Robert Rotenberg has written four legal thrillers set in Toronto, that old industrial city on the shores of Lake Ontario. He's a criminal lawyer — all his books are centered on trials — and he loves his city so much that he makes multicultural Toronto a character in his books. His first release, Old City Hall, is even named after a Toronto landmark: a beautiful stone building that is now used as a courthouse.
Real Courtrooms, Real Courtesy
In that first novel, a trial takes place in Old City Hall's ornate Courtroom 121. "It's a bit of an intimidating room when you're first here as a lawyer, especially as a young lawyer, because it's so big and the judge seems to be so high up," Rotenberg says. "In fact, what I often do is I bring my clients in here on another day to have them look at the space, because sometimes they'll just get overwhelmed by it."
Inside Old City Hall, court clerk Kevin Barnes unlocks the courtroom for Rotenberg. Barnes is a well-known court character, partly because he wears white running sneakers and also because he must memorize everything he says in court. He's severely dyslexic and can barely read — but he did read Rotenberg's first Toronto novel.
"I kept on giving Mr. Rotenberg updates when I read the Old City Hall," Barnes says. "From the time that I picked up the book to the time that I finished it, it took me roughly eight and a half months."
Rotenberg has appeared in Toronto's courts many times, and he takes great pains in his books to portray the relatively calm atmosphere of Canadian courts, where high court lawyers wear robes and tabbed collars and always refer to their opponents as "my friend" or "my learned friend."
"There are no gavels in Canadian courts," Rotenberg explains. "There's a certain decorum that's expected. Lawyers call each other friends — even if they're horribly combative, they still say, 'Well, my friend says, my friend says this.' We bow before we come into court, and we bow when we leave. And I think it's a really good thing, because you're dealing with these horrible things; you're dealing with murders and rapes and real huge human tragedies."
Life Meets Literature
Rotenberg keeps a tiny office at a downtown law firm. He still practices a bit, and the office represents his transition from lawyer to author. "This is kind of my life," he says. "This drawer, these are all my client files, there are all the cases I do — and in this drawer, this is all my writing stuff."
Some of Rotenberg's writing ideas are mined from his own life. One of his main characters, homicide detective Ari Greene, has an elderly father who is a Holocaust survivor — like the grandparents of some of Rotenberg's childhood playmates. Rotenberg also sends the detective to Gryfe's Bagel Bakery in the old Jewish neighborhood where the author grew up. It's a real bakery, now run by Moise Gryfe, a son of the family that started the business.
Inside the bakery, Gryfe realizes Rotenberg is the author of Old City Hall. "It talks about my mother in there," he says. Rotenberg tries to launch into a memory, but Gryfe interrupts him: "She used to give half the store away."
Over the years, this neighborhood has changed; it's not what it was when Rotenberg was growing up. "It used to be Jewish and Italian, and now it's Filipino and Orthodox Jews," Gryfe says.
Rotenburg fishes a copy of Old City Hall out of his backpack to show Gryfe, pointing him toward the description of the bakery:
"Gryfe's was a simple storefront, and the lineup of men stretched back on to the corner. Most of them were bent over, tapping at their BlackBerrys, talking to their wives on their cell phones, or reading portions of the sports pages, which blared headlines about the Leafs' victory." Benjamin has made an art of being in the right place at the right time for maximum media attention. That often means getting in line early to get the perfect seat at a congressional hearing. "And if that means we've gotta sleep out the night before, we do it," she says. "And if it means we've got to be there at 6 in the morning before the doors open at 7, we do it." She says her days typically start before dawn and last until late at night, all in the service of getting her message out — about Syria or drones or Guantanamo. Perhaps her highest profile disruption was in May, as President Obama spoke at the National Defense University. "Can you take the drones out of the hands of the CIA?" she yelled, breaking into the president's speech. "Can you stop the signature strikes that are killing people on the basis of suspicious activities?" Remarkably, Benjamin was able to interrupt the president more than once, ultimately prompting a response. "The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to," Obama told the audience. "I was very afraid when I did that" Even though she has sneaked into countless speeches, fundraisers or other events where she wasn't welcome, Benjamin still finds the situations scary. "I was very afraid when I did that" at the National Defense University, Benjamin says. "It's still a terrifying thing to be in a room full of people who are not going to like what you do. It's terrifying to see these big security people who you know are going to be picking you up and hauling you off, and you're thinking, 'Uh-oh, am I going to get hurt?' And then you wonder if it's the right thing to do." Michael Heaney, political science professor at the University of Michigan, says by now, people ought to recognize her. "I don't know how she gets away with it. I really have no idea," he says. "I don't know why she isn't banned from every place in Washington, D.C., but she still — she knows how to get in." "Sometimes I feel I'm invisible," Benjamin says. "Maybe it's for being this middle-aged, small, white woman, I get to kind of slip and slide through places. But I'm amazed myself." Benjamin is an unthreatening 61 years old, with blonde hair and bangs. And she always wears pink. Her group started after Sept. 11, when the George W. Bush administration released its color coded alert system. "Remember, it was a yellow, orange, red, and we felt that it was trying to keep people in this state of fear that would justify more violence," she says. "And we thought, 'Uh oh, we need another color-coded alert. How about code pink?'" At the time she didn't even like the color pink, and didn't have a single pink thing in her wardrobe. Now it is everywhere, from her kitchen cabinets to her earrings. With her daughter long out of the nest, Code Pink is Benjamin's life. After Obama was elected, the anti-war movement as a whole — and Code Pink along with it — struggled for relevance. Code Pink shrank from 300,000 members at its peak to about 150,000 now. Richard Grenell is what might might be described as a friendly rival. As spokesman for the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations throughout the Bush administration, Grenell encountered Benjamin often. "I disagree with Medea probably 99 percent of the time," he says. "In and around Washington, D.C., I think reporters and political folks are bored and annoyed with Code Pink — and Medea." For Benjamin, that's a challenge to come up with new, more creative ways to force people to pay attention. "Let's face it, she's gotten into a number of high-level speeches and hidden her pink shirt and her signs very well," Grenell says. "She really is someone who knows how to work the system." "There were flies everywhere. Garbage bags seeping and oozing. Human waste all over the floors; the scene was horrific," Thornton says. "You probably couldn't create a movie set that looked as bad as it did that day." But the hardest part, Thornton says, came after a helicopter finally took him out. From the sky, he could see the full scope of the damage. He says he remembers thinking the Superdome's fate was in question. "For me that was the low point," he says, "and I don't mind telling you that I wept all the way to Baton Rouge by helicopter that day." Instead of giving up, however, officials allotted more than $330 million to renovate the damaged structure. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu — who was lieutenant governor at the time — says there was no other option. "That building is an iconic symbol for the people of New Orleans and will always reflect our willingness to get back off our knees and move forward," Landrieu says. Of course, winning helped too. In the dome's re-opener in 2006, the New Orleans Saints faced their archrival, the Atlanta Falcons. The Falcons were supposed to win, but on the fourth snap of the game, the Saints blocked a Falcons punt that sparked New Orleans to victory. "I distinctly remember hearing people in the press box slam their hands down on the press box counter, and that never happens," says Times-Picayune sports columnist Jeff Duncan, who was at the game. "We're not supposed to cheer in the press box, but people couldn't help themselves." Since then, the Saints have enjoyed historic success, even winning their first Super Bowl three years ago — a game that Saints superfan Lionel Alphonso still can't discuss without getting emotional. "You're sitting there and they win, and everyone starts crying. It was amazing," Alphonso says. "You never thought you would see adults crying, but it happened." These days, Alphonso is just happy the city is hosting the big game once more. He'll be watching the Super Bowl of course, but Alphonso doesn't care so much about the outcome. As far as he's concerned, New Orleans wins either way. It's axiomatic now that comics have gone from being kids' stuff to, in some cases, adults only. These days, comics are recognized as a real artistic form, one that can be complex, subtle, pointed, probing and profane. One of the artists most responsible for this is Art Spiegelman, who drew for Topps Bubble Gum comics, invented the Garbage Pail Kids, created a character who was all head, no body, for Playboy and won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, his Holocaust comic — a phrase that was once unfathomable. Spiegelman has edited magazines and has drawn famous covers for The New Yorker. "As an art form, the comic strip is barely past its infancy," he once wrote. So am I. Maybe we'll grow up together." A new restrospective of his work has been published by Drawn and Quarterly. It's called Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, and Spiegelman tells NPR's Scott Simon that he started copying comics when he was a little kid. "If you copy enough of them ... you learn the vocabulary that way," he says. "So I was doing that, and by the time, I don't know, I was in third grade — so what's that, 11? — it was clear to me I was going to be a comics artist." Interview Highlights On his issues with depth perception It's served me well — not in baseball, but in drawing comics, because comics seem very real that way. ... I don't really see stereo, so it's not good for getting in and out of cars, but when I draw something, it looks real. On his changing interests over the years
That passage references one bit of ersatz Toronto lore in Old City Hall. The Maple Leafs did not win the Stanley Cup that year — they last won it in 1967.
"I can actually remember the moment I thought of the idea, and I burst out laughing — I was all by myself," Rotenberg says. "And I just thought, you know what, it's my book. You know, they're never gonna win the Stanley Cup in my lifetime, so I at least might as well let them win in my book."
Location, Location, Location
Rotenberg suggests a trip to Ward's Island, where one of his characters lives. It's a beautiful wooded part of the Toronto Islands, about a 20-minute ferry ride into Toronto's Inner Harbour.
"When I think of a character, almost the very first thing I think of, [is] where do they live?" Rotenberg says. "Knowing where they live really tells me a great deal about who they are, and if I don't know where they live I can't write about them."
In the first book, policeman Daniel Kennicott visits prosecutor Jo Summers at her home in the Toronto Islands. To research that scene, Rotenberg walked around the summer cottages on Ward's Island until he found one that fit his plot.
Standing in front of that stranger's cottage — he has no idea who actually lives there — he says, "This is the house that I chose for Jo. I wanted her to live near enough to the ferry so in the climactic scene when Daniel has to run he can hear the horn of the ferry boat and rush out there."
Rotenberg's attention to accuracy is impressive, especially for a book that is, after all, fictional. "Maybe it's the criminal lawyer in me, but it's all details," Rotenberg says. "I actually ran from here to the ferry boat to make sure that the number of minutes I said it took him was the exact same number."
Paring Down The Character List
Rotenberg has assembled an unusually large and almost Dickensian band of lawyers, police and journalists who circulate around the courts. "I don't think it was a conscious decision to have all these characters," he explains. "It's just how it felt to me — that just to tell the story, I just needed all these different points of view."
"People always say, 'Who's the main character?' And although Detective Ari Greene is kind of the central character, he's not really the main character," Rotenberg says. "He's kind of like the moral center and everyone kind of circles around him."
In his fourth book, Rotenberg may be thinning the herd: Without spoiling the story, let's just say that some of those characters are edited out ... permanently. "Well, they are murder mysteries," he says, laughing.
And there are more on the way. Rotenberg has written four novels so far; he says he plans to write 20 legal thrillers set in Toronto, one each year.
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