Paul Coggins is the author of the new novel Chasing the Chameleon, the third in his series featuring his character Cash McCahill. Coggins is a criminal defense attorney in Dallas and a former U.S Attorney for the Northern District of Texas.
Q: What inspired you to write Chasing the Chameleon, the latest in your series featuring your character Cash McCahill?
A: In the prior Cash books (Sting Like a Butterfly and Eye of the Tigress), Cash crossed a cartel, which slapped a seven-figure bounty on his head.
To survive, he faced a choice of running until his legs and luck ran out or hiding in plain sight. He went with the latter, by surgically altering his face and stealing the identity of a dead cop. A threat to someone close to Cash forces him to shed his fake identity and return to his old life.
A key inspiration for the book is a movie called Seconds from the 1960s that has haunted me since I saw it as a kid. It was a box office bomb upon release but has become a cult classic. In the film, an over-the-hill banker undergoes a procedure and becomes a young, handsome artist portrayed by Rock Hudson.
In Chameleon, the opposite occurs, with easy-on-the-eyes Cash in his prime resurfacing as a much older cop.
Face/Off starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage is another inspiration.
Q: Do you think Cash has changed over the course of the series?
A: Cash is a risk-taker, who had better change if he plans to survive into his 50s. He grows within the confines of each book and over the course of the series. Orphaned at 8, Cash was raised by his now-deceased grandmother. He builds a surrogate family among the eccentrics, castoffs, and untouchables in his small firm.
Two years in a federal prison for jury tampering shook Cash to the core and lifted his law license for three years. The time served also deepened his commitment to fight for the underdog. He owes his life to his cellmate and protector behind bars and has vowed to give the lifer at least a shot at spending the last years of his life on the outside.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: Before embarking on a story, I prepare a detailed outline that falls apart in the first 10 to 20 pages. The advance planning part is the lawyer in me talking.
However, the outline is more of a security blanket than a structural tool. At most, the outline helps me think about scenes, characters, and the relationships among them.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: First, I hope the readers like Cash, warts and all, and decide they would want him in their corner if their freedom was on the line.
Second, I share with the reader my insights into our judicial, police, and prison systems, again warts and all. There is a caveat, of course. Justice gets done only when all players in the criminal justice world do their jobs. The courtroom is Cash’s true home and the one place where he stands up to Goliaths.
Finally, Cash’s small law firm is his family, complete with a curmudgeonly senior partner/surrogate father; a Latina Jill-of-all-trades, who may or may not be in the country legally; and a trans woman, who works as a paralegal in the firm while attending law school.
Families come in all sizes and shapes. Cash’s tight-knit crew, though small in number and far outside the corridors of power, fights way above its weight.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have completed a draft of the next Cash book: Canary in the Courthouse. Something is rotten in the courthouse, where a powerful law firm and its Fortune 100 client have two thumbs on the scales of justice. A federal judge fears for her life and calls on Cash to expose the corruption.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Why do so many lawyers try their hand at writing legal fiction? Trying cases by day and writing novels at night offers balance. One pursuit is public and performative. The other, solitary and contemplative.
Trial work makes me a better writer and vice versa. A wise law professor told me that 99 percent of being a lawyer is selecting the right word at the right time. That turns out to be 100 percent of being a good writer.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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