Bankrate: Do you think your financial struggles growing up informed your writing?

Baldacci: Yeah. Sometimes you draw your inspirations and literary power from things like that. If all of a sudden you change your lifestyle and become part of the rich and famous, where does the power or emotional drama of your stories come from? I think writers like to remain tethered to their past a little bit because their youth and experiences they had growing up are where they draw their power from.

Bankrate: There is always an aspect of the underdog in your novels that seems to spring from the working class.

Baldacci: It was from that, and also being an outsider. I grew up in Richmond, Va., where if your last name wasn't Lee, Jackson or Stuart, you were considered an outsider. Coming from an ethnic family, I found myself on the outside looking in from time to time, and that's a great position for a writer to be in because writers are supposed to be observers and listen and watch and think about what other people are doing and how they're leading their lives. I spent a lot of time doing that.

The underdog role, I felt that a lot, too. I wasn't the kid whose parents bought them a car when they were 16 and paid for their education and got them set up in life. That's not the way my life happened. And I'm glad that it didn't happen that way, but it does give you that sense of being an underdog from time to time.

Bankrate: Some were surprised that your thrillers are filled with political intrigue, given that your law career had little to do with Washington politics.

Baldacci: No, I wasn't dealing with politics. I did the typical work that a lawyer in D.C. would do. From time to time, I would run into cases that had some tenuous connection to Capitol Hill or politics, but for the most part I litigated cases that were politically neutral and did deals that were the same variety. But all of those were inhabited by real people who had lots of political beliefs. Being in D.C., you read a lot and think a lot and talk to a lot of people and you can't not have opinions about a lot of things. I certainly have developed mine over the years.

Bankrate: "Absolute Power" came out of nowhere to become not only a runaway best-seller but a hit film as well. How did that change your life?

Baldacci: After 15 or 16 years of writing and not having a whole lot to show for it, that was the classic big break that every writer dreams of getting but most of them don't. No one knew I was writing back then, so that was quite a shock to a lot of people, including family and some of my really close friends. But writing was a very personal and private matter for me and that's how I wanted to keep it, but when "Absolute Power" happened, that changed. Up until then, it was just me and my pen and some paper.

Bankrate: At some point, you received a whopper of a check. What did you do with it?

Baldacci: The first thought was, gee, this gives me some independence and freedom, finally, to maybe write full time, which had been in my brain for a decade. We banked it; we put it in the bank and paid off some bills that we had. The big purchase we had, because my daughter was just 1½ back then, was a video recorder because we were missing some important moments in her life. My conservative, fiscal side said OK, this is fine, but what if it never happens again? So we were very conservative, we put it into investments, I continued to practice law and we lived on my paycheck. We didn't go out and do anything crazy.