An Interview with 'Night Laws' Author Jim Michael Hansen

Denise: From what you've told us we know you're an attorney practicing law in Denver, Colorado's metropolitan area. You have 20 years of courtroom experience, represent a variety of corporate and individual clients in civil matters and focus on civil litigation, employment law and OSHA. You are also driven to ride a bike REALLY long distances (from Cleveland, Ohio to San Francisco, California to Salem, Oregon) and no matter what, people like stealing your stuff. You also are an attorney with a sense of humor. Should we be scared?

Jim: I would think that any rational person should be terrifed. I'm a lawyer who can hop on a bike and get to you no matter where you live. When you're on a bike,  you come in quietly. And when I get there, you never know whether I'm going to hand you an invoice, tell you a joke or swim naked in your pool. Scary stuff indeed.

Denise:What motivated you to ride a Schwinn 12-speed from Ohio to Oregon? Tell us about this experience and the one where you "soaked up culture" in Europe.

Jim: When I was in college, I lived in a 16-foot travel trailer park in Cleveland, Ohio. The water pipes froze in November and didn't start running again until April, meaning I took all my showers down at school. It was so cold inside the trailer during the winter that I used to sleep in my coat. So the day following my last senior final, I had to get the wide-open spaces around me and blue sky over my head. I hopped on my bike with all my money in my pocket (three dollars) and pointed the front wheel towards California. Technically, the ride was also a "pledge ride" for the March of Dimes, and generated some revenue for the organization. Cleveland's main rock radio station used to put me on the air every morning so I could tell everyone where I was and what was going on. They also set me up with media contacts in upcoming cities. It was great fun and took me most of the summer to cross the United States.

Denise: You knew you wanted to be an architect or a lawyer. What factor determined the course of your future?

Jim: That's true. I started off as a school teacher in Cleveland, but needed bigger challenges after about six years. I decided to be either an architect or a lawyer and decided architect, since I had a math and semi-engineering background. It turned out that all the architect programs in Cleveland were day programs and I had to continue teaching to support myself. There was, however, a night program for law offered by the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. So off to law school I went. Good thing, too. Could you imagine a building designed by me?


Denise: How did you have the energy to attend law school full time and teach during the day? I actually think you had yourself cloned and you're still touring Europe.

Jim: Now there's a scary thought - me cloned. Between teaching full time and going to law school full time, my life was pretty well stuffed to the brim. However, about that time in my life I picked up a great gal in a disco and tricked her into marrying me. She did all the hard work, like food shopping and washing our pet elephants and popping out babies. That freed me up to concentrate on law. Without her, I'd just be a bum right now. Some argue that even with her I'm a bum right now. Who am I to disagree?

Denise: Let's talk about something you love as much as your wife and kids: your debut crime thriller, Night Laws, which is due to be published Feb. 3, 2006. Tell us about Denver Homicide Detective Bryson Coventry and what he's after.

Jim: The primary thing that the proponent in Night Laws - Lt. Bryson Coventry - is after is to get me rich, although he doesn't know it yet and therefore doesn't talk about it much.

In the meantime, he's busy chasing after the bad guys and the ladies, as well as getting chased a bit himself, I might add. The thing I like about Bryson Coventry is that he has his moral compass pointed in the right direction. He's also very realistic and not the formula cop who constantly argues with the chief and hates intrusion from the FBI. He isn't above taking help from wherever he can get it and realizes that everyone brings something to the party. He gets his share of attention from the ladies but doesn't mistreat them. He's basically a solid, good guy who also happens to be a world-class hunter of bad guys. He also has a pretty incredible sense of humor. I wonder where he get that from?

Denise: How does he know who is on the killer's hit list?

Jim: The cell phone from one of the bad guy's victims disappears. A call is made from that phone, presumably by the killer, to an attorney named Kelly Parks, Esq., after the victim's death. A connection is made but no words are exchanged. Bryson Coventry speculates that the phone call is a message to him, or to Kelly Parks, that the killer is playing a game and that Kelly Parks is in it.

Denise:What motivated you to write from the detective's perspective and not write a law thriller?

Jim: You're right in that Night Laws is much more of a crime thriller than a legal thriller. The traditional legal thriller involves courtroom drama and that kind of thing bores me to death. So you won't find any wake-me-when-it's-over courtroom scenes in any of Laws novels. What you will find, however, is very interesting lawyers and law firms who find themselves in very unique predicaments. Those predicaments end up intersecting the crime storyline and cause numerous sparks to fly.

Denise: What research was involved? How long did it take (or will it take) from idea to final manuscript? Editing to final galley?

Jim: Those are good questions. As far as research goes, I am fortunate enough to be friends with an individual very high up in the Homicide Unit of the Denver Police Dept. He and some of his colleagues were kind enough to share their many years of experience and answer my many technical questions. He was also kind enough to read the manuscript and give me a course correction wherever I went wrong. For example, I had the FBI processing a homicide scene at one point in the book. He informed me that the FBI doesn't do that. So I shifted that scene over to Coventry's group. Luckily, Coventry's on salary so I didn't have to pay him any extra.

From idea to final manuscript probably took me 1,000 hours, maybe more, maybe less. I was too scared to keep track of how much of my life was being dumped into the project, especially since nothing might ever come of it other than creating a pile of paper for the bottom of a drawer. After the first draft of the manuscript was complete, I edited it relentlessly twelve times. One or two of those edits were major, where I slashed whole chapters and pages in the name of keeping the pace going fast. Some authors refer to that as "killing your babies."

Denise: You're currently in the process of writing your second book, "Fear Laws." Is this a sequel or brand new thriller?

Jim: All of the Laws books are stand-alone thrillers and can be read in any order. Lt. Bryson Coventry and his co-conspirators, Shalifa Netherwood and Kate Katona, are in every book, but everyone else is new. Each Laws book has a lawyer somehow involved in the mix of things, hence the "Laws" part of the title.

Fear Laws is the second book in the series and is looking at a release date in the first quarter of 2007. In that book, we meet a free-spirited lawyer named Taylor Sutton, Esq., a solo practitioner with a propensity to sleep around and light matches. A fellow criminal lawyer asks her to investigate one of his mysterious clients who the lawyer thinks is on the verge of killing him for reasons unknown. She investigates as requested and gets pulled into a dark world that tests her abilities, her loyalties and her morals as she uncovers secrets and gets pounded with life and death decisions. Meanwhile, Bryson Coventry is on the hunt for a killer who has brought Denver to her knees in fear. The seemingly unconnected storylines spiral together and intersect in a world where no one is safe and nothing is what it seems.

Watch for updates on my website. Anyone who wants to contact me can do so.

--Interview conducted by Denise Fleischer, gottawritenetwork.com
Netera@aol.com