Michael Connelly, author of ‘The Lincoln Lawyer,’ draws on fact for his crime fiction

But he had always been intrigued with an attorney “doing the right thing at great risk to himself and his family” ever since reading “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as a kid in Fort Lauderdale.

So he kept on writing his Harry Bosch books but made a project out of researching a legal thriller. He moved from Los Angeles to Tampa and hooked up with Dan Daly, an old reporter buddy.

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Daly had since gone into criminal defense law. He and partner Roger Mills had lots of stories to tell. The trio often would meet at a bar in Tampa called Four Green Fields, an Irish pub and a popular watering hole for prosecutors and defense attorneys, and they’d tell Connelly about the gritty way criminal law really worked.

Connelly asked during one of these sessions if they’d defended anybody really scary.

Daly quipped, “There is no client as scary as an innocent man.”

It meant that you’d be haunted, as his attorney, if you couldn’t win the case.

“I didn’t take notes at these things, but that was so good I borrowed a pen and a cocktail napkin and got them to say it again so I could write it down,” Connelly says.

It became the epigraph of the book — and the key motivation for Connelly’s character, Mickey Haller, in a story filled with plot twists.

As the story developed on the page, Connelly based a good bit of Haller on Ogden’s style of work, but it wasn’t a character portrait. Haller is twice divorced (one of his exes is a prosecutor), a little bit too slick for his own good. His investigator is killed, and thugs threaten to kidnap his young daughter.

Ogden has been married for 45 years with two adult kids who never had a dramatic encounter with their dad’s clients. He’s also 66 and was delighted when producers picked the often-shirtless McConaughey for the role.

“I was worried they’d pick Wilford Brimley,” he says.

But the atmosphere for the story, the less-than-idealistic way the law tends to work, arose from stories that Ogden, Daly and Mills told Connelly, and he put them into print.

Like the story about a defense attorney who, if a client wasn’t paying him, would go to a hearing and tell the judge the case couldn’t proceed because he needed to find a “witness named Mr. Green” — as in cash. Another attorney would tell the judge he also needed a continuance (thus leaving his client in jail) because he had a “Rule No. 1 violation.” Rule No. 1 is that you get paid before you do any work.

Daly, now practicing in Gainesville, remembers that he once had a nonpaying client assure him that there wasn’t a problem, that he had Daly’s money.

“And I told him that was the problem,” Daly says. “He had my money.”

The line made it into the movie, said by Haller to a client stuck in an L.A. County jail. Haller gets a hearing continued, leaving the client locked up, until he pays.

Haller comes across as a real operator, at one point making a show on the street of getting a freelance television cameraman to sell him the videotape he’d just shot of Haller’s high-profile client emerging from the courthouse. The client, visibly impressed, is relieved he won’t be on tabloid TV. It’s a con, of course — Haller then drives a few blocks, meets up with the “cameraman,” a hustler who he’d hired to show up and pretend to film, and gets his money back. Minus a fee, natch.