Ex-FBI boss James Comey still has a passion for sentences – now, as a novelist

This story is part of the May 27 Edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

There was a time, not long ago, when James Comey was the most hated man in America. Liberals blamed him for the outcome of the 2016 presidential contest because, as FBI director, Comey sent a letter to Congress days beforehand about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Clinton would probably have been president, statistician Nate Silver concluded, if Comey had not penned that missive. But he did, and Donald Trump became the 45th president. Then Republicans turned on Comey too, because he refused to ease off on an ongoing investigation into Russia’s role in the election. Trump fired Comey four months into his presidency.

Comey’s long and distinguished career in public service, as a prosecutor in his home state of New York and then as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, ended in ignominy. He was the turd in the political punch-bowls of left and right alike, destined to fade into the background – as he had once famously attempted to do at a White House event wearing a blue suit the same colour as the curtains.

A few years out from the fever dream of the Trump presidency, and in the same week as the former president is indicted in New York on hush money charges, Comey reports that people are hurling abuse at him a little less than they used to. “Somebody screamed ‘F--- you’ on the street in New York a while ago,” he says when we meet at a bookshop cafe in Washington, DC. “I think he was from the left,” he adds, presumably drawing on a lifetime of criminal profiling. At 203 centimetres tall, Comey’s standard response to hecklers is a cheerful “thank you for your feedback”. Except, that is, when his wife of 35 years, or one of his five kids or three grandchildren, are with him. Then he focuses on getting away quickly.

“My family doesn’t love the idea of being back in the public eye,” Comey admits. If all goes to plan, they will be, because Comey has written a novel, his first, which is out in Australia next week. It’s a crime thriller called Central Park West, about a federal prosecutor pursuing a powerful mobster in the New York courts following the state governor’s murder. “I can picture eight more books after this one,” Comey says. Apart from the joy of finding a new passion, the public servant forced into early retirement is frank about the financial need to succeed. If he doesn’t? “I’ve got to go work at a law firm or something.”

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Lawyer-turned-novelist is a well-trodden path. The most famous examples are the two Johns, Grisham and Mortimer, of Pelican Brief and Rumpole fame. “All good lawyers are storytellers,” says Comey. “Sometimes we think we’re people of substance, so we can’t be storytellers, but if you think about it that way, you’re making an enormous mistake.” Among a crowded field of yarn-spinners, Comey’s one of the best. This is, after all, the prosecutor who went after Martha Stewart for insider trading, culminating in a show trial so scrutinised that even Comey’s former boss Rudy Giuliani denounced it a “publicity stunt”. Stewart was spared the indignity of handcuffs in the courtroom, but Comey worked to ensure the optics were in his favour. As a New York Observer story at the time noted, “Comey used plain English to make sure the public grasped the nature” of the homemaker impresario’s crimes.

Left, Martha Stewart, the homemaker impresario jailed for insider trading, and right, John Gotti, the head of New York’s Gambino crime family, whom Comey helped bring to justice as a young prosecutor.Credit: Getty Images

Comey is also known for his courtroom wit. A former colleague turned TV writer, Richard Appel, noted “he’s easily as funny as the writers I worked alongside with at The Simpsons.” Comey’s record as a prosecutor was impressive – he helped nab members of the notorious Gambino crime family, including John Gotti – but not everyone was a fan.

Comey is “smarmy”, the veteran US political commentator Joe Klein once wrote, pointing to a moral righteousness widely regarded as genuine but grating. A former colleague recounted to Vanity Fair that on every new lawyer’s first day in the office, Comey announced that he loved his job because it involved, by definition, doing the right thing. “There is stubbornness, ego and some self-righteousness at work,” sniped another co-worker. Comey himself has acknowledged that he can be “prideful, over-confident and driven by ego”.

Those traits dovetail with a knack for self-promotion. Time and time again, Comey has somehow appeared, Forrest Gump-style, at pivotal moments in American history. It was Comey, an acting attorney general during George W. Bush’s presidency, who rebuffed members of that administration hoping to secretly renew a domestic eavesdropping program. Naturally, he did so not at the office, but by the bedside of the actual attorney general who was incapacitated in a Washington, DC hospital. All this Comey later described at a political hearing into the program that The Washington Post called “the most riveting 20 minutes of Congressional testimony. Maybe ever.”

With Barack Obama. “I came to deeply respect him,” says Comey of his former boss.Credit: Getty Images

Perhaps it’s not much of a surprise that Comey would become the most famous director of the FBI since J. Edgar Hoover slipped on a lace nightie at a party at New York’s Plaza Hotel half a century earlier. Though a lifelong Republican, Comey’s appointment by then president Obama in 2013 was met with approval from both sides of Congress. Obama and Comey had their disagreements, including when they clashed after unrest in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, about whether heightened scrutiny of police had led to a violent crime wave. (Comey thought that it had.) Still, as Comey later said of Obama, “I came to deeply respect him.”

Things turned weird in the days and months following the 2016 election. Comey details the high emotion of that time in his memoir A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, published in 2018. In that book, Comey is at pains to point out that Obama vindicated his decision to reopen the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. “­‘I appointed you to be FBI director because of your integrity and your ability,’ ” Comey recounts Obama saying. “He looked me in the eye and he said, ‘Nothing has happened, nothing, in the last year, that has changed my view.’ ”

His next boss didn’t hold Comey in such high regard. Much of Comey’s memoir is devoted to disassembling Donald Trump, whom he describes as “unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values”. He observes the “soft white pouches” under Trump’s “expressionless blue eyes” and notes he never saw Trump laugh. To Good Weekend, Comey dismisses the former president as “lacking the managerial talent of a mob boss, but manifesting many of the mob boss’s unsavoury behaviours”. (Trump, meanwhile, has called Comey a “showboater” and a “slime ball”.)

With Donald Trump who, four months into his presidency, sacked Comey.Credit: Getty Images

As described in another one of the memoir’s indelibly Comey moments, the newly elected Trump summoned his FBI chief for a one-on-one dinner where they feasted on “salad, shrimp scampi, chicken parmesan with pasta, and vanilla ice-cream”. It was at that dinner that Trump pressed Comey for a pledge of “loyalty”, implying he should give up on the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the election; Comey writes he countered with a promise of “honesty” – which was, famously, not enough for Trump.

A scene so memorable – later dramatised in a TV miniseries called The Comey Rule, in which Jeff Daniels plays the eponymous character and Jennifer Ehle his wife – assured A Higher Loyalty entry into the annals of US political legend. The source material was unimpeachable and the writing itself was praised. The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani was over-the-top effusive, describing it as a “near-cinematic” account; Comey, she said, “is what Saul Bellow called a ‘first-class noticer’.”

The book performed extremely well, topping the Amazon bestseller list even before release. Comey published a second non-fiction book with the same publisher, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust, which sold briskly. So when news broke that Comey was writing a novel, industry observers were surprised to see it was not with Flatiron, his big-deal first publisher, but with an indie outfit, Mysterious Press.

“Something must be up here,” is how publishing veteran and crime fiction columnist Sarah Weinman recalls her reaction to Good Weekend. “I wonder what happened?”

Jeff Daniels portrays the then-FBI chief in the TV miniseries, The Comey Rule. Credit: Ben Mark Holzberg/CBS

Intriguingly, given the change of publisher, Comey credits his original editor, Zack Wagman, with the idea of writing a novel. “He said to me, ‘You ought to think about it. You write stories well.’ ” When Comey relented, he discovered a love for what he calls “the process of crafting character and scene”. He now writes every day from a screened-in porch at his home in suburban Virginia. “I found it more fun than non-fiction, but harder,” Comey says of his pivot. “It’s a little bit of a risk to put myself out there.”

Flatiron Books did not respond to a request for comment, but it could be that Comey’s name recognition was not deemed enough to float an untested novelist. Unlike other political figures such as Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have co-written blockbuster thrillers with established authors, Comey’s is the only name on the cover of Central Park West.

Comey does give credit to his daughter, Maurene, on whom he based the main character. “When I think about Nora Carleton, who’s a six-foot-tall, auburn-haired woman in her early 30s trying an organised crime case, I was able to think about my own daughter.” Maurene has followed in her father’s footsteps as a federal prosecutor in the New York court system, leading the criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein, who was found guilty of numerous sex crime charges, and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Maurene didn’t let her father attend either trial. There was a lot of media attention and “she was worried me being there would become a thing”. Deprived of seeing his daughter argue a high-profile case in the exact courtroom in which he had prosecuted a mob boss 20 years earlier, Comey decided he’d imagine it instead.

Comey’s daughter Maurene, a New York federal prosecutor, who led the criminal case against the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Credit: Getty Images

I tell Comey what’s striking about the novel is how it takes the reader behind the scenes, into the nitty-gritty of fighting crime. “Few people know that the United States Marshals Service operates the largest prisoner transport network in the world,” is a phrase in the book; we learn about jury consultants, turf wars between police departments, and how to convince suspects to come in for questioning without them “lawyering up”. “That was one of my goals in this,” says Comey. “To use fiction as a vehicle to show what that world’s really like.”

There are also some surprising plot points, or as the columnist Sarah Weinman dubs them, “interesting choices”. Nora Carleton is a single mother who is exploring her queer identity – a long way from the father of five who wrote her. For this, Comey drew on the experiences of another of his daughters. Did the kids like his book? “They were just really relieved there was no sex,” says Comey. “Terrorism, law enforcement – I know these really well. I have five children, but no expertise in romance.”

There may be no love interest, but Central Park West is surprisingly pacey, combining two seemingly distinct plots – mafia killing and political assassination – into a satisfying whodunnit that shows all Comey has gleaned about law enforcement. It also seems to be a working-out of what, at 62, he doesn’t know. In the years since his very public firing, it appears that Comey’s bright lines between right and wrong have blurred a little.

Without giving anything away, an older, grizzled colleague tells Nora towards the end of the book that “I worry you’re aiming at the wrong target, with all this ‘truth’ stuff … that’s not what the system is for. Our job is to live in grey.” It’s hard not to view this as a self-rebuke from the man once characterised by The New York Times as a “straight-arrow bureaucrat, an apostle of order and the rule of law”. Comey has notably never admitted fault or even a sense of doubt on his most controversial decisions – chiefly, the fateful letter to Congress about Hillary Clinton’s emails. As he says, “I’ve looked at those decisions a thousand times. I feel comfortable with them.”

But when I put it to Comey that this novel lives “in the grey” a lot more than the strident defences of his two non-fiction books, he’s willing to accept that interpretation. “I think part of growing up for anyone, but especially for someone who’s spending their career in the justice system, is realising that it’s imperfect, and that there really is a difference between truth and justice often,” he concedes. “I was much more idealistic when I was a 32-year-old mob prosecutor. I had seen less of the complication and less of the grey that I saw over the next 30 years. So I think that’s fair. I haven’t even thought of it that way, but I think that’s fair.”

Unshackled from the facts, fiction has been a kind of freedom. In a courtroom, Comey says, “imagination is forbidden. But now I get to make something up, as long as I stay true to the people in it.” The reviews are not yet in but I found Nora to be a fully realised character: a successful woman who finds it difficult to buy clothes she feels good in, and is distracted about what to cook her four-year-old for dinner while cross-examining a bad guy in court.

What made Comey an effective prosecutor, he says, was empathy, and it’s surely also useful for a novelist. I ask where this ability comes from and he takes me back to his childhood in suburban New Jersey, to a Friday night he felt sure would be his last. As the 16-year-old Comey worked on a column for the high school newspaper in his room, he heard a noise and realised there was a home invasion in process. He discovered the intruder in his parents’ bedroom with a ski mask on and a gun in hand. He convinced the burglar to lock him and his brother in a bathroom out of harm’s way. The nightmare ended only when the intruder escaped into nearby woods.

Incredibly, Comey doesn’t think this incident led to his decision to go into law enforcement, but he does say the gunman gave him “two gifts” that night. “One, because I was certain I was going to die, it gave me perspective,” he says. “It was very useful to me, throughout the rest of my life, to know that I was just lucky to be alive.” The second, Comey says, was “an understanding of what victims of crime experience”.

“I can remember people used to say to me, ‘Well, thank god you weren’t hurt.’ And I never said this back to them, but I would think, ‘Yeah. Except I thought about that guy every night for five years.’ ” He continues, “My parents don’t live in that house any more. They’re dead. But when I drive by that house, this little house in New Jersey, I still think about that.”

Comey says his wife Patrice, a counsellor, believes that telling the story of what happened that night over and over at school was a form of therapy for the shaken teen. In a variation on a theme, Central Park West begins with a home invasion – and, in an echo of another chapter of Comey’s life, there is also a corrupt politician who leans on law enforcement for nefarious ends.

“I don’t envy those prosecutors,” he says when pressed for an opinion on Donald Trump’s latest legal problems. “It was hard in the eye of the storm.” He maintains, “I didn’t find Donald Trump that traumatising because I knew what he was,” but this novel, and its exploration of ambiguity, feels like therapy of a different sort. James Comey wrote a novel, but – as always – fact and fiction may not be so far apart.

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