Like many writers, the author of a new novel that’s set in Virginia has a day job to support his writing habit.
In the case of “Charlie-Man,” a young adult novel coming out this summer, the author’s day job is one of the hardest gigs in the country to land: Thomas Cullen is a federal judge.
Virginia is no stranger to judges who are also authors. J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who sits on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, has written six books, three of those after he ascended to the bench from the law school faculty at the University of Virginia.
His books have been about law and politics (his first book, “Harry Byrd and The Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945–1966,” remains a go-to reference for anyone who wants to understand the politics of that era).
Martin Clark, a retired circuit court judge from Patrick County, is famous for his novels — legal thrillers that have put him on best-seller lists.
Joining them now is Cullen, a Roanoke-based federal judge who hears cases in the Western District of Virginia, a judicial circuit that covers roughly half the state. His first novel will be published July 15 by the Richmond-based Brandylane Publishers (and is now available for pre-orders). The coming-of-age plot is one that he says has been percolating for a long time, but before we get to that, we should remind people (or educate some for the first time) just who Cullen is.
He comes from a well-known political family in Virginia. His father, Richard Cullen, began as an aide to then-Rep. Caldwell Butler of Roanoke, later became U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and spent about half a year as the state’s attorney general in the late 1990s. Today, Richard Cullen is a legal adviser to Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Thomas Cullen spent time as both a federal prosecutor and in private practice before being named U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia during President Donald Trump’s first term. It was then that The Washington Post profiled Cullen for his work in prosecuting those involved in the deadly “Unite The Right” march in Charlottesville. The Post headlined the story “The Trump Appointee Who is Putting White Supremacists in Jail” and led with a photo of a grim-faced Cullen headed into court. The story described “his face set in its resting scowl” as he secured a sentence of life in prison without parole for the driver who slammed his car into a crowd of people, killing a woman. The Post faulted some Republicans for “averting their gaze” to the rise of white supremacist groups but quoted Cullen as saying: “I could care less about politics. Hate crimes and violence by white supremacist organizations that qualify as domestic terrorism are way up. Prosecuting them is common sense. It’s the right thing to do.”
Not long afterward, Trump nominated Cullen for a vacancy on the federal bench. In an era when judicial nominations are often controversial, Cullen’s was not. Virginia’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, were among those who voted to support Cullen’s nomination.
So how did that stony-faced prosecutor in the Post photo turn into the author of what is described in its publicity blurb as a “heartrending but hopeful story of one boy’s journey toward manhood in the American South, and a lyrical homage to the classic coming-of-age novels of years past”?
Cullen says he’s always been an avid reader. “I read everything,” he told me during an interview in his office. He gravitates to a lot of history and biography (he was a history major in college). “I’ve got a soft spot for contemporary political thrillers,” he says. “My greatest fear, my greatest nightmare, would be being stuck somewhere and not having anything to read. I’ll read pretty much anything you put in front of me.”
Like many avid readers, Cullen has long been a writer, too. “I’ve always loved writing, particularly about non-legal things,” he said. In college at Furman University, he wrote essays and opinion pieces for the college paper. As a judge, Cullen writes lots of legal opinions, although writing one of those is nothing like writing a novel, he found. “A long legal opinion for me is probably 30 pages,” Cullen said. “As a general rule, if we can’t say it in less than 20 pages, we don’t understand it.” (The novel weighed in at 210 pages.)
Cullen, though, does strive to do something that many judges don’t: He aims to make his legal opinions comprehensible to those who aren’t lawyers. “When someone reads our opinion, I want them to feel like they’re reading a newspaper, so highly readable, with short declaratory sentences and a conclusion up top. If I could do anything else in life, it would be that.”
Even as a judge, Cullen has written occasional opinion pieces for Cardinal News — on non-political topics such as the joys of winter fishing in Highland County or an ode to a summer camp in Bath County that he attended as a boy.
“In the back of my mind, I had the outline of the book for a long time,” Cullen said. “I knew what the first chapter was.” It was after he wrote the ice-fishing piece for Cardinal in January 2024 that Cullen said he decided to forge ahead and figure out the rest of his future novel.
“I tried to write a little bit every morning and some on weekends,” he said. Within three months, he had a “rough manuscript” that took another six months to edit and polish.
“I didn’t think it would be as much fun as it was to write,” Cullen said. “You just become so wrapped up in the plot and the characters. I found that if I could make myself laugh writing, I thought it may not be that bad.”
As for that plot and the characters, Cullen says “Charlie-Man” is autobiographical, except in all the places where it’s not. The protagonist, Charlie Stewart, who goes by the nickname “Charlie-Man,” is beginning his final year at St. Mark’s Episcopal School, a prestigious (and fictional) all-boys school in Richmond. Cullen attended a private school in Richmond, but his was coed. Charlie has lost a parent and has a loved one who suffers from addiction. Cullen didn’t go through any of that, but, like Charlie, “I spent a lot of time on the banks of the James River. Many of the characters bear some resemblance to my high school friends and mentors. I don’t think there are any dead ringers and most of them are composites.” Charlie’s goals that final year: “to rekindle his relationship with Katy Hendricks, a beautiful tennis star, and gain admission to a highly selective state university.”
I won’t give away things beyond that, except to say that Charlie confronts some challenges as the year goes on. That year, by the way, is a very specific one — the 1994-95 school year. “One of the coolest things about writing a book set in the 1990s,” Cullen said, is getting the technology (or in some cases, the lack thereof) right. Readers, he said, “will get a sense of what life was like when we used landline telephones and wrote letters from camp and had to wait for news to travel naturally. We weren’t wedded to our phones” the way we are now.
“I don’t consider myself old,” Cullen said. “I’m 47 and this stuff will be completely foreign” to many readers today.
Those readers are intended to be teenagers. The genre of “young adult” literature is typically defined as aimed at those 12-18 and constitutes a very specialized slice of the literary market. So what led Cullen there? His answer is a pretty simple one: “That’s the story I had to tell,” he said. “That and the practical difficulties of writing a legal book or a purported legal thriller where there are ethical issues.”
Cullen does not fit the typical mold of a young adult author. A study by the writer Sam Subity found that only 13% of young adult authors are men, for instance (and only 27% of the protagonists are male). The federal judge-as-young-adult author is a definite rarity. However, when his manuscript landed on the desk (or in-box) of Brandylane publisher Robert Pruett, he was immediately taken. “Being a Richmond-based publisher particularly interested in young adult novels, we were first drawn in by the Richmond setting, then by the descriptive prose, authentic dialogue, and the characters,” Pruett said by email. In an industry where many authors endure multiple rejections and wait months or sometimes years to hear from publishers, Cullen heard back from Pruett the next day.
Most of the time after that was spent in the details of editing the manuscript and proofing page galleys. The book carries a promotional blurb from Clark, the former Patrick County judge-turned-novelist. That’s unusual, Clark said. He gets many requests to blurb books and accepts very few. This particular request came from the publisher, not Cullen. “I’ve never met the guy, don’t know him, wouldn’t know him if he walked in the room,” Clark said, but he read what Brandylane sent him and was impressed by Cullen’s work. “He’s got some serious skills as a writer,” Clark said. “He does a really good job of capturing a time and space.” Clark, like Cullen and Cullen’s protagonist, went to a private school. “If you know nothing about that corner of the world, he makes it really fun and insightful,” Clark said. “For somebody like me it’s very evocative. It charts a world and place that I remember mostly with positive thoughts. But if you haven’t been there, he makes it really attractive and then he overlays it over a really good plot.”
Clark also advised that readers shouldn’t be put off by the “young adult” tag. “I’d never read a young adult book, but this book stands out at any level for any genre,” Clark said. “You could read this as a 65-year-old adult and enjoy it. It didn’t seem so dialed into that demographic as to exclude other readers.”
So now that “Charlie-Man” is set to be published, is there a second book in the works? “We’ll see,” Cullen said. “Sitting down and crafting this has been more fulfilling than any other writing project. That said, I have a pretty busy day job.”
Over the next month, he’ll be presiding over a trial in a criminal case out of Danville and a civil rights case out of Harrisonburg, and sentencing at least a dozen defendants on drug cases in multiple other courthouses across the district. He’ll be doing some writing, too — on legal opinions.
