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Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
Our mystery columnist puts three legal thrillers on trial.
Feb 25, 2000 | It is easy to see why legal thrillers have been so popular in the past decade. The trial attorney is a quintessential '90s hero -- a lone cowboy who gets to wear a white hat with his pinstriped suit. He gets to live up to youthful fantasies of righteous yet cunning iconoclasm while fitting neatly into a highly structured environment, the court, where there is a clear winner and loser. No matter what little quirks are thrown in at the end -- what Pyrrhic victories, what uncollectible judgments, what regretted intentions -- our hero always gets his verdict. He gets to fight authority, and then he gets to triumph in the most obvious, explicit, here-and-now, authoritarian sense. (By "he" I mean the masculine sort of person, not the human sort. The writers I am talking about are men, and their main characters are men. A novel by a Lia Matera or Lisa Scottoline is, in the end, a whole other kettle of counterclaims.)
The court -- like that quintessential '90s vehicle, the SUV -- is where vague notions of adventure can intersect with making it big time. If the lawyer's cause is just and its success depends on his success, there is bound to be some confusion between doing good and doing well -- a confusion that is readily embraced in these stock-enhanced times.
That said -- and I've said far worse -- I should add that I love the genre. The arcane rules! The wiliness! The chicanery! Still, I'm surprised at how many people are writing these things. Although the monetary rewards can be great -- John Grisham's glow could not be more golden -- the form is one of the most rigid I know. A trial is a trial; every reader is familiar with its shape. A defense attorney, a prosecutor, the accused, a judge, some witnesses: The cast of characters is as inflexible and unwieldy as the court building itself. (Civil cases are the exception.) It is a rare legal thriller that does not feature the defense attorney as the hero. Vogues in murderers come and go (for a while the judge was popular), but in the end you're still stuck with the same old cast members. Fooling with the witnesses can at least give you some elbow room, and three new mysteries pay special attention to them.
In "Nothing but the Truth" John Lescroart, the most flavorful of legal-thriller writers, starts off in happily predictable fashion. Ditmas Hardy, his hard-drinking defense attorney, is in court while three cases are summarily dealt with: comedy, tragedy, triumph. Bam, bam, bam. Then Hardy's office calls: His wife has not picked up the kids at school. Now that we have seen the court process from the outside, we move to the inside. The point of view switches to the wife, who has been called in front of a grand jury. The assistant district attorney bullies her; she keeps saying she has to go get her children; he misleads her; she in fact does know something about a friend she has promised not to reveal; the ADA sneers and insinuates; she loses her temper and ends up in jail.
Robert Benchley once wrote an essay in which he fantasized about being a successful witness. When the opposing attorney snidely cross-examines him, he maintains his composure with just enough irony to amuse the judge. This fantasy must be all the more prevalent now, thanks to "Court TV": How would I do up there on the witness stand? As an answer, what happens to Hardy's wife emerges full-blown from a nightmare.
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