Sydney silk Richard McHugh joins a long line of lawyers who out of hours use their facility with words to craft fiction, writes Fiona Carruthers.
![AFR MAGAZINE - FIRST USE. Portrait of Barrister Richard McHugh SC at his holiday home near Nowra. Apart from practising law, Richard is also a novalist. Photographed Friday 16th January 2015. Photograph by James Brickwood. AFR MAG 150116 Richard McHugh](/content/dam/images/1/3/f/x/6/u/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.134dmj.png/1430012109645.jpg)
"Can we talk on and off the record?" Richard McHugh, SC, sounds a note of lawyerlycaution as he takes a seat in his spacious rooms at Banco Chambers in Sydney's Martin Place. He leans back in his chair and laughs apologetically: "I don't mean to be difficult. It's just in my profession, we're paid to answer questions – and we're paid very well. But we don't answer questions about ourselves."
His reticence is understandable. The 46-year-old silk is one of the stars of the NSW bar. As a top commercial barrister he has represented Gina Rinehart's daughter Ginia, plus the ABC and those comedic Chaser boys. He's also appeared in a number of high profile cases for companies such as PwC, Macquarie Radio Network's 2GB and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Hailing from one of Sydney's top legal families – father Michael McHugh was a former High Court judge, mother Jeannette is a former federal Labor minister, his sister looks after legal and business affairs for a media/film company and his brother is also a silk at the NSW bar – McHugh holds a masters in lawfrom Yale. His long-term partner, Kate Morganis also a barrister with a masters from Yale.
To end up on the other side of the desk, in the vulnerable position of interviewee, is not a place he feels entirely comfortable. McHugh got here thanks to his penchant for writing fiction, a pastime that looks set to put him under the spotlight again in late May when his first novel, Charlie Anderson's General Theory of Lying, hits the shelves. The manuscript was taken up by Penguin's publishing director Ben Ball a week or so after McHugh's agent offered it to him. "I thought it was fabulously entertaining," Ball says. "Richard writes with a smart, wry, rolling style that I found extremely seductive."
McHugh's fictional debut is the story of crack Sydney management consultant Charlie Anderson and his equally if not more successful wife Anna, who is poised to become head of one of the country's biggest retail banks. With views from their living room across Middle Harbour and three genetically blessed daughters – complete with private school educations and inappropriate use of social media – they live an upper-class Sydney life, albeit one with Machiavellian twists involving everything from corporate succession planning to interest rate hikes, office affairs and daughter trouble.
Monied Sydney in all its complexity is a world McHugh has observed well. One of his closest friends called him after reading the manuscript last year to say "tell me there's more to life than this". What McHugh didn't want to do was draw his first novel from the court room. "I wanted to use my imagination," he says. "They say the law sharpens the mind by narrowing it. I wanted to do something creative and totally different from running cases. It would have been too easy to write about the legal world."
McHugh is the latest in a long tradition of legal eagles who have turned their hand to fiction. The roll-call extends from former London chief magistrate Henry Fielding to Franz Kafka – who trained as a lawyer and worked as an insurance compliance officer – to former Sydney solicitor Banjo Paterson. It includes global stars such as John Grisham, Erle Stanley Gardner and John Mortimer, the latter the creator of the TV show Rumpole of the Bailey. Contemporary Australian novelists Anna Funder, Matthew Reilly, James Bradley and Georgia Blain all started out as lawyers, as did screenwriter Peter Duncan, who co-wrote the ABC TV drama Rake, in which Richard Roxburghplayed the roguish Sydney barrister Cleaver Greene.
Ball says certain careers tend to spit out writers in waves. "People in the law are interested in and have a facility for words in the same way that, 30 years ago, you had a lot of great writers coming out of the advertising industry, people like Peter Carey, Bryce Courtenay and Salman Rushdie, to name a few." Asked if he can pick manuscripts submitted by barristers, Ball erupts in laughter: "You could probably characterise the bad [ones] as 'lawyer books'. But almost by definition, when it comes to good novels, you can't guess what the writer does for a day job."
What lawyers can be counted on for is to be meticulous in perusing their publishing contracts before signing on the dotted line. Ball recalls: "When we published a book by [former High Court justice] Michael Kirby, he said he must be the only author published by Penguin to ever read our entire contract from beginning to end."
Many, like McHugh, write while holding down jobs in the law. Sydney silk Richard Beasley practices and writes, as does former Media Watch presenter Stuart Littlemore, whose Harry Curry series of novels has a cantankerous lawyer as lead character. Melbourne barrister Elliot Perlman has penned multiple books, including the award-winning Three Dollars, which was made into a film in 2005 starring David Wenham and Frances O'Connor. Retired High Court justice Ian Callinan wrote novels, short stories and plays before and while on the bench. Gold Coast lawyer Chris Nyst has film and book projects on the side. "I guess the message is there are a lot of lawyers doing much more than writing affidavits," Beasley quips. "Maybe law's not quite as boring as it's made out to be."
The professionalisation of fiction writing over the latter half of the 20th century, as evidenced by growth in the number of institutions offering creative writing courses, together with the increasing difficulty of selling novels, particularly those by first-time authors, makes keeping two careers going a smart way to deal with writerly aspirations.
"Given that the amount earned by the average author in Australia, the UK and the US is going down, there's more pressure than ever to combine writing with something – be it advertising, teaching, journalism or law," Ball says. "Coming to writing novels early in mid-life makes sense in many ways, as you're more secure, both financially and professionally. If you're a lawyer, hopefully you can better control your caseload to fit it all in." The ultimate portfolio life, if you like, and far more 21st century than waiting tables.
Having mastered one career not only teaches discipline and lends confidence, it can also provide the financial firepower necessary to pursue an artistic dream. Former lawyer and investment banker John M. Green established his own publishing house, Pantera Press, which has produced all three of his novels along with books by a number of other Australian authors. He wrote his debut novel, Nowhere Man, while working at Macquarie Bank after a bank-sponsored leadership course instructed participants to do one thing they really wanted to do for themselves – and to set themselves a deadline. Green decided to write a novel, which he finished about two years later and published in 2006. Today he writes full time while also sitting on a number of boards, including acting as deputy chairman of QBE Insurance. "The wonderful thing about spending half my time as a writer and half my time as a company director is you live in two completely different worlds that infiltrate each other," Green says. "You learn from your 'other' experience, which is fantastic."
McHugh can't imagine leaving the bar for good even if his first novel sells well. How his learned friends respond is another matter that is weighing somewhat on his mind. "I would have preferred to keep all this under the radar," he confides. "I know my friends at the bar will be merciless, because that's exactly what I'd do to them if they wrote a book and then started doing magazine interviews about it."
Beasley has just sent a draft of his fourth novel to his publisher, Hachette. His first book, Hell has Harbour Views, was published in 2001 by Pan Macmillan. In 2005 the ABC turned it into a mini-drama starring Matt Dayand Lisa McCune. When he began writing it, Beasley was working for a small law firm, while his flatmate was employed by one of the big blue-chip firms. "I used to hear his door slam at 3am every morning when he finally got home," Beasley recalls. "He'd curse, 'my life is a joke'. Then he'd get up and go to work at 7am and do it all again."
People still ask Beasley if Hell has Harbour Views was based on the life of his former flatmate or one of the large firms in particular. He insists it's an amalgam of many people and stories. "I can't have been too spot on, given no one sued me," he says cheerfully. "Then again, if your characters are adulterers, fraudsters and cretins, not many people are going to put up their hand and say: 'That is definitely me.' Creating unsympathetic characters is a good insurance policy for immunity." Spoken like a true lawyer.
The co-creators of Rake weren't so lucky. Sydney barrister Charles Waterstreet argued he was entitled to a share in the profits when the US bought the rights to the show, given that the scallywag lead Cleaver Greene was loosely based on him. The producers settled the matter with Waterstreet for an undisclosed sum.
While McHugh didn't want to write about lawyers, he couldn't completely ignore his DNA. Late in the novel his character Anderson desperately needs legal representation. He picks up the phone and calls his friend Peter McElhone, who McHugh describes as a corporate partner at the toughest law firm in the city. "Charlie tried to save money on professional services wherever he could, but not when it came to fuck-off representation," McHugh writes. "The other side had to know you were serious, and these guys weren't afraid of a brawl."
McHugh admits that the barrister who Charlie and Peter subsequently go to for advice is a send up of a colleague and a friend. "I gave him the barrister chapter and he was fine with it," McHugh says. "He's a superb mimic himself."
Finding the time to write is probably harder in a big law firm, where days are measured in six-minute billable units, than in a barrister's chambers, where your time is far more your own to carve up. At home, McHugh and Morgan have four children aged between five and 17, but with some serious juggling of their workloads, McHugh manages to take up to six weeks off a year to write. To do so, he usually escapes to the family's weekender on the NSW south coast. It was here that Charlie Anderson began to take form in 2010. "I made a few false starts," McHugh says. "But after I had the characters, working out the story was fairly straightforward."
He remains conscious of the sacrifice made by his family to let him write: "If you rule the time out far enough ahead, you can juggle your cases and have a week off here and there. I wrote most of the first draft over a period of about six months – I'd just disappear down the coast and write for a week every month or so. Kate and the children were great about it. But it felt very selfish, so I tried to get through as much as I could when I was away. All I did was write."
It was a serendipitous lunch with literary agent Cheryl Akle that pushed McHugh's writing to the next stage. Akle, who had set up and run the federal government's Get Reading! campaign, was coming off the high of having discovered Sudanese-Australian writer Majok Tulba, whose debut novel Beneath the Darkening SkyAkle sold to Penguin for a six-figure advance. Tulba's novel was critically acclaimed and awarded following its 2012 release.
Akle wasn't keen to become a full-time literary agent but had enjoyed the process. She mentioned to a friend that she would quite like to do it again. Her friend introduced her to McHugh, who back at age 21, while still an undergraduate at Sydney University, had been shortlisted for the prestigious Vogel Literary Award for unpublished authors under the age of 35. The mutual friend knew McHugh had started writing again.
Akle and McHugh organised to have lunch at Sydney's The Bridge Room. "I went to lunch with some trepidation, thinking 'what if he can't write, how am I going to get out of it?'," Akle recalls. "That night he sent me what he'd written, which was just a couple of chapters, and thank god, I loved it. I thought it was unique. I'd not read about that kind of people; it was kind of like The Slap but about affluent Sydney. So little of what is written is about that segment of society."
She told McHugh to keep writing. "Each night he'd send me what he'd written that day. I'd wait for it before going to sleep because I was enjoying it so much." Akle took the 300-page manuscript to Ball, the publisher who had signed up Tulba. Ball took another leap of faith with McHugh.
Beasley wrote his first two novels almost a decade ago while he was relatively new to the bar and his case load wasn't too demanding. For his third novel, he took seven months off in 2011 and worked all day, combining writing with being a house husband. He and his wife have twin boys, who were then at primary school. He didn't say too much to colleagues, but he shut up his chambers, dropping in once a fortnight or so to collect mail. "My wife said I could have 12 months but I finished the first draft in seven months. I could have fibbed to her about my progress, but wisely decided against it. I was back in chambers after seven months."
For McHugh, being published will be as big an achievement as anything he's done in the law. It also brings full circle his younger ambition. When he was shortlisted for the Vogel in 1990, one of the judges was acclaimed author Thomas Keneally. "I didn't win it, but at the dinner he said to me something along the lines of: 'I'm sorry to tell you this, but you can write, so you have to keep going.'"
Lest he sound like a big noter, McHugh hastily adds that another of the judges had a different opinion. "She told me she more or less hated it."