After his 21 years as Cook County Public Guardian, Patrick Murphy has a keen sense of the provocative. He’s never been shy about taking bizarre cases to the public, which is why many people see him either as a passionate advocate or a grandstander who never met a TV camera he didn’t like.
He hopes to stir those intense emotions again — only this time from readers, with his first novel.
While some may be unaware that the controversial Murphy has flirted with the contemplative literary life for some time, they won’t be surprised that much of the book, “Drowning in Hot Water,” takes place in Juvenile Court, “a massive steel-and-glass building several miles west of Chicago’s Loop.” Or that it hums with child abusers, smooth-as-silk lawyers and morally challenged public officials.
“It’s what I know,” he shrugged. “It reflects what I’ve seen working in this city for the past 35 years. Fiction is a way to expose it — and control the outcome.”
Control is important to Murphy, one of the most high-profile attorneys in the city — a remarkable accomplishment since his clients are not the moneyed elite, but some of the city’s poorest and most disenfranchised citizens. Control is also essential to his novel’s protagonist Carol Moore, a savvy, hard-working police detective who assumes responsibility for a corpse that has washed up on North Avenue Beach.
The investigation takes her to a number of gritty locales, from Northwest Side biker bars to South Side housing projects. When she discovers the death by scalding of a child — swept under the rug by people in high places — Moore finds herself in, well, hot water. Simultaneously, Murphy delves into her private life specifically how his narrator copes with the competing demands of work, marriage and family.
Murphy recently reflected on this latest addition to his resume. At 61, he still sports a trim midriff — the result of thrice-weekly handball games and disciplined eating habits. For a guy who is not shy about talking to the press (his name has turned up in more than 500 Chicago Tribune stories in the past two decades), he is surprisingly miserly with chit-chat. He politely declines a request to talk to his wife. Even efforts to get him to reflect on his legacy were surprisingly futile. “I don’t think that’s for me to say. . . . That should be left to others,” he said succinctly.
But on the subject of his fictional debut, he is voluble. In the works for eight years, he describes “Drowning” as part “novel noir,” part whodunit. “But that’s not exactly right either,” he said, casting about for just the right genre. “What I really set out to do is write about human beings, Chicago politics, cynicism and how people sell each other out.”
The book is the first of a Murphy trilogy (the second installment is scheduled in about six months), but he has no plans to give up the day job. “It would be nice to sell a couple books, but you write for the same reason you paint a picture . . . because you enjoy the process.”
There’s no question that he is in a unique position to reveal what percolates beneath the placid exterior of county offices. Over the course of his career, his name has been attached to big juvenile cases — from Baby Richard to Baby T — and no one will have trouble seeing him as a character who chafes at the go-along, get-along culture.
Whether readers buy him as a 34-year-old leggy female cop with a professor husband, two young children and a lackluster love life remains to be seen.
“I wanted a police officer who wasn’t jaded and I thought I had a better chance of accomplishing that with a woman,” he explained. “And even though the voice is female, I’m still mostly writing about men — and how they react when they get close to money and power. How the little people get caught and punished . . . how the big ones generally get ahead.”
The author is at his best in the book when he deals with the case and all its untidy ramifications. However, running on a parallel track is a tale of stolen moments, awkward gropes and smoldering desire between the protagonist and a high-powered lawyer. (Although for Carol Moore to deftly juggle a full-time job, a spouse and kids and still have enough energy leftover for a steamy affair could only be a male fantasy.)
While some may find that the affair doesn’t ring quite true, he defended it. “I think it’s human nature to wonder whether another relationship might be better than the one you are in. There are a lot of trade-offs in life — and you realize that real love is more than electric lovemaking. But I also think it’s part of human nature to be tempted. . . . No one has a monopoly on virtue.”
To make sure he hit the right notes on the female experience — virtuous and otherwise — he ran some of the dialogue past his wife, Susan (a former attorney) and other colleagues, including Sherry Fox, one of the lawyers in his office. Fox said she sees a lot of her boss in Carol Moore, as well as another detective in the book, Tommy Welch: The desire to get the bad guy and most certainly, her frustration with all the lawyers more concerned with protecting themselves than doing the right thing.
“Out of the glare of the spotlight, I think people would be surprised how gentle he is,” said Fox, who works in the disabled adults division. “How he goes to these horrible places and gives these poor people their dignity back. That’s very important to him.”
The steamy stuff — of Moore’s temptation to stray, the crudeness of some of the characters — might also hit close to home. Said one former reporter: “I always thought Patrick enjoyed relaying some of the salacious details a little too much.”
People looking to match up the slimy characters with real-life counterparts will be disappointed. There are no dead giveaways that point to a particular state’s attorney or juvenile court judge. Besides, life — and his novel — is more multifaceted than what goes on from 9 to 5, he said. “It’s a sum of all life’s experiences . . . and the job is just one small part of that. They also come from working construction, being in the Peace Corps, prosecuting people, defending them, not getting married until I was in my 40s, having kids and hanging out at some of the worst bars in Chicago and New York. You take away a little bit from all of it.”
To those who know Murphy only from the media will have a hard time placing the “streetfighter” (to use an overworked adjective) in the more genteel literary landscape. But his love affair with the written word dates back to boyhood, when he grew up in the Englewood neighborhood, the fourth child of eight kids born to Arthur and Eileen Murphy, first-generation Americans.
It was a highly competitive family, with an immigrant’s zeal to succeed and education was one way of achieving that. (His three younger brothers, Michael — presiding judge of the Circuit Court’s County Division — Jack and Tom also became lawyers.) After grammar school, he attended a Carmelite Seminary in Massachusetts, where he discovered the sports department of the school newspaper — along with the fact that he wasn’t cut out to be a priest.
After graduation from Loyola University, Murphy attended law school at Northwestern University. As a newly minted lawyer, he went to work in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, where he gained a reputation as a tireless worker with a crackling intellect. Within three months of passing the bar, he was trying criminal felony cases at 26th and California — the top tier of the State’s Attorney’s office — but instead of capitalizing on his rapid rise, he opted out after a year. Weary of sending waves of young black men to prison, he yearned to change his time and place. “I don’t want to use the word burnout, but I asked myself, `Is this really what I want my career to be about?'”
In 1966, fueled by the idealism of John F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he joined the Peace Corps, drawing an 18-month assignment in Somalia. “Here I was this white, Irish, Catholic city kid dropped into black Muslim society, where I was the minority. . . . It changes the way you look at everything. I don’t think I helped anyone, but I came away with a better understanding of myself and the world,” said Murphy.
When he returned to Chicago, he joined the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, which included traveling to some 33 states setting up public defender programs and clinical programs at law schools. That was followed by a two-year stint with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, where he opened an office on the West Side and started representing children. That became the basis for his first non-fiction book, “Our Kindly Parent the State” (Viking, 1974). It was also during this tenure that he appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court — Stanley v. Illinois — notching a victory for fathers’ rights. Gov. James Thompson appointed him to his current post in 1978, where he has been toiling away ever since.
It was about this time that he started dabbling in fiction. In 1980, he even attended the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont — which has attracted such luminaries as Truman Capote and John Irving — as a way of honing his skills, but he was underwhelmed by the experience. “I don’t think other people can tell you how to write. You can only learn by writing and reading.” The fiction was temporarily shelved for essays (many of which have appeared in this newspaper) and legal writing, which he considers more instructive than any composition class.
“When you’re writing a brief, you learn to be concise and to the point,” he explained. “What you’re really doing is writing a plot.” Along the way, he also burnished his resume with another non-fiction work, “Wasted: The Plight of America’s Unwanted Children” (Ivan Dee, 1997).
But the novel kept popping up in his head. On March, 16, 1992 — his 53rd birthday — the time had come.
“I reached the point where I either had to write at least a page of the novel every day . . . or just stop pretending.”
Murphy rises at 5:30 a.m. — a habit cultivated when his two sons were young, so he could get an early start at work and be home in time for dinner. He’ll log an hour or so, writing longhand on the back porch of his Riverside home, with few crutches other than soft classical music and strong coffee. Or he’d grab a slice of time while his sons — now 15 and 18 — were at football practice or cooling his heels in the doctor’s office. He’d finish up a few more pages in the evening, while his boys did homework.
“I can focus well, so I can write almost anywhere.” When the juices are flowing, he can turn out 20 pages a day; other days, it’s like opening a vein. After completing a few chapters, he’ll dictate the story into a tape recorder (“It’s the best way to tell what works conversationally and what doesn’t”), which is then transcribed by an assistant.
An almost nonexistent social life also helps free up spare time. On most Saturday nights, you’ll find him at home, cooking dinner (he swaps Italian recipes with his secretary) and watching a movie (he hails the VCR as “one of the greatest inventions of all time”) or reading. His literary tastes tilt to the esoteric: Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Herman Hesse, Graham Greene and Roddy Doyle, especially “A Star Called Henry” which he described as “the closest prose comes to being poetry. I read that and I thought, Why bother? And then I tell myself that it’s OK, … not every basketball player is Michael Jordan, either.”
He gave up one of the few luxuries — a summer home in New Buffalo, Mich. — a few years ago, when the kids’ weekend activities took precedence. “But, really, you just work so hard all week, that you just want to stay home.”
For someone who has a reputation as being lethally efficient, though, the novel was something quite different. “There are no short cuts,” said Murphy, who completed 20 drafts before he was satisfied. “A lot of it was junk, . . . it deserved to be rejected.”
The gender switch did raise some eyebrows when he shopped the manuscript to publishers, as supported by a fistful of rejection letters, which he is secure enough to pull from his briefcase. One agent fumed that Murphy had no “right” to write as a woman. Another assumed that he really was a female using a male pseudonym.
But it was a non-issue to Peter Cooper, president of the Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-based publisher, who green-lighted the project, based on two strengths.
“First, it was a highly-readable story and second, you get the sense that he really knows these people, even though he made them up. He shows us these issues that he cares about — child abuse, foster homes, the system . . . but they’re part of the story, . . . he’s never preachy.”
The fact that Murphy’s name is well-known helped, said Cooper, but by no means sealed the deal. “I’ve turned down some lousy manuscripts from really famous people,” whom he declined to name. “You still need a good story.”
Although he’s approaching retirement age, he has no plans to pack it in. “With two kids going to college, I’m going to be working for a long time.”
Last year, there was a flurry of speculation that he would pursue a judgeship. But observers speculate that he derailed any chances of getting official party backing last March with his handling of the Baby T case. (The foster father, Ed Burke, oversees the committee that slates candidates.)
Will he be on the ballot for the next primary in 2002? Said Murphy: “I never look more than 12 months ahead.”
As for his position as public guardian, he acknowledged that more than two decades in the office is a long time.
“But whenever I start thinking that it’s time to go, there’s a case that I’m excited about. Even after all this time, it’s still a kick to win in court.”
`DROWNING’ EXCERPT
The elevator, of course, is not working, and judging from the garbage piled up inside the cage, I suspect that it hasn’t seen an upper floor in years. I trudge up the stairs. Despite the bald fellow’s reservations, in such places white women are normally safe except from an occasional harassing remark, since everyone knows that you’re either a cop, social worker or crazy. Even so, I unholster my weapon and carry it under the light jacket that I hold.
The trip up the steps is uneventful except for the foulest stench this side of Hell. Castoff food, puke, piss and even [excrement] clog the steps and landings. But I only have to endure it for a few minutes. Brenda something-or-other, Howard’s girlfriend, has to endure it 24 hours a day; though when I encounter her I realize that won’t have to put up with it much longer — a few months, tops.
Brenda is a shade taller than I. Saucer-like, unfocused eyes overwhelm a gaunt face. Her scraggly hair can’t conceal open sores blistering on her head and face. Her arms and legs protrude from a short dress like sticks. Maybe she weighs 90 pounds. She slurs her words and hangs onto the door for support. “Come in, sweetie.”
A table, cot and chair furnish the seven-by-nine airless room, which reeks much like the stairwell. Crawling things, everywhere. “Sit down.”
“I’ll stand.”
“No problem,” she collapses on the cot. “Who are you?”
“A cop.”
“Oh, yeah, You told me that, didn’t you? Watchya want?”
“To talk about Howard.”
“Don’t know no Howard.”
“Howard Pore.”
She scratches her head slowly and rubs a scab from an old track mark on her arm. “Whatchya say his name be?”
“Howard Pore.”
“Howard, yeah, Howard. I think I know that boy. Say, you got any money?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe I know no Howard.”
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To the lockup. A couple of days in County will clear your head,” I say — though actually, in her condition, withdrawal would kill her.
———-
From “Drowning in Hot Water” by Patrick Murphy. Reprinted with permission from Vivisphere Publishing.
