Photo: Chris Emeott
Resident rekindles his love of creative writing.
When Plymouth resident Bob Lund graduated from college with a degree in English, he had two choices—enroll in either journalism school or law school.
At first, journalism felt like the right choice—Lund had spent his college career at Hamilton College in New York working for the school’s newspaper and writing short stories and poetry. But, he says, “My advisor and school basically said, ‘Look, there aren’t any jobs there.’” Financially, law school made the most sense. “I think some people would say it was a cop out,” Lund says. “But going to law school and taking the career path that I did … from an economic standpoint, [it] was clearly the right choice.”
After he finished law school at what is now known as Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Lund worked as a corporate lawyer for Twin Cities financial institutions for more than three decades and served as the CEO of a mid-sized company for 12 years, which left him with little time to write creatively. In 2018, Lund stepped away from his CEO position to open his own law practice. With more time on his hands, he decided to return to writing.
“I always in the back of my mind thought, ‘You should have done more in terms of the artistic side [of writing].’ And I always kind of regretted that,” Lund says. “So, when I knew I was going to have more time, I thought … ‘[I’ll] just give it a try.’”
Inspired by author Stephen King’s mysteries and Wallace Stegner’s westerns, Lund wrote his first novel, Treachery, in just two months under the name R.T. Lund. Having grown up in Duluth, Lund used his novel to combine the two spaces he’s most familiar with: the courtroom and the North Shore.
Treachery kicks off in Gooseberry Falls with the murder of a young lawyer, whose recent lawsuit against the Catholic Church threatened to take down the Twin Cities’ archdiocese. As local sheriff Sam MacDonald investigates the case, he unravels a knot of corruption in the church.
“What I really want to do is to try to tell a good story that incorporates a lot of the fallibility … [and] all the ironies that are involved in the world,” Lund says. “There have been a couple lawyers who’ve made a lot of money out of representing the victims in America, so the book also points out those issues.”
For his second novel, A Climate for Death, Lund set his critical lens on climate change. Readers rejoin Sheriff MacDonald as he investigates a mysterious plane crash that implicates an heiress and a congressional candidate, all while surviving one of the North Shore’s coldest winters on record. In 2021, the novel won first place in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards’ Thriller category.
Even with his recent success and a third book set to be released in early 2022, Lund views his writing as a hobby rather than a career. “I don’t need to make any money from my writing at this point,” he says. “I’m doing it because I like to do it … I have fun doing it.”
Treachery and A Climate for Death are available from Amazon and rtlundauthor.com.
