Wyoming Judge’s Secret Life Is Hand-Writing Top-Selling Legal Thrillers

GILLETTE – It’s a good day, Judge Paul Phillips said, raising his mug of coffee briefly before sinking down into a brown, vinyl armchair at Starbucks in south Gillette. It was Veterans Day, and Phillips was happy to be awarded free coffee for his two decades of service in the U.S. Army.

That day, Phillips was casual in a button-down shirt and jeans, blending in with the crowd of casually dressed patrons sipping lattes with heads bent over iPhones and computers. It’s a rare day off for Phillips, who would normally be among the small subset in court attire in a decidedly working-class town that favors Carhartts and baseball caps.

Being a circuit court judge by day is just one facet of his life, Phillips noted. Along with being an avid outdoorsman and veteran, he’s also a best-selling legal thriller writer who goes by the pen name James Chandler.

The pseudonym, he explained, creates a clear boundary from his day job.

Even the people who work for him don't necessarily know about his alter-ego. One woman ran back into his office after about a year on the job to tell him that he was James Chandler.

"She had seen an ad for one of my books and recognized me," he said. "That told me I was doing a good job keeping my writing hobby separate from my work."

Typically, Phillips — as Chandler — would be busy writing before he donned his black robe, but he’s taking a quick breather after shipping off his eighth book, “Reasonable Suspicion,” to his editor. This marks the final installment - for now - in his popular Sam Johnstone legal thriller series, which perennially ranks in the top 100 best-sellers on Amazon as well as the Wall Street Journal lists.

The writing break is brief because he’s also finishing up his third book in the Smith and Bauer four-book series that he co-writes with Laura Snider, a former prosecutor and writer living in Iowa. In this series, Snider does the heavy lifting by coming up with the first draft and plotline, Phillips explained, which he then fleshes out with the fine details.

It’s a great symbiotic working relationship, he said, because he doesn’t have to think up the plotlines.

"She writes by the seat of her pants, and her part of writing is writing the first draft," he said. "My favorite part is fleshing out characters, refining and polishing sentence and paragraph structure. We could never switch roles."

With his contractual obligations nearly wrapped up with both book series, Phillips has a shopping agreement with a major Hollywood producer to turn his first book “Misjudged," which was published in 2021, into a six- to eight-part streaming series.

“Seeing it happen is still a long shot,” Phillips said, but the odds improved recently when the producer brought on board a well-known showrunner signed on to the project.

The showrunner completes the script for a pilot episode and puts the team together, including lead and minor characters and other technicians and staff necessary to produce a television series. Then he works with the producer to market the package to network television studios and streaming platforms.

Phillips is duty-bound not to spill the guy’s name or any of the details, only to say that he has an impressive track record with several blockbusters under his belt.

Still, given the tortoise-like speed of show business, which Phillips’ friend compares to “swimming in peanut butter,” it will likely be a while before he knows anything.

“The odds are definitely not in my favor, but I think we’ve gone from several-million-to-one to something much less than that,” he said. “People in the business are spending a lot of time on it.”

As for who he envisions playing his lovable but fatally flawed protagonist? The jury is still out on that.

'Poor Man’s Voelker'

The success of his books continues to surprise Phillips, who still can’t believe his work is up there with the heavy hitters like John Grisham and Michael Connelly.

“It’s still surreal to think that many people are reading my books,” he said.

Not only reading them but ranking them high on Amazon, with his first book receiving 4.3 stars with more than 30,000 ratings on both Amazon and Good Reads.

He’d started writing six years ago more or less on a challenge from his wife, Ann. He had been reading a book that he didn’t find particularly good and commented to Ann that he could do better.

“So do it,” Ann said.

Writing didn’t come out of left field for Phillips. Throughout the course of his military and legal career, Phillips had published articles about military history and in legal journals as well as short stories and personal stories about fly-fishing.

A novel, however, was a whole different animal, starting with how to structure it. He went to the library and picked up some of the authors he liked, including Robert B. Parker, author of the Jesse Stone books that were made into a television series starring Tom Selleck.

Other influences include Robert Traver, author of “Anatomy of a Murder,” which was made into a film starring Jimmy Stewart. Traver’s real name was John D. Voelker, and he was a Michigan attorney and then a Supreme Court Justice as well as avid fly fisherman and former army officer.

“I’m like a poor man’s Voelker,” Phillips joked.

Phillips grew up reading Ed McBain’s police procedurals, anything by Joseph Wambaugh or Alistair McClain as well as Arthur Conan Doyle, and Shakespeare’s sonnets and most of his plays with the exception of his comedies

Longhand on legal pads

When it came time to write his book, however, he studied the format of Parker’s Jesse Stone series.

Then he sat down to write.

“I type with two fingers,” he said, so a lot of his writing is done in longhand on yellow legal pads.

It took him almost four years to finish the draft. After being turned down by dozens of agents and publishers, his book was picked up by Severn River Publishing just as he was getting ready to throw in the towel.

The publisher offered him a four-book contract that would entail him writing a book every six months. At first, he thought that would be impossible given his day job and the fact that the first one took him several years, but in the end the publisher convinced him it would get easier once he found his rhythm, and they compromised on a schedule of every nine months.

It would eat into his weekends and vacation time, but with Ann on board, he decided to go for it.

“I was on pins and needles there for a while,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to embarrass myself. I never dreamed of having this kind of success and I’m grateful to my readers for it.”

Eight books later, sales continue to skyrocket as he potentially gets ready to see his stories unfold on the big screen.

Fatally flawed

Along with action-packed plotlines and a distinctly Wyoming setting, much of the series’ success is owing to Phillips’ protagonist, Sam Johnstone, who’s a complicated guy with a lot of baggage.

He’s a veteran who lost his leg from an IED blast in Afghanistan, and like Phillips, is battling addiction after moving to Wyoming for a new shot at life.

“I’m not Sam,” Phillips is quick to point out.

Rather, he said Sam is an amalgamation of a lot of guys he’s known. Parts of Johnstone’s life does mirror Phillips. He, too, became an attorney after serving in the military for 20 years, first in infantry divisions as an air defense artillery officer and later as a public affairs officer at the Pentagon, where he was assigned during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

After getting a master’s degree in communications, Phillips put himself through law school at night beginning when he was on active duty, and later, while working as a defense contractor.

It took him four years to earn his degree, at which point he started applying for jobs out West.

Ideally, he was hoping to land in the Boise, Idaho, area, but no offers came.

“Nobody wants to hire a lieutenant colonel to be a baby lawyer,” he said, “especially one with my grades. I think they were afraid they’d be dealing with the Great Santini.”

Only one offer came his way in 2004 from Wyoming’s Sixth Judicial District. It was a law clerk position working under district judges, John R. Perry and Dan R. Price II. He took the job for 18 months and then went into private practice in Gillette for a decade before being appointed to the bench in 2017 by former Gov. Matt Mead.

Like Phillips, Johnstone randomly lands in Wyoming in the fictional town of Custer after his college buddy offers him a job.

It’s here that Johnstone finds himself at the center of several murder investigations while balancing his penchant for beautiful women, who sometimes end up stalking or trying to murder him.

Johnstone also struggles to stay sober while fighting his inner demons as he transitions into the civilian world.

Finding Footing

As a veteran, Phillips has a big heart for those who served, particularly those like Johnstone who are having a hard time finding their footing.

To this end, Phillips is a regular speaker at Warriors Return, a Minneapolis-based, five-week program helping veterans who are struggling, some of whom – like the characters in his books –  find themselves on the wrong end of the justice system.

Phillips’ workshop uses the structure of a novel — beginning, middle and end — as an allegorical framework for encouraging veterans to see their lives as a story and to work to achieve a happy ending.

He thinks he gets more out of it than his students, he said, and he also applied this framework in the development of Johnstone’s character.

By book three, Johnstone gets his drinking mostly under control, which was a conscious decision that Phillips made both in his own life and that of his main character.

“I had to make a choice about whether this guy gets his life together or continues flailing,” Phillips said. “I thought it would be better if he got sober. Getting sober and staying sober is a challenge, and one I appreciate, but it can be done and I felt like Sam needed to get it done.”

As a sitting circuit judge in one of the busiest jurisdictions in the state, Phillips has no shortage of material from which he might draw, but generally his characters and plots emerge from his imagination and from people he knows.

“Most of my characters are based on people I worked with in the military,” he said. “That helps me keep things fictional.”

Johnstone and all of Phillips’ characters, including Johnstone’s mentor, Judge Daniels, are three-dimensional figures who are at once likable yet fatally flawed.

It’s their complicated inner lives that make them so relatable, much like Phillips himself.

Relatable

Phillips may be one of the few judges in the state who can relate to those who appear before him, many of whom have derailed their lives due to alcohol and addiction.

Phillips understood addiction was an issue in Gillette and accepted an opportunity to serve as a treatment court judge even before he was appointed to the bench.

For more than 15 years, he presided over treatment courts and chaired the board of directors that oversees the county’s treatment courts, which provides a holistic approach to treatment.

This entails providing support such as employment, housing assistance and treatment and counseling along with behavioral guardrails to help offenders develop their own path to sobriety in lieu of incarceration or worse.

He’s a guy who believes in second chances, though he also has little tolerance for excuses and for the repeat offenders who chronically cycle in and out of the courts.

“Sooner or later, you’ve got to look in the mirror and recognize the problem is staring at you while you brush your teeth.”

Phillips is also not afraid to be a hardliner on the bench, admonishing “bubbas” with bad attitudes, and once marveling that the behavior of a traveling salesman was so egregious that he was arrested for public intoxication in a hard-living city “where drinking is practically a sanctioned indoor sport.”

Though tough, he’s equally self-deprecating, which emerges in his characters, who, along with his intriguing plotlines and a few red herrings along the way, draw readers to his books.

As for his favorite of his eight books, he struggles to pick one.

“They’re like kids,” he said. “I can’t have a favorite.”

But if pressed, he said, he’d choose either “False Evidence” or “The Truthful Witness.”

“I felt like I hit my marks with those two,” he said.

For whatever reason, he said, the odd-numbered books were much easier to write than the even-numbered ones in the series, which he said were a real struggle to get through. Oddly, however, it’s the even-numbered books that sold the best.

His second book, “One and Done,” skyrocketed him to the top of Amazon’s legal thrillers, while his fourth, “Capital Justice,” landed him on the Wall Street Journal best-sellers.

The last book, “Reasonable Suspicion,” due to release in April, was by far the hardest one to finish, he said, requiring him to ask for an extension to get the book to his copyeditor.

Now that it’s done, he’s eager for a little break, but not for long. Already, he has another book in mind.

Likely, it will be a stand-alone novel, perhaps not surprisingly featuring a judge as its main character. He’s still mulling that one over, he said, and isn’t ruling out the idea of turning it into a multi-book series.

And who knows, maybe Sam Johnstone will find a second life as a crossover character in his next book.

Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.