PHILLIP MARGOLIN

If asked to account for his career(s) in crime, Phillip Margolin would probably offer evidence that it was inevitable. “I have been a voracious reader starting in elementary school and I tore through Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels and the Ellery Queen mysteries,” he says. “By the seventh grade, I had decided that the only thing I wanted to do was try murder cases.”

- John B. Valeri

Margolin—the New York Times bestselling author of 23 novels, including his latest A Reasonable Doubt—would go on to do that for a quarter century. But first, he studied Government at the American University in Washington, DC, served in the Peace Corps in Liberia, West Africa, and attended New York University of Law; he spent his last two years as a law student simultaneously teaching junior high school in the South Bronx—a neighborhood with one of the highest crime rates in New York City at the time.

“One year, the school took the biggest troublemakers from each seventh-grade class and put them in one class. I had them for English,” Margolin remembers. “I brought in books like Conan the Barbarian, Nancy Drew, and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer that I read in school and told the kids that they could steal them, but should give them to the other kids if they liked them. We ended with the second-highest reading score in the school next to the honors class.”

He continues, “I also had the kids act out plays so they could jump around and yell while reading, and I had them write a lot. Seventh graders don’t want to read Silas Marner. Give them trashy novels that their parents would not want them to read.”

Following his stint as an educator and graduation from law school, Margolin did a clerkship with the chief judge of the Oregon Court of Appeals, Herbert M. Schwab, before going into private practice with a specialization in criminal defense at both the trial and appellate levels. He tried 30 homicide cases, several in which the death penalty was invoked, and was the first attorney in Oregon to use battered woman syndrome as a defense.