At first glance, those who know John Rhea as a former criminal defense attorney may be surprised to learn that he's published a novel. In reality, his book Lifer -- which came out June 10 with Redhawk Publications -- has been a long time coming.
Lifer follows Jack Merritt, a talented South Carolina trial lawyer who finds himself serving life in prison for a brutal killing. Rhea works backward, unraveling the story of Jack's life, crime and trial with the unique insight gleaned from his own decadeslong career in law.
A native of Rock Hill, S.C., Rhea grew up fascinated by literature, music and art. He read voraciously, with everything from Albert Camus to Joan Didion to Walker Percy leaving its mark, along with the art books that his mother often left around the house and a rapidly growing record collection. As a teenager, he was divided between two dreams: becoming a writer and a lawyer.
After college, his literary ambitions took precedence, and Rhea lived a bohemian existence in New York and New Orleans while writing a novel in his early 20s. "I was idealistic and full of self-confidence," he says. "But it was not my time as a writer. Thankfully, that noble failure of a book has been destroyed."
Instead, he decided to attend Tulane University for law school, becoming a defense attorney -- and eventual law partner -- in his hometown and marrying painter May Rhea. Yet all of these experiences, from his law career to his love of art, music and books, would find a home in Lifer. "I wrote that book because I had to," he says. "It came from the heart and the gut."
After Rhea retired from his law practice, he and May relocated to the Asheville area, which they had loved visiting over the years. He returned to writing, yet struggled to move a story forward. One evening, the broad strokes of Lifer appeared in vivid detail.
"It really did come to me in a flash late at night," he recalls. Immediately, he knew that his protagonist would be a former criminal defense attorney like himself, imprisoned for life.
After years of work alongside his editor, Tom Rash, Rhea's novel was complete, telling the story of a South Carolina lawyer, Jack, who becomes embroiled in a crime out of fierce loyalty to his cousin Gil. He celebrated its publication with an author event at Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe on June 18 and will continue to promote the book with events around the region.
Lifer is far from an autobiography -- yet the adage that "you write what you know" proves true in several of its key themes and storylines. Rhea's legal expertise and experiences with thousands of criminal defendants deeply informed his prose. During his many years as a trial lawyer, he would write down memorable turns of phrase he heard in courthouses, local jails and state prisons, recording them in a journal.
Rhea knew that the prison scenes were key to making the book work -- he needed to evoke its hopeless, oppressive and claustrophobic atmosphere, a harsh emotional contrast to Jack's comfortable, white-collar life before his conviction.
"If the prison scene didn't work, nothing was really going to work -- everything stemmed from that," he says. "The prison scenes came very quickly, because I know these guys." Rhea was able to construct realistic, gritty dialogue, drawing upon that journal to give many of its most colorful lines to his favorite character, the wisecracking prisoner Panic.
But how does an upstanding citizen like Lifer's Jack, an attorney himself with no criminal record, end up committing a violent crime in the first place? To make this storyline believable, Rhea drew upon his observations of human nature as a criminal lawyer.
"You have someone who's done something that's uncharacteristic of them and really unthinkable in some ways, that someone of Jack's education and knowledge would do something like he did," he says. "But it's not just one factor. It's a confluence of factors. And I saw that in real life with some cases I handled."
A larger point that he wants to make with Lifer is that any of us could commit a crime, given just the wrong mix of external and internal factors. "You should never generalize about inmates, for any number of circumstances can cause a person to commit uncharacteristic, even unthinkable, acts," Rhea says. "Someone's life can go terribly wrong in an instant. We are, all of us, just a couple of bad decisions away from ruining our lives and the lives of those we love."
In the case of the protagonist Jack, factors such as a struggling marriage, mental health issues and family loyalty build up to the climactic crime. As a defense attorney, Rhea saw firsthand how these could lead to criminal activity and later become mitigating factors he used in trial to explain his clients' behavior. "These sort of complex nuances are part of my lawyer DNA," he says.
In the case of family or friend influence, he was especially conscious of how close personal ties can lead people astray. "I did want it to be a cautionary tale," Rhea says, "because every family has certain power dynamics." For Jack, this was his cousin Gil, with whom he shares both deep loyalty and jealous rivalry.
"There's a little bit of Jack in Gil, and there's a little bit of Gil in Jack. They both understand each other very well," the author explains. "I wanted to take it to extremes with both of them."
Inspiration also came from many unexpected places. After all, "So much of influence is subconscious," Rhea says. "So much of writing is theft of experience." Jack's eclectic music taste and love of literature come from Rhea himself, while character details like his artistic spouse and idyllic family farm harken back to Rhea's wife, May, and her grandmother, a talented poet and painter.
Beyond the clear lines of influence accrued over the years as a defense attorney, Rhea recognizes the many overlaps between the legal profession and writing. Fundamentally, both come down to storytelling: taking the complex, even contradictory realities of a full life and transforming them into a coherent narrative. "I did some of my best writing," Rhea remembers, "writing and rewriting what I'm going to say in the closing argument in a big trial.