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Frank Southers is a retired attorney who writes fiction from stories from his career. (Courtesy photo)
Once a Texas trial lawyer who served on the San Antonio Grievance Committee for 10 years, who tried at least 50 jury trials, and who facilitated a whole lot of mediation decides to retire, you can bet he has some stories to tell.
Actually, by the time Frank Southers and his wife, Linda Southers, Ph.D., retired to Carmel with their two dogs in 2016, he had already penned and published a five-book series of “Grievance Committee” novels.
The series was launched by writing book one of the same name. Once Southers began to unearth just how much he’d experienced, remembered, and had to say about it, he realized it couldn’t be covered within one binding.
It all started in 1979 when Southers, in addition to his law career, was serving as an adjunct professor at his alma mater St. Mary’s University School of Law in Texas. Recognizing that trial lawyers tell stories every day, he understood why other professors were teaching from case studies rather than textbooks. Still, he thought there should be one. So, he and a colleague set about developing a text on grievances, an achievement that landed him on the Grievance Committee. And gave him an idea for a novel.
“Lawyers don’t like the topic of ethics,” Southers said. “In ethics classes, they get up to take a break and don’t come back. I realized, if I introduced a little sex into the story, I’d have an audience. And since, in Texas, lawyers are not prohibited from having sex with their clients, like they are in California, I had myself the basis for a story.”
In “The Grievance Committee—Book One” (2012), Southers hooks the reader in the first paragraph by getting right into the heart of the matter. The protagonist climbs aboard the city bus to head downtown for a grievance committee meeting. The topic up for debate is what she considers a sexual-harassment case against her court-appointed lawyer. She’s feeling pretty anxious and pretty sure the other attorneys will recognize that what he did was not against the law.
Continuing to mine his experiences on the Grievance Committee, Southers went on to write, “A Serious Mistake,” “To Get Even,” “Lawyer Magic,” and “Senator White,” which completed his series, each installment published less than a year apart.
“Each time I finished a novel,” said Southers, “I found myself searching for my next one. By the time I’d completed the series, it had become a habit. I almost have to do it, have to build fictional stories off of what really went down.”
A shift in the script
By 2018, Frank Southers had abandoned his “Grievances” series to publish, “Escape From Apartheid,” a historical novel that took him two years to write. Once again, the book is based on his own experiences, influenced by the injustice of others. Southers, who traveled as an educational leader on a junket to South Africa, understood, if he planned to lecture people he didn’t know about the intricacies of politics law in a country that wasn’t his, he’d better become a scholar of it.
“I kept my notes from the trip,” he said. “As I went through them later, I couldn’t help but think of the children and how they were affected by Apartheid, a startling parallel to Trump’s border patrol between the United States and Mexico, which separated children from their parents. I did a lot of reading before I wrote this book.”
After he published the book, Southers sent it to Oprah Winfrey. He didn’t get a response, but he likes to think she may have read it.
Southers’ favorite novel, the one that means the most, the one that hit home, that he considers his best work is, “The Home.” Published in 2019, after he moved to Carmel, the story portrays a single father, now dying, who raised his son on his own until he sequestered him in an “orphan’s home” to hide him from his wayward mother and the company she kept.
“The Home is a coming-of-age story, a tear-jerker,” said Southers, “partially because of the sensitive storyline, and partially because I know some of this story all too well. This is the kind of empathic writing that creates a hybrid of memoir-meets-fiction.”
Southers’ next effort became a two-volume anthology simply because, once again, he had too many stories to share. Anything more than some 30 stories per book, he realized, would have turned them into a tome. So, he divided them into two books. “Lawyer Short Stories” and “More Lawyer Short Stories” continue the collection of a Texas trial lawyer’s experiences, all chosen to entertain, educate, and stimulate intellectual curiosity.
“In all of my books,” said Southers, “my purpose and my goal have been threefold: to entertain my readers, to educate them about each topic I explore, and to stimulate intellect and emotion by taking them into a different venue.”
In Frank Southers’ newest publication, but by no means his last, “Persons of Interest” (April 2023), he brings forensic pathology into his “whodunnit.”
“At least three persons of interest hate Grace so much, they are tickled pink she’s dead, “ said Southers, “shot in the back by the rifle her live-in boyfriend kept under the bed. He claims suicide. But everyone knows you can’t shoot yourself in the back with a rifle.”
Once again, Southers grabs his reader with access to one side of a dialogue between a dispatcher in the county sheriff’s office and, it seems, Grace’s boyfriend. The only thing that seems certain, is that Grace is dead.
As we might imagine, Frank Southers, who has engaged local readers through various live book readings and signings, most recently at River House Books in The Carmel Crossroads in July, is already well into writing his next book. This one is about a boy and his dog. And we get to hear from both.
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