A novel experience
AS LAWYERS BEGIN THEIR SUMMER HOLIDAYS, THERE IS A PLETHORA OF BOOKS WITH A LEGAL THEME FROM WHICH THEY CAN CHOOSE.
JAMES MORTON CASTS A CRITICAL EYE OVER A SELECTION OF THEM
Reversible Errorsby Scott Turow Pan, paperback, 6.99
This is a cracker of a plot.
Arthur Raven, a self-deprecating socially maladroit company lawyer with a schizophrenic sister, is handed a pro bono appeal in a death penalty case.
Ten years earlier, a minor black criminal known as Rommy Gandolph with an IQ of 73 was convicted on his own confession of a triple killing in a greasy spoon.
Now another prisoner comes forward to say he is the real killer and puts up a very convincing argument.
The young district attorney at the first trial, who was far too close to the investigating officer for her own good, is now running for political office.
The trial judge, then hooked on heroin, has done her own time.
Too fantastic? Well, think of the number of judges in the Chicago area alone who have tasted life behind bars.
Is this confession by a dying prisoner just too convenient? Is he protecting a third party?
Mr Turow, himself a lawyer, knows how to get everything from the court scenes.
Sometimes, like John Le Carr, he has a precious way with words and the sex scenes can be skipped, but this exercise in both compassion and cynicism really is him at his best for a long, long time.
The Emperor of Ocean Parkby Stephen L CarterVintage, paperback, 6.
99
If law professor Talcott Garland is unravelling, it is no surprise.
His father, a disgraced former judge, has just died in a wave of publicity.
His sister believes it was murder.
He is approached at the funeral by a gangster who may have been the cause of his father's downfall.
Pieces from his father's prized chess set disappear and then reappear.
His house is trashed.
If that is not enough, he suspects his wife may be carrying on with the town's most prominent lawyer.
After all, she and Talcott cheated on her first husband.
And with his increasingly bizarre behaviour comes the threat to Talcott's tenure at the university.
Covered by acute social observation of university life, this is basically an old-fashioned mystery.
Who (if anyone) killed the judge? And it is none the worse for that.
Those of us who are committed readers of detective novels may work most things out before Talcott.
It is not that he is blind; he just does not want to see.
But, by the end, there are still a few surprises left to fool us.
Love and Dirtby Diane AtkinsonMacmillan, hardback, 15.99
It is not that many years ago that a well-known criminal practitioner lost out on an appointment to the Old Bailey because of his ill-advised and certainly short-lived marriage to a night-club hostess.
The Victorian barrister Arthur Munby, man about London and friend of - among others - the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, would have been in similar difficulties had he aspired to judicial preferment.
His problem was a fascination with working women and he ended up married to Hannah Cullwick, whom he particularly liked to watch 'in her dirt', cleaning boots, steps and chimneys.
Diane Atkinson, working from Munby's papers and Cullwick's diary, has carved a small Victorian cameo of a sexual relationship in which Cullwick was happy to be exploited by 'Massa' as she called Munby who, in turn it seems, genuinely loved her.
The Sixth Lamentationby William BrodrickLittle Brown, hardback, 12.99
Seeking Sanctuaryby Frances FyfieldLittle Brown, hardback, 19.99
Two novels by Catholic lawyers, the first a former priest who was then called to the bar, and the second by a popular novelist, and each concerned with concepts of good, evil, loyalty, betrayal, sin and redemption - all the things which make life worth living.
In Mr Brodrick's novel, a prior is approached by a man claiming sanctuary.
At the same time, the dying Agnes Aubret tells her niece of her betrayal by this man 50 years earlier when she was trying to smuggle Jewish children from Paris.
Ms Fyfield's Theodore Calvert has written a most peculiar will leaving money to his daughters - one a nun and the other who has rejected formal religion.
Most probate lawyers would advise the girls to have it overturned.
There is something in the book of Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus as a handsome and unsettling stranger begins work at the convent, beloved by the inmates but deeply disturbing to the renegade nun.
On Cape Three Pointsby Christopher WaklingPicador, paperback, 10.99
Trends come and go in crime and, indeed, any other sort of fiction.
There is currently a fad for the young upstart businessman, who for some reason or other falls foul of his employers or business rivals, and whose career then spirals downwards at the speed waste is flushed down the sink.
All you really need to know is that Lewis Penn from a lower-middle-class family and working in the higher echelons of international business - his brother is dying in hospital - misplaces confidential papers belonging to a Russian company on which he should be working.
He takes steps to retrieve them and ends with more than he should.
Cut to the chase, from where Mr Wakling - an Australian author and lawyer - piles on the twists and turns.
Joey Pyleby Earl DavidsonVirgin, hardback, 18.99
At a time when jury fixing is 'in the linens' as criminals would say, Joey Pyle's memoirs are instructive.
In two of the major trials in which he was involved, juries were seemingly under attack from one source or another.
Not him, he says, since he was in prison - but he cannot guarantee the actions of his friends.
Mr Pyle was arrested many times and convicted in only a handful.
Who might Mr Pyle be? The answer is that the most successful criminals - like Detroit's Moe Dalitz, who ran with The Purple Gang in the 1920s and ended a revered citizen in Las Vegas - are the ones you have never heard of.
Mr Pyle, whose career has spanned the better part of 50 years, is a genuine criminal's criminal.
He knew and mixed with them all.
He was the best man at Ronnie Kray's wedding, and he knew the Soho pornographers and which coppers of the period could be relied on to help out in times of trouble.
In the background, Mr Pyle was always the adviser and fixer.
The book is at its most interesting when he tells of the US Mafia's efforts to take over gambling in London and his part in the rise of unlicensed boxing.
Body of Evidenceby David BowenConstable, hardback, 18.99
For a time, there was a fashion for memoirs of pathologists.
Famous practitioners such as Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Sidney Smith, Francis Camps and Keith Simpson all wrote about their work.
Now the noted David Bowen takes a gentle canter through his famous cases, and for the past 30 or more years there are few, in the south of England particularly, in which he has not been involved in one way or another.
So Dennis Nilsen, the Jack the Stripper murders, Robert Calvi and the railway murders of the 1980s rub shoulders with the Keith Blakelock case and Rudolph Hess.
Interspersed are a number of cases in which there was no conviction and sometimes no definite cause of death.
It is all pretty low key.
There is some mild criticism of Camps, who Mr Bowen thinks specialised in 'unusual and sometimes specious defence submissions', but there is nothing really that could be described as cutting edge.
However, at the end of the book, there is some criticism of the conduct of the first inquest into the death of the spy, Hess, who - frail to a degree - somehow managed to hang himself.
Mr Bowen was invited to give an opinion following the second post-mortem.
He is certainly unhappy with the suicide verdict and intriguingly he comments that little consideration has been given to the suggestion that Hess was murdered by order of the British government.
What he does not say is why this order might have been given.
James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist
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