My novel, A Cure for Night, concerns a young lawyer who is fired from his job at an elite law firm after a paralegal he was involved with dies of a heroin overdose. After nearly losing his law license, the narrator becomes a public defender in Brooklyn.
I myself have never been a public defender, in Brooklyn or anywhere else. But when I set out to write the book I wanted it to be an accurate portrayal of the sort of legal practice it depicts. The book thus draws extensively on my own practice as a lawyer, particularly on my experiences representing poor clients. I also conducted an extensive amount of research, and consulted with lawyers who had worked as public defenders in New York. In doing so, I sought to give the book an authenticity which is, to my mind, often lacking in fiction about the law.
For a realistic depiction of the practice of criminal law, the classic courtroom novel remains Anatomy of a Murder, published in 1958 by John Voelker, a Michigan Supreme Court Justice who published the book under the pseudonym Robert Traver. That portrayal of how a criminal defense lawyer actually operates – the way he teaches his client how to shape his own story, the frequently adversarial relationship between attorney and client, the near-total irrelevance of the truth to the courtroom proceedings – has never been done better.
Contemporary legal fiction has two fathers: John Grisham and Scott Turow, two very different writers who publish very different kinds of books. It’s helpful to distinguish between the courtroom novel and the legal thriller, with the foremost current practitioner of the former being Turow and of the latter being Grisham. Grisham’s books are filled with conspiracies, evil corporations, and corrupt government officials. They have chase scenes and things blowing up. I don’t mean this pejoratively – thrillers are supposed to have chase scenes. Indeed, one of the striking things about Grisham novels is how much their plots recall the classic paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, such as The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, a movie whose plot is echoed by The Pelican Brief. In Grisham’s world, big business and government are inevitably corrupt, and the individual who gets in their crosshairs better take off running if he or she hopes to survive.
Turow’s more introspective courtroom novels, on the other hand, are mostly concerned with how the stately machinery of the law intersects with the lives of the messy human being who operate it. The drama in his fiction is usually focused on the workings of the law, and how those workings shape and twist the law’s practitioners. Although Turow’s books generally center on a murder, and certainly have suspense and plot twists, they are not thrillers in the conventional sense – I can’t recall a chase scene in a Turow book, or even a scene where someone broke into a run, for that matter. They are much more concerned with the machinations of the law itself. Even a Turow novel not focused on the actual courtroom, such as Personal Injuries, is nevertheless filled with procedural details, and bears a strong resemblance to how an actual investigation played out in real life.
A legal thriller, then, is a thriller that concerns lawyers; a courtroom novel is a novel in which the drama is focused on the workings of the law. It is safe to say that most law-themed novels that have been published in the wake of Grisham and Turow’s runaway success have been legal thrillers. Such thrillers were ubiquitous in the 1990s, bearing titles that appeared to have been plucked at random from Black’s Law Dictionary: Offer of Proof, Special Circumstances.
In addition to their titles, the other thing that many of the recent crop of legal thrillers often have in common is that the cases in them involve some vast conspiracy reaching to the highest reaches of government. I have nothing whatsoever against conspiracy stories, but in many legal thrillers these conspiracies have been drained of all real content. Rather than trying to say something about how the world works, many contemporary conspiracy stories are simply a tired narrative trope, a way of raising the stakes. But in making their stories so over the top, these legal thrillers lose sight of the inherent drama of an actual criminal case.
I set out to write a courtroom novel that would reflect the reality of the American urban criminal justice system. My novel would not feature a beautiful heiress accused of murder, or a conspiracy whose origins date back to some biblical counter-narrative. The CIA didn’t do it. Instead, I wanted to write a book that would resemble the sort of case that actually make up the docket of this country’s criminal courts. It would be a case in which race and class played a visible role. One in which the defense lawyer was not some thousand dollar an hour wizard with Perry Mason’s ability to spring spontaneous confessions from the witness stand, but rather two young, relatively inexperienced, public defenders whose strategic decisions were tentative and occasionally made on the fly.
While I have tried to write a more human-scale, realistic portrayal of the practice of criminal law, my book is by no means a documentary. When there was a conflict between strict adherence to reality and the narrative demands of fiction, storytelling wins hands down. But the actual conflicts inherent in a murder trial, the ambiguities, contradictions, and outright lies, and the conflicts that such things in turn create in the lawyers who work on such cases, is almost unimaginably rich dramatic material. The legal thriller may occasionally spill over into absurdity trying to continually raise its stakes, but the courtroom, that crucible of conflict, will always have a place in the novel.
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