I had a good experience last week at the Willamette Writers meeting in Newport. The guest speaker was Philip Margolin, a best-selling author who has written 30 books. He writes “legal thrillers’ not to be confused with mysteries. He said when he started out, the term legal thrillers did not really exist. If you had a lawyer taking on a murder case, the story was usually classified as a murder mystery. Authors like John Grisham (and himself) turned legal thrillers into its own genre. Two of his stories have made it on screen, The Last Innocent Man , and Gone but not Forgotten. He graduated with his law degree from NYU Law School. He said that he already had a job lined up when he graduated, that being, a law clerk for a justice on the Oregon Court of Appeals. When I heard that, my ears perked up and I went, “I wonder . . .” The rest of his presentation was interesting. He went into private practice. He loved Perry Mason when he was growing up, but he said Perry Mason’s clients...