Briefcases for Hire: American Hardboiled to Legal Fiction

Abstract

Take a shopworn, dick, softened with bourbon, rumpled at the edges, a piece snug under his arm, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Take an Armani-clad attorney-at-law, all suave urbanity and legalese elocution, a Gucci briefcase dangling from his manicured hand. We are talking night and day, the pauper and the prince, the marginal and the mainstream, right? Well, not quite. Although not wholly obvious at first glance, the premier difference between the American gumshoe from the pages of fiction and the lawyer-hero of contemporary courtroom drama may be that one carries a gun and the other a briefcase. This flies in the face of a common perception that the two genres-hardboiled and legal fiction-have little in common. After all, they are not even of the same era. Tough guy prose peaked in popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, while the legal procedural did not go nova until the 1980s, enjoying its phenomenal success until this very day.1 And yet first impressions can be misleading. Take a look at the heroes, for instance. Both are archetypal, fast-talking urban cowboys, moving through the shark tanks of mean city streets or mean city courtrooms. Both are for hire for a fee plus expenses. Both are reluctant to use force at first, although when push comes to shove neither the PI nor the attorney-at-law will back down from a tangle with the wise guys-or pretty dames, for that matter. As even this thumbnail tableau reveals, the tough guy of the school may be more closely related to the hero of the legal procedural than previously allowed. Could this resemblance be more than a coincidence? For an answer to this question, we will look to two novels that in their own way typify their respective eras, Zeitgeists, and modes of writing. Samuel (Dashiell) Hammett's proto-hardboiled Red Harvest (1929) and John Grisham's novelistic and Hollywood blockbuster, The Rainmaker (1995), usefully highlight a number of the apparent differences and underlying similarities of their respective genres. Taking a closer look at the narrative styles, cultural roots, and socio-historical contexts of these two novels, we aim to establish beyond reasonable doubt the roots of contemporary law fiction. Paying particular attention to the prime mover of the crime and courtroom thriller-the hero, we'll trace how the conjunction hardboiled lawyer plays out in modern-day legal procedurals such as The Rainmaker. Although implicitly, at least, this article joins the debate on aesthetic and cultural merits of popular literature. We take the answer to the question Is there a point in studying genre fiction? as largely settled in the affirmative.2 Quite apart from the demonstrable inaccuracy of critiques aiming to put the aesthetic merit of popular fiction to doubt, this type of elitism is misplaced in the consideration of literature in its socio-cultural context. More to the point, genre fiction is by now a universal forum for the propagation and assimilation of ideas. Commenting on all aspects of contemporary life, it ends up informing, and in some cases even forming, the background of many people's values and beliefs. A good case in point may be the 1927 trial of Ruth (Momsie) Snyder and Henry Judd (Lover Boy) Gray, convicted of murdering Ruth's husband, Albert Snyder. Even though every paper, from Hearst tabloids to the New York Times, covered the sensational hearings, few of us remember anything about Snyder v. Gray. And yet anyone familiar with James M. Cain's classics, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936) -or their movie adaptations (Postman 1946, remake 1981; Oscar-nominated Indemnity 1944)-will recognize the case in a flash. While the names have changed -Cain, a seasoned journalist who covered the Snyder trial on assignment, turned them to Cora, Frank, and Nick in Postman, and to Phyllis, Walter, and Herbert in Indemnity-the circumstances did not. …