author of "The King of Methlehem." He grants that "lawyer/writers are like model/actresses — there are so many of them. All lawyers have a book in their filing cabinets." But Lindquist had luck. He wrote his first novel ("Sad Movies") precisely when Jay McInerney's cocaine-youth novel "Bright Lights, Big City" came out, pitched McInerney's editor, fellow Northwesterner Gary Fisketjon, and presto, he was Fisketjon's subsequent top-selling novelist. What a rush!

Life in the literary Brat Pack looked like "Entourage," only everybody was a star. McInerney wooed models, Bret Easton Ellis made nihilism stylish, Lindquist hit the clubs in New York and L.A. He wrote screenplays, then the Brat Pack Hollywood novel "Carnival Desires."

Then he went to law school and hit Seattle's clubs just when Nirvana played "Saturday Night Live." Like Cameron Crowe going back to Ridgemont High to write a book and movie, Nathan Hale High grad Lindquist was half-sincere, half-careerist. "It was my life, but I was consciously gathering material," says Lindquist.

Now he's in Tacoma prosecuting crimes of meth, which has become what coke was to the '80s and heroin to the '90s. "It was known as a white-trash drug, a trailer-park drug. It expanded from those subcultures into gay nightclubs, to mainstream nightclubs, then to housewives and Reverend Ted Haggart. Meth has come a long way in becoming a mainstream drug.

"We're absolutely swamped. Pierce County was consistently in the top five counties in the nation for meth," says Lindquist. One day, he recalls, "It occurs to me that what I'm reading for work is more dramatic, more interesting, more full of human drama than most novels I'm likely to read nowadays." With a screenwriter's pruning instinct, he pauses and polishes his quote: "Police reports have more pathos and drama than a novel."

Lindquist, who contributes occasionally to The Seattle Times books pages, prizes precise language and resonant facts. When a cop at a Pierce County trailer park sardonically called the place "Methlehem," he had his novel's title.

"The King of Methlehem" is a thriller about a driven Pierce County cop on the hunt for a meth entrepreneur who calls himself Howard Schultz, in honor of the Starbucks mogul. The meth king has a fiendish genius for hairsbreadth escapes, but he is both smart and half-crazed in his quest to win — just like his police pursuer.

"I like entering into the world I'm writing about," says Lindquist. He works 40-70 hours a week, then enters his private world. "I do literally take off the suit when I sit down to write — two to three hours a night on weeknights, and weekends, six days a week. I take Mondays off." He filters what he's seen through a fine scrim of screenplay style. "Not a word, not an image can be wasted. And the novelists I've admired tend to have a cinematic style: Hemingway, Didion, even Raymond Carver [McInerney's mentor, the hard-partying godfather of the Brat Pack]. They're full of strong images and moments like movies. I start with the fundamentals of character, then figure out what they want."

When he was script-doctoring, his office was plastered with 3-by-5 cards. "Now my office is pretty clean and stark. My notes are pretty much in my head. That's why it's important to write every night. So I don't forget."

Lindquist's composition process is addictive, mirroring the demented industriousness of meth heads, who (in his novel and in real life) spend hours "sifting through shredded paper and pasting it back together." The meth heads assemble credit-card receipts for identity theft; Lindquist faithfully filches the criminals' aggregate identities for his fiction. Also those of their pursuers. "You put a little of yourself in every character," says Lindquist.

All of the book's good and bad guys are addicts, of "nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, and workaholism as well." Lindquist swore off the first two, but as he noted in a recent e-mail, his workaholism seems to be getting worse. "Though I didn't set out to write an anti-drug book, it did develop into an anti-consumption book because I believe that most consumption — especially of drugs, alcohol, or material things — is a hollow pleasure that just leaves people wanting. That said, I do like the occasional Scotch."

The brats in Ellis and McInerney's world of fiction like to snort cocaine off a Porsche hood. Few would have predicted that their club-hopping '80s pal would become a chief prosecutor. "I'm sure many of my friends thought it was an interesting career move," says Lindquist. "Some people said they thought it's ironic that Jay blurbed an antidrug novel." Even Brat Packers have to grow up someday.