Judge’s Career Takes Novel Turn

For retired Virginia Circuit Court Judge Martin Clark ’84, the law was a fallback career, a parent-pleasing choice he made after he found nobody wanted to hire him to teach creative writing.

Clark now has six published thrillers — including his latest bestseller, “The Plinko Bounce” — but his journey from law school to published author involved nearly 20 years of writing, the help of heaven and several other well-placed mentors, and dozens of brushes with cases that got his imagination flowing. He even committed his own petty crime in the process.

Though law wasn’t his first choice, it served as the foundation and fodder for his highly successful writing career.

“My dad was a lawyer and he was anxious for me to become a lawyer,” Clark said. “I thought a J.D. was a universal degree, but when I realized that you needed a Ph.D. or a published novel to teach creative writing, I came back to Patrick County and set up [a criminal defense] shop with my dad, doing everything from speeding tickets to capital murder.”

He had been working on a novel manuscript since his undergraduate days at Davidson College and was loathe to put it down. While at Davidson, he entered and won a writing competition judged by literary journalist Tom Wolfe, who was already famous for his book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” The author, a native Virginian, took a liking to Clark, reviewed his manuscript and encouraged him to keep working on it, a story about a hard-drinking, pot-smoking judge who ultimately goes corrupt for no particular reason other than sheer boredom.

Clark’s Constitutional Law professor, A. E. Dick Howard ’61, let him continue working on the manuscript for academic credit and gave him feedback. And a law school classmate helped him track down a world-famous local novelist, Rita Mae Brown, in hopes that she might guide him through the process of landing a book deal.

After significant detective work, they located her farm in horse country and hatched a fully baked plan to stuff his half-baked manuscript and a bottle of liquor in her mailbox.

“We went to Barracks Road Shopping Center and bought ski masks, and we obscured the license plate on my pal’s Jeep because we were worried about mailbox tampering,” Clark recalled. “It’s a federal crime, you know? And we were worried the mailbox police would leap out from behind the hedge row and slap us in irons.”

Brown was kind enough to read the manuscript and return it — postage paid — with a note about structure and a final comment: “As to mixing law and literature, it occurs to me you’ll either be a half-ass writer or a half-ass lawyer.”

Fortunately for Clark, he ended up doing neither halfway.

He focused primarily on his law practice until, at age 32, he was appointed to an open judgeship in the local juvenile and domestic relations court. Three years later, he was promoted to the circuit court bench.

He kept at the manuscript through those years, writing for about an hour each morning.

The characters and cases that came through his courts stoked his imagination, from the elderly judge who hadn’t picked up a book in two decades, to a garden-appliance thief who beat his charges because of a blown Miranda warning. And Wolfe — now the Tom Wolfe behind “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and numerous other bestsellers — continued to encourage him and cart his manuscript around New York literary offices.

“My biggest problem was I was lazy, and I never finished the manuscript,” Clark said. “So when I was about 37 or 38, I decided to dedicate myself to it, give it my best effort, get an agent and do things the right way.”

He also made a desperate “deal with the heavens above,” as he put it. “I made this vow, like a small child, that if I could just get published, I would give all the money to the Presbyterian church.”

“The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living” was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2000.

Clark figured he would be on the hook to the church for about $5,000 because that’s what debut fiction novels usually net, he said. “Many Aspects,” however, was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2000, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a finalist for the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award.

As his mentors and agent had told him through the years, “You only need one person to make your book a success.” Once Dwight Garner, the New York Times’ book critic, read it and dubbed him “the thinking man’s John Grisham” in 2004, the pennies from heaven rained down.

Judge Clark reviewed his mental contract with the deity to determine whether his obligation included royalties from audiobooks, movie rights and e-books.

“But that is not a deal you want to cut the margins on,” Clark said with a laugh. “So every penny associated with ‘Many Aspects’ still goes to the church.”

The last time he checked, “Many Aspects” — the book that keeps on booking — had paid more than $100,000 to the church. And that was 20 years ago. In 2010 or so, he started a foundation to channel some of the earnings from other books toward the local community.

Clark went on to write four more books before retiring from the bench in 2019: “Plain Heathen Mischief,” “The Legal Limit,” “The Jezebel Remedy” and “The Substitution Order.”

Those novels have appeared on numerous bestseller lists, and the audio version of “The Substitution Order” was a No. 1 national bestseller. Some have also been chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year, a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Library of Virginia’s People’s Choice Award in 2009, 2016 and 2020.

Clark received the Patrick County Outstanding Community Service Award in 2016 and the Virginia State Bar’s Harry L. Carrico Professionalism Award in 2018. The latter is an ironic honor, as former Chief Justice of Virginia Carrico was extremely displeased with the portrayal of the dissolute judge in “Many Aspects.” Ultimately, the two became good friends and Clark was invited to speak at Carrico’s retirement celebration.

Clark’s latest novel, “The Plinko Bounce,” was released in September, and named a New York Times Best Thriller of 2023 and a New York Times Editors’ Pick. The book is a tale about a public defender faced with a murder client who admits his guilt but has technicalities stacked in his favor. It’s based loosely on the garden-appliance thief he encountered in court.

Forty years after tampering with Rita Mae Brown’s rural mailbox, Clark and his wife, Deana, now live on a farm with dogs, cats, chickens and three donkeys.