Author Chats
In Debut Novel, Akerman’s Rick Spees Lampoons District Lobbyists
October 07, 2022
In Duly Noted the D.C. Bar continues its author Q&A series featuring members who have published works in a variety of genres.
D.C. Bar content producer Jeremy Conrad with Rick Spees (right).
Newly minted author Rick Spees draws upon his 40-year career as a District attorney, lobbyist, and Senate staffer to caricature the lobbying scene of the 1990s with a familiarity and detail that lend authenticity to his first novel’s absurd twists and quirky characters. In Capitol Gains, he introduces readers to Richard Brewster, a junior partner at a major Beltway law firm who creates a client for himself on paper in a fit of boredom. The scam takes Brewster on a wild ride with dizzying highs and crashing falls, lampooning the businesses of law and politics along the way.
On September 29, Spees offered more insights about his book during a launch party hosted by Akerman LLP, where Spees serves as government affairs and public policy partner.
In talking about your novel, we discussed some of your literary touchstones, and I thought they gave an accurate sense of your writing style. Which authors do you appreciate?
I really enjoy the novels of Christopher Buckley and P. J. O’Rourke. I also like Carl Hiaasen, who comes from Miami and writes about corruption in government in Miami, though his last book, called Squeeze Me, is more Washington oriented.
Those are the kinds of books that I enjoy, and they’re the things I read when I want to read. Of course, I also read very serious books and biographies and legal things all the time. But when I am in the mood to read a fun book, I turn to satire. I love to laugh, but a good satire can make you look at the world differently and see things you didn’t see otherwise.
What is your approach to writing comedy?
First of all, I think you need to read to write, and I do. But for comedy, you also have to have the ability to see things at an angle. You can’t just look at it straight-on. You have to consider different possible outcomes. It’s almost counter-factual. I enjoy doing that. It’s a fun approach.
And you can make some points, too. There’s a character in this book, a very sympathetic character, that the lobbyist keeps on as a pro bono client and helps him get approval from the FDA for a vaccine to help kids, and the lobbyist feels really great about it. It tells the positive side of lobbying, how rewarding it can be. What makes it humorous is that the good is almost undone by the hubris of the hero as he tangles up his efforts for much less sympathetic clients.
In your novel an attorney completes their CLE requirements with the “District of Columbia Bar Association.” Of course, my employer is the D.C. Bar, a very different organization. Your protagonist says the classes are “usually dull and always irrelevant.” Is it difficult writing fiction?
Yes! You really have to twist a story as hard as you can to make sure that it bears no relation to the truth.
One of your characters says that in D.C. “lobbyists run the show,” while another says that other attorneys regard lobbyists as “incomplete practitioners of their profession.” How true are these observations?
In terms of other attorneys looking down on lobbyists, that’s absolutely true, and every day we wake up feeling bad about ourselves. I think what’s interesting is that people who do legal work look down on us until they need to get something done, then they change their opinions very quickly.
You wrote a period piece. How does the 1990s setting impact your story?
There are a couple of things. First, it’s a safe distance behind us. Secondly, it doesn’t have all the social media, which I found very hard to write. I’m not really good at social media, and the setting of the story takes place in the time before all of that. The next book I’m working on is more contemporary, and I’ll need to kind of throw that stuff in.
But Washington in 1994 was a more pleasant place to work. There were often very serious political
disagreements between the two parties. I worked with a Republican senator and we had disagreements with the Democrats, but we went to work every day knowing that everybody wanted to make the best of everything. I might disagree with how you want to do it, and you might disagree with how I want to do it, but we both had the end goal in mind.
Now, that’s really not the case. People are now really into the politics of destruction, and I don’t like writing about that. When I was on the appropriations committee and we went to write a report, we spread our stuff out on the table and the Democrats were at the table with us and we all wrote the report together. There were certain things we knew that we were going to disagree on, but there weren’t that many things. You could tell by March what the differences were going to be, and so 90 percent of the bill we wrote together and the 10 percent that we didn’t I wrote as if the Republicans had won, and they wrote as if the Democrats had won. And we had a vote and nobody took it personally. If you won, you won. If you lost, you lost. I thought it was a more pleasant time to write about.
How realistic is the scheme that propels the novel’s plot, both in the ’90s and today?
I get texts from political parties, and I have a text that I can show you, right now, from Nancy Pelosi saying please give us five dollars. I have another text from Adam Laxalt, who is running for the Senate as a Republican, and he’s asking for seven dollars.
These requests do a couple of things. Nobody cares about losing five dollars or seven dollars, for example. Though my son, who is a fundraiser, will tell you that once you are on the list they keep coming back, and the next time they won’t ask for seven dollars; they’ll ask for more.
Another thing is that you [if] manage to get 100,000 people to send you five dollars, you still have a pretty good sum of money, so it’s important to be small enough that people don’t get worried about it.
Your website, rickspees.com, includes a blog in which you issue a call to arms in response to the announced discontinuation of the Choco Taco.
I was outraged that they discontinued the Choco Taco and, frankly, I was shocked that people weren’t more upset by it. I kept watching Squawk Box, I kept watching Morning Joe, and nobody was picking up on it.
Here’s the thing, the issue is bipartisan. Everybody likes Choco Tacos. And as I pointed out on my blog, it’s a foreign company doing this. It would only be worse if it was Chinese, but it’s a British company. And they’re doing it for profit. I’m surprised Bernie Sanders isn’t all over it.
Where can people find your book?
Capitol Gains is available for purchase online at rickspees.com or through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.
