Michael Kahn extracts solemn legal principles from the exploits of hip-hop artists, comic-book creators, Oprah and the Energizer bunny. Then he takes all that gravitas, all that skilled rhetoric about honor, property, justice and atonement, and turns it into witty murder mysteries.
He’s written eight so far, all set in St. Louis—but his latest, The Mourning Sexton, is a bit of a departure. Written under the pseudonym Michael Baron so as not to confuse fans of his Rachel Gold series, the novel is grittier and more complex than its predecessors, and it reaches deeper.
“Part of it is, you are older, and you have undergone things,” Kahn says with a shrug. “You see tragedies. When you are young, you think you are immortal and everyone around you is immortal.”
The Mourning Sexton explores failure, guilt, grief and redemption without losing the ease of the earlier books, their banter and warmth. “A sense of humor is still crucial,” Kahn says, “but there’s a certain resonance I find lately in the Book of Job. I keep rereading it. Bad things happen for no reason. It might be why people read books: to make sense out of what can otherwise seem senseless.”
He’s read his whole life—his favorite writer is Jane Austen—and he started writing before law school, back when he was teaching elementary school in Chicago. “I did a bunch of strange articles for Chicago magazine,” he says, “rode the El train from midnight to dawn, wrote
about what happened to all the dead dogs and cats ...”
He applied to law school on a lark because, he says, “If you grow up with a big mouth, people are always saying, ‘Oh, you should become a lawyer.’” He chose only a few schools and was stunned when he was accepted by Harvard: “I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I should go.’”
Kahn wrote his first book while working as a young trial lawyer. “My wife dared me because she got tired of hearing me say, ‘I could write a better book than that,’” he says. Then he pauses. “That’s the glib answer. I don’t know why I did it.”
He does remember choosing the mystery genre because he thought it would be easy. He set his first book in a big St. Louis law firm because he was working in one—working so hard that he had no time to research a more exotic setting.
The publisher requested the next two books in the series. (“Series?” Kahn blurted, then recovered. Ah, yes, the Gold series.) As he began to write regularly, he realized that he was doing exactly what he did as a trial lawyer: using a cast of characters to tell a compelling story to an audience. “The big difference is that, in fiction, you can control what happens,” he says. “It’s very hard to find closure in litigation. There’s no such thing as a pure victory.”
The hero of The Mourning Sexton is a high-powered lawyer whose life spiraled out of control when he started using cocaine. As the book opens, he’s out of prison, trying to regain his dignity and rebuild his career, but he gets caught up in a quixotic, dangerous quest for justice—something Kahn doesn’t have the luxury of thinking about in his trial work.
“It’s not a lawyer’s job to think about justice,” he says, his voice charged with an unidentifiable emotion. “Authors worry about justice. Judges worry about justice. We’re the gladiators: They put us into the ring, and we’re supposed to fight for our client. It can distort things; you’re in this schizophrenic world where you may be sympathetic to the other side, but, if you act on that, your client will fire you—and should fire you.”
At Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin, Kahn focuses on intellectual property, “which is this fancy term that didn’t even exist when I was in law school,” he says. “The big case on fair use was whether you could tape a TV show on your VCR, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court.” Today’s questions range from sampling and manipulation of images to trademarking of domain names and meta-tags, and when Kahn teaches entertainment law at Washington University Law School, he reminds his students that they will be arguing over technologies that don’t even exist yet.
In intellectual property, he’s troubled by the ease of theft in the cyberworld, but he’s equally troubled by what he sees as a trend toward clamping down on ownership until there’s little public access or common cultural property left. Film crews can’t even shoot footage that shows a painting on the wall without getting permission, he points out. “The reason you don’t hear ‘Happy Birthday’ sung at more restaurants is that the song is still covered by copyright—and every time Mickey Mouse is about to go into the public domain, Disney gets the copyright extended.”
Kahn represented the National Basketball Association in a fight over the Dream Team trademark; he defended Oprah Winfrey in a libel case; he’s fought for $100 million judgments. “But the really fun cases are the ones nobody ever hears about,” he says. “I had a case for our maid: The automaker shall remain nameless, but they were trying to deny her warranty claim. I really had fun with that one. That was a case with complete closure.”
In court, human nature presents itself to Kahn on a silver platter. Then he goes home to make private sense of it. “Even after all I’ve been through, I think people are basically good,” he says, sounding surprised, “but I do think there are evil people. I’ve seen evil. If you are a lawyer, you get to see evil.”
