John B. Peoples follows a drifting man who, after splitting a lottery ticket with his boss, wins $40 million, only for his boss to disappear with all the winnings, sending him on a worldwide chase to reclaim his share. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The inspiration for the story in John B. Peoples came from what might be considered an unusual place, given the book’s plot. The inspiration arose from how my mother-in-law faced her losses bravely and without compromise. In her case, a beautiful woman in her early 90s, she was stricken with cancer of the mouth. As the cancer grew, it took away her beauty and mobility. Yet she remained positive, telling me once that she was happy as long as she woke up and could wiggle her toes. That led me to want to write about how people deal with loss. Then, a “bolt of lightning” hit me and I thought about how one would feel if they won the lottery, but someone tried to take that away. A reader of John B. Peoples will see other types of loss included/covered throughout the book.

As John’s options narrow, he turns to increasingly extreme measures, including organized crime. How did you approach that moral progression?

In John’s past, even before thinking his lottery winnings had been taken, he had suffered a knee injury that made him lose out on continuing his dream of playing college football. After that he failed in marriage and lost custody of his daughter. Then, as we find him at the start of the book, he is facing the challenges of barely getting along as a divorced father with an unrewarding job and child support obligations in Los Angeles where he lives in a one-room converted garage. Finally, as he seeks to recover his share of the lottery jackpot, he becomes more and more frustrated with the limits of the justice system and the other impediments he encounters. That frustration leads John to be willing to take more and more aggressive and risky steps to obtain the justice and fairness which he feels life has too often denied him.

The novel explores the frustration of living in a society where success is unequally distributed. How consciously did you engage with that theme?

This was very conscious, at least regarding how that frustration served to motivate John. Of course, who among us, as blessed and fortunate as they might be, does not feel or see how success can be a matter of birth or luck or kissing up or devious behavior or any “unfair” circumstances?! However, when writing John B. Peoples, I did not consciously think about people and society in general, but rather about John’s character and why he might act the way he acts.

What does the novel suggest about access to justice in the modern world?

For most, the justice system, even if one can afford or be able to access it (for example through a contingency fee agreement rather than through exorbitant hourly fees), is a confusing and frustrating maze. It may be one’s first or only experience with lawyers and judges. For example, how should one choose a lawyer? What kind of lawyer would serve me best? What is a typical fee arrangement? Can the justice system get me what I want or is the system of laws and remedies limited? John B. Peoples explores all of that. And it could be suggested that it is not worth even trying to access the justice system, or that self-help may be a better or the only solution to a problem.

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