He was not a lawyer-he worked in finance- but he was a person of such understated elegance that he remained live in my memory. The inspiration for the fictional Stern was a suburban neighbor of my parents, who’d fled to the U.S. The coincidence could be a source of amusement for eagle-eyed fans-and, as Jon guessed, dozens of people have written to me in the decades since asking for an explanation of how the same guy could appear in the fictionalized world of Kindle County and the real-life universe of Harvard Law School. I was depressed by the thought of having to make a change. I was panicked, because the name for the defense lawyer somehow seemed perfect to me, capturing so much of the character-named Alejandro Stern at his birth in Argentina, he decides, after his emigration, to call himself ‘Sandy’ in his tireless quest to be a real American. Thus it was Jon, who brought me the shocking news that there was a Sandy Stern in that book, too. When my editor, Jonathan Galassi, first bought Presumed Innocent for Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1986, he was dedicated enough to go back and read One L. The new Stern-Rusty Sabich’s clever and urbane defense lawyer-bore little resemblance to the somewhat pompous “Sandy Stern” in One L, and so I never made the connection. Even in One L, my memoir of my first year in law school that was published in 1977, where I changed the names of classmates and professors to protect their privacy, there was a “Sandy Stern,” albeit nothing like the man I invented a few years later when I began writing Presumed Innocent on the morning commuter train, on my way to work as a federal prosecutor in Chicago.

There has been a character named Sandy Stern in almost every book I have written.

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