Authors at Home: Joey Hartstone; “The Local”
We are pleased to feature Joey Hartstone and his debut novel, The Local, which Doubleday recently published. The Local is a riveting legal thriller about a patent lawyer whose life changes when his mentor is murdered and his newest patent client is the prime suspect. Read on to learn more about Joey Hartstone and The Local!
What are you currently reading, watching, listening to? Anything you wholly recommend as being inspiring, uplifting or just really fun?
I’ve had very little downtime in the past couple of months, so I have a growing queue of books and TV series to consume. The one show that my wife and I devoured was Couples Therapy on Showtime. I’m not exactly sure why watching partners fight and work through their relationships is so engrossing for us, but it is.
Can you take us through the day in the life of Joey Hartstone? What’s your day-to-day routine like — when you’re writing a book, and when you’re not?
When I was writing The Local, I would get up at 6 a.m., write until about noon, and then enjoy the rest of my day. Now, I have a one-year-old son and I am showrunning the second season of Your Honor, the Bryan Cranston series on Showtime. So I get up at 4 a.m., and I work until Teddy wakes up a few hours later. I spend a little bit of time with my family and then get back to work until our writers room commences at 10 a.m. We meet for five hours and then wrap. Then I usually have meetings or calls until about 5 p.m. I try very hard to make sure I get a couple hours with my family at night. Then, if I’m lucky, I relax with my wife for a little while before bed.
We also know you are a screenwriter and have written movies and worked on several television shows. What are you most passionate about and why? How does writing for television and the big screen differ from book writing (aside from book writing being solitary!)
I think one of the tricks of writing is being the most passionate about whatever you happen to be writing at the moment. If I don’t feel, at least for a little while, that the project I’m currently working on is my favorite project, that’s a really bad sign. That being said, the first movie I wrote, LBJ, will always have a special place in my heart. Similarly, The Local, will as well.
One of the biggest differences in writing a book versus writing a screenplay is that your words are the final product. In screenwriting, you rely on actors, directors, producers, set designers, location scouts, and about a hundred other people to bring your words to life and color in the details. Knowing that the pages of the book are the entirety of the experience for the audience made the words more important to me.
If you weren’t writing books or writing for the screen, what job would you most want to be doing? Can’t say lawyer!
If I had to do something else other than be a writer (and since you won’t let me say lawyer), I’d be very happy teaching, though that wouldn’t remove me from the broader field of screenwriting. I would like to be a pilot. My brother-in-law flies a corporate jet for executives and every time he posts a photo of his plane or his view out of the cockpit, I get a tiny bit jealous.
What kind of research went into writing The Local?
I did a lot of reading and learning about intellectual property law. But more importantly, I traveled to Marshall, Texas, met with people there, took in the feel of the community, and tried to understand the setting of my book.
If your book could be turned into a television show or movie, who would you want to star in it? Would you want to be fully involved in the process or would you have someone else direct and write the screenplay?
As a screenwriter, I try very hard not to envision an actor in my main role because you almost never end up casting that person, and you don’t want to be disappointed by or unprepared for the star of your project. I do like to envision people in supporting roles, though they’re not always actors. For example, in The Local, my investigator is a small, athletic woman nicknamed “The Leg,” and I always pictured Megan Rapinoe as that character because she’s such a badass.
I do hope that The Local will be adapted into a TV series one day, and it would be my intention to write it with a small writers room. I would definitely want to showrun that series, but I have no interest in directing. It’s not something I’ve studied, nor is it something I expect I’d be very good at. I really enjoy turning a script over to a director and watching them apply their craft to transform it into something new.
What do you hope readers get from reading The Local? Is there one big particular message you hope to convey?
I hope that people love the characters. They’re often based on people I know and/or people I admire, so they mean a lot to me. It’s my hope to return to them for future installments of this story.
Book Summary:
In the town of Marshall sits the Federal courthouse of the Eastern District of Texas, a place revered by patent lawyers for its speedy jury trails and massive punitive payouts. Marshall is flooded with patent lawyers, all of whom find work being the local voice for the big-city legal teams that need to sway a small-town jury. One of the best is James Euchre.
Euchre’s new client is Amir Zawar, a firebrand CEO forced to defend his life’s work against a software patent infringement. Late one night, after a heated confrontation in a preliminary hearing, Judge Gardner is found murdered in the courthouse parking lot. All signs point to Zawar — he has motive, he has opportunity, and he has no alibi. Moreover, he is an outsider, a wealthy Pakistani-American businessman, the son of immigrants, who stands accused of killing a beloved hometown hero.
Zawar claims his innocence, and demands that Euchre defend him. It’s the last thing Euchre wants — Judge Gardner was his good friend and mentor — but the only way he can get definitive answers is to take the case. With the help of a former prosecutor and a local PI, Euchre must navigate the byzantine world of criminal defense law in a town where everyone knows everyone, and bad blood has a long history. The deeper he digs, the more he fears that he’ll either send an innocent man to death row or set a murderer free.
The Local is a small-town legal thriller as big in scope as Texas. It crackles with courtroom tension and high stakes gambits on every page to the final, shocking verdict.
About Joey Hartstone:
Joey Hartstone is a film and television writer. He has written two feature films, LBJ (2016) and Shock and Awe (2017), which were both directed by Rob Reiner. He wrote on the first two seasons of the legal drama The Good Fight. He is currently the showrunner and an executive producer on the Showtime series Your Honor. He is also the author of The Local, to be published by Doubleday on June 14, 2022. Joey lives in Los Angeles with his family.
Connect with Joey Hartstone:
Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
Read more Authors at Home:
Karen Winn: Our Little World
Erica Ferencik: Girl in Ice
Elle Marr: Strangers We Know
Lara Elena Donnelly: Base Notes
Yasmin Angoe: Her Name is Knight
Lynne Reeves: The Dangers of an Ordinary Night
Gabrielle St. George: How to Murder a Marriage
Cai Emmons: Sinking Islands
Emily Giffin: The Lies that Bind
Jeanette Escudero: The Apology Project
