After sitting unpublished for 73 years, Carl Illig’s novel Yancy Lawyer is finally in print thanks to his son, Dale, who fulfilled his father’s wish to someday publish the manuscript.
Dale — an accomplished retired Georgetown lawyer and the president of the W.D. Kelley Foundation — was only 8 years old when dad finished the first draft of the story, which, coincidently, is about a small town lawyer.
When Dale read the manuscript later in life, he found that he accidentally followed in the footsteps of the character his father created.
A story about a lawyer
The novel’s protagonist, Nicholas Hunter, turned down a job at a fancy law firm in Houston to move to a small fictional Texas town called Yancy. His office was across from the courthouse on top of a drugstore.
After he went to law school, Dale also chose to not look for a job in his hometown Houston. He decided to move to what — at the time — was small-town Georgetown, and worked in an office across from the Williamson County Courthouse.
“I knew it was a story about a country lawyer and I probably read a chapter or two as a kid, but children typically are trying to form their own identity,” Dale said.
In the book, Nicholas Hunter is an idealistic lawyer who helps the underdogs in the town find justice. The chapters are episodic and often take on the tone of courtroom dramas. There are a lot of love stories. In one particularly comedic case, a young man is sued for “breach of promise” for leaving his fiance.
In Dale’s career, he took on notable local cases, including representing W.D. Kelley, a union carpenter from California who moved to Central Texas when his aunt, Mary Palm of Round Rock, passed. Mr. Kelley was the last surviving heir of the A.J. Palm family, and fought the City of Round Rock, which had condemned his interest in the farm in 1986 to create Old Settlers Park. Earnings from the cases eventually became the W.D. Kelley Foundation, which offers grant funding to local nonprofits.
Finishing a life’s work
Over the years, Carl’s draft was retyped a few times.
Dale’s wife, Sandy, helped complete it while Carl was still alive. Dale then made his own edits with a pen and it was retyped by Dale’s secretary, Donna Arldt.
Dale later took these pages and reworked portions again alongside a professional editor.
“It was a process of me being able to spend time with my daddy again. [He has] been dead for 30 years, so it was a wonderful experience for me,” he said.
“As a writer, whatever you write is going to have some of you in it, you know? There’s just no way that you wouldn’t. Some of these characters are fictitious characters but I can hear my father.”
Yancy Lawyer was published this April, and is available for purchase on amazon here: https://tinyurl.com/2mxtb4sz. Dale believes his father’s true passion was writing, and felt that bringing his manuscript into print was completing something for his father.
“He was an attorney — he wanted to be a writer,” Dale said of his father. “He really liked to write, but, like everything else in life, being creative doesn’t always pay.”
In retirement, Dale has focused on his creative passions. He’s worked with editors and produced films. He also brought to light photos he took while traveling through India during his youth in the Peace Corps.
Next, he hopes to work on a book about his legal practice and running the W.D. Kelley Foundation.