With the Christmas break just round the corner, lawyers can tuck into a feast of books that offer fictional and factual themes.

James Morton gives his selection of the best of them

Mr Hardieby Henry Archer The Book Guild, hardback, 16.95

One of the more interesting of the pre-Second World War judges was Mr Justice McCardie, who killed himself in his rooms in St James' over, it was said, gambling debts.

The story went that his body was discovered when blood trickled through the ceiling on to the dining table of the flat below.

His son, Henry Archer, shows this part of the tale is apocryphal.

It was McCardie's secret Jewish mistress who telephoned the police.

There was, naturally, a major service with tributes to McCardie and mention of the judicial burden which had eventually broken him.

It was a good example of an establishment cover-up.

Some years later, Sybille Bedford told part of McCardie's tale in her fact-based novel Jigsaw; the heavy gambling - stocks and shares and greyhounds were equally attractive to him - the furtive relationship with the woman who was never introduced to his colleagues at the bar and who had to sneak into his flat; the increasingly unhealthy interest in sex cases; and the ultimate crash.

It was only half the tale.

Well before his Jewish mistress, McCardie had conducted another secretive and long-running relationship with Mayna Archer, by whom he had an illegitimate son, Henry, the author.

This time, the girl was from a working-class family in Norfolk.

Mr Hardie was the name by which his son knew him, and, unsurprisingly, rather disliked him.

This memoir is not only that of McCardie but also of Mr Archer's own troubled upbringing, with its taint of illegitimacy, financed by the judge's family.

Henry Archer gained a double first, flew with the RAF during the war, became a civil servant, and wrote two novels in the 1950s and 1960s.

Nevertheless, it is McCardie's life and his judicial problems, particularly over the so-called Amritsar libel case in 1924, in which he clearly backed the claimant, which will be of most interest to lawyers.

Mr Archer died while still working on the book which, at the time, had four alternative endings.

If judicial biographies were still in fashion, McCardie would surely be first in line for a full-length portrait.

As it is, Mr Archer's wife has now completed the manuscript and it is a most attractive account of bygone years and attitudes.

The Man Who Lost Himselfby Robyn AnnearRobson, paperback, 12.99

The arrival of DNA has removed a good deal of fun from things.

Take the great Victorian case, the Tichborne claimant, as an example.

DNA would have dealt with it in five minutes flat.

As it was, the nation was enthralled for years over the question of whether Arthur Orton, or Thomas Castro as he was also known - a more or less illiterate butcher from Wagga Wagga and possibly the Australian town's most famous son - was indeed Roger, the long-lost son of the widowed dowager Lady Tichborne, thought to have drowned more than 20 years earlier.

Despite the fact her son had a thin face and Orton a large round one, he could not speak French which Roger could, nor could he remember any of his former friends at Stoneyhurst, she certainly thought he was, as did the family solicitor and, at first, an old friend.

In 1871, a case to establish Orton's claim to the title was heard.

He produced 100 witnesses in his favour and ranged against him were 17 family members and friends.

The case lasted 102 days and the subsequent trial of Orton for perjury, nearly twice as long.

In between the cases, he toured the country, raising funds for his defence.

Thousands turned out to see him and believed in his case.

In the end, he received a 14-year sentence and on his release became a music hall turn.

Robyn Annear has marshalled the facts neatly and arranged a splendid gallery of fakes, profiteers and lunatics including Orton's counsel, Edward Kenealy, for our entertainment.

An Underworld at Warby Donald ThomasJohn Murray, hardback, 20

It is generally accepted that the Second World War was Britain's Prohibition, so far as the criminal classes were concerned.

With dozens of prohibitive emergency orders being made in Parliament, here was an opportunity beyond their wildest dreams.

Now middle-class women were prepared to deal with black marketeers to obtain extra food, clothes, cigarettes and petrol coupons.

Government offices were raided for ration books.

The bombing provided a great opportunity for looting and, dressed as air-raid wardens, thieves were often inadvertently assisted by members of the public to clear stock from damaged shops.

The blackout and subsequent ban on car lights helped getaway drivers enormously.

Seeing the opportunities available, people who would not normally commit crime helped themselves.

In 1943, thefts from railway stations exceeded 1 million (40 million in today's terms) and the next year the figure almost doubled.

A new generation of criminals was born.

Professor Donald Thomas, whose literary output ranges from poetry through more than a dozen novels and half a dozen biographies, has in recent years produced some fine books on crime.

His latest is an impressive trawl through the newspapers of the time, showing just how the underworld profited at the expense of the government and the public generally.

However, in a curious way, Prof Thomas has decided to concentrate on the lower end of the market rather than the criminal carriage trade.

The Messina brothers, pimps who made a fortune out of prostitution in London, hardly rate a mention.

Jack Spot, who ran much of east London and Soho crime after the war, and whom Prof Thomas genuinely rates, was 'to be a Mr Big'.

He never reappears in the text.

These omissions apart, the book is a wonderfully entertaining read.

Language and Power in Courtby Janet CotterillPalgrave, hardback, 45

Linguists, as opposed to lawyers, see a jury trial as a process of storytelling.

Ms Cotterill has taken the OJ Simpson criminal trial, distinguishing between story and narrative, and has analysed language patterns used by jury, lawyers and witnesses.

Here were top-class US lawyers getting themselves in incredible tangles with witnesses, lay and expert alike.

Much of the book will be gobbledegook to a lawyer, just as much law will seem to be gobbledegook to a linguist, but advocates could do a great deal worse than to look at and learn from the structure of the dialogue in the trial.

Act of Godby Susan R SloanTime Warner, paperback, 6.99A Long Decemberby Donald HarstadFourth Estate, paperback, 10.99

Susan Sloan and Donald Harstad, a trial lawyer and former deputy sheriff respectively, have each provided an entertaining read to while away the holiday period.

In Act of God, Seattle lawyer Dana McAuliffe has the unenviable task of defending a man accused of blowing up an abortion clinic.

At the beginning of A Long December, long-serving Carl Houseman is trapped in a shoot-out.

For McAuliffe, her personal life is unravelled as she attempts to challenge the evidence against her client.

Houseman tries to find out just how two elderly brothers came to witness what appears to be a routine gangland execution.

In neither book is life exactly what it seems and the plots twist and turn agreeably.

Lawyers will no doubt enjoy the long trial and investigation sequences which US writers do so well.

The Book of Criminal QuotationsEdited by JP BeanArtnick, paperback, 12.99

Finally, a stocking filler or something for the office waiting room: JP Bean's collection of entertaining, and often apposite, comments by criminals, lawyers and judges on their lives, careers, hopes and the legal system in general.

All the usual suspects are there but Mr Bean has found some real gems.

They include Pearl O'Loughlin, accused of murdering her step-daughter - 'You can't hang me if I don't confess.

You don't think I've been a detective's wife for two years for nothing'; the German Christa Lehmann, who thought along the same lines and poisoned her husband, in-laws and a friend - 'I don't suppose I should have done it but I love to go to funerals'; Jack Abbott, who killed again after his first release -'No one has ever come out of prison a better man'; and Judge HC Leon - 'I think a judge should be looked upon rather as a sphinx than as a person.

You shouldn't be able to imagine a judge having a bath'.

James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist