Legal Thriller Research Articles

Making Peace with the Past: Detective on the Couch

I have to admit that I love mysteries and thrillers as much as I loved fairytales as a kid. Thus, I was excited when we decided to include an occasional mystery review in the journal’s literary resources column. But then I started to ponder...which mystery or thriller to start with? One of the Nordic psychothrillers that are getting more and more gruesome lately? Or some masterpieces of the hardboiled school, such as one of Chandler’s or Hammett’s books not many readers remember anymore? Then, my unconscious acted decisively and the name of Gianrico Carofiglio and the title of his book, The Silence of the Wave, popped up in my mind. Gianrico Carofiglio is an author with an interesting background—a former anti-Mafia prosecutor involved in investigation of corruption, human trafficking, and organized crime, turned Italian senator, turned novelist. To those familiar with his work, he is mostly known for the Guido Guerrieri (defense lawyer) legal thriller series. However, The Silence of the Wave is a bit different “mystery.” It intertwines three story lines—psychiatry sessions of the hero, carabiniere Roberto; his life and reflection upon it; and dreams of a boy named Giacomo. They all come together in an intriguing finale. Roberto grew up in California, where his father was a policeman. After his father killed himself upon being imprisoned for taking bribes, Roberto and his mother move to his mother’s native Italy. In one session with his psychiatrist, Roberto emphasizes that he is angry with his father “not so much because of the offenses he committed, but because he killed himself and left me alone. Damn it.” (p. 112). Interestingly, in Italy, Roberto becomes a policeman. Because he speaks Spanish, he is recruited to become an undercover agent involved in many international drug operations. As he explains to his psychiatrist, “There are always more drug cases. Potentially, there’s no end to them. The idea that you can defeat the phenomenonwith carabinieri and judges and trials is complete nonsense...the only way to wipe out the whole system and literally bring the Mafia to its knees would be to legalize drugs” (pp. 29, 30). Roberto is good at his job and, at the beginning, likes to live with criminals with whom he is “working” while undercover and having a lot of money. He gradually realizes that this is not how he wants to live, however. During one session, he describes episodes when he felt totally ashamed and helpless, such as watching young girls being raped by narcotraffickers and not being able to do anything about it. His undercover career culminates in one operation after which Roberto became totally disenchanted with his work. He becomes uninterested and depressed and one day is found by one of his colleagues “with a gun in his mouth, wondering if you really didn’t feel any pain when you shot yourself in the head at such close range” (p. 55). There is another reason for his depression, profound guilt, and suicidality, as we find later during one of his sessions...but that is one of the mysteries left to the reader to discover. As mentioned, Roberto ends up seeing a psychiatrist, getting medication, and being in therapy. He is an astute observer who broods about many aspects of therapy. When noticing that his psychiatrist has a separate entrance and exit to his office/waiting area, he contemplates, “Waiting to see a psychiatrist isn’t like waiting to see an orthopedist, for example. No one has any problem admitting he has something wrong with his ankle or his knee. Nobody has any problem meeting an acquaintance in a dentist’s or an ENT’s waiting room. On the contrary, they have a chat and time passes more quickly. But practically everyone has a problem admitting there’s * Richard Balon rbalon@wayne.edu

Forcing the spring: inside the fight for marriage equality

*A New York Times Notable Book of the Year* * A Washington Post Best Book of the Year (Nonfiction)* * A Kirkus Best Book of the Year* Jo Becker has written a riveting history of one of America s great court cases. She captures our struggle for freedom and its epic sweep just perfectly. Future generations will turn to her book to understand Proposition 8 from its inception its journey to the Supreme Court, along with special insights into the remarkable DOMA victory led by the legendary Edie Windsor. --David Mixner, LGBT Activist and Author of Stranger Among Friends and Brave Journeys: Profiles in Gay and Lesbian Courage [A] riveting legal drama, a snapshot in time, when the gay rights movement altered course and public opinion shifted with the speed of a bullet train... Becker s most remarkable accomplishment to weave a spellbinder of a tale that, despite a finale reported around the world, manages to keep readers gripped until the very end. --The Washington Post A groundbreaking work of reportage by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jo Becker, the is the definitive account of five remarkable years in American civil rights history, when the United States experienced a tectonic shift on the issue of marriage equality. Focusing on the historic legal challenge of California s ban on same-sex marriage, Becker offers a gripping, behind-the scenes narrative told with the lightning pace of a great legal thriller. Taking the reader from the Oval Office to the Supreme Court ruling, from state-by-state campaigns to an astounding shift in national public opinion, Forcing the Spring political and legal journalism at its finest.

The Lifeboat

Charlotte Rogan's The Lifeboat is an interesting oceanic story about an accident at sea, the grim time survivors spend aboard a lifeboat, and the legal aftermath for newlywed Grace Winters (Winters), 22, who loses her husband in the wreck. The most compelling element of the novel, aside from its tale of survival and mutiny on the sea, is the series of legal complications and issues which centers the book.The Lifeboat also bears almost the same title as a 1944 Alfred Hitchcock movie for which John Steinbeck wrote the story treatment (Lifeboat). Steinbeck was unhappy with the film and asked that his name to be removed from the credits, but ironically was nominated for an Oscar for his efforts (although Hitchcock also did bring in other writers to adapt and change the story for the big screen). Both Rogan's novel and Steinbeck's screenplay have produced memorable oceanic stories which, though rooted in history, tell universal stories. Sadly, the new book is more of a legal thriller than a successful statement of the human condition. Told mostly in flashbacks, Rogan's book is an effective story about personal development. Winters, who must fend for herself among strangers and the elements without her husband Henry, learns profound lessons about society, survival, and the law. This tale is more elaborate than Steinbeck's screen treatment for the Hitchcock movie Lifeboat.After a shipwreck caused by an explosion in 1914, Winters is cast on the sea among strangers on a lifeboat which has too many people aboard and weighs down heavily in the water. These people do not have sufficient provisions for a long period on the sea. Therefore, they need to get rid of some on the boat, and they find it is necessary to prevent some survivors of the wreck from getting into the boat. Winters is a survivor and adapts to her predicament, which results in her being included along with some of the crew mates who must face being put on trial for their actions aboard the ship. There is mutiny and murder among the crew who struggle to survive. They also fight among themselves to stay out of the water. The ocean is portrayed as a grim wilderness, and the characters must persevere. They do not find as much fish as they would like to eat, and it is not safe to drink sea water. Unlike the shipwreck survivors in the Hitchcock film, these survivors do not need an enemy combatant on the ship.The writing about the sea is not very spectacular, but Rogan makes it clear that the vacation for the crew is over, especially for Winters who is now without a spouse: “Now, however, I knew he was in the sea, lurking there, hand in hand with Hardie, rising up in these big waves and splashing down random pieces of himself in our boat” (253). The structure of the book detracts from a full appreciation of the story, leaving readers waiting for answers to major questions. The book, however, is compelling, as are the plot elements for which readers await resolution. Winters learns some practical, but debatable lessons from the experience: “I replied that … perhaps there was a more profound point to be made about innocence, that perhaps a person could not be both alive and innocent.” (237). While the court case is clearly presented, it is not resolved until close to the novel's end. Winters emerges as a survivor of the harsh sea, the grim and sometimes dangerous crew mates, personal loss, and an intrusive legal system. While the book does become a page-turner, it does not update Steinbeck's story. Also, it lacks the seriousness of Steinbeck's work, which can be seen as a parable of the human condition. Nevertheless, it is a more contemporary treatment.

Sensitivity to Genre in Literary Translation

The article analyzes genre-related issues in the process of literary translation. The research is based on the analysis of genre of two novels that belong to the genre of contemporay thriller: Dan Brown’s technothriller Digital Fortress (1998) (Lithuanian translation “Skaitmeninė tvirtovė”, 2005, by Jonas Čeponis) and John Grisham’s legal thriller Firm (1998) (Lithuanian translation “Firma”, 1997, by Romualdas Petraitis and 2008 by Jonas Čeponis). Particular choices made by the author may become clear analyzing the genre that a book belongs to; however, the translator’s responsibility lies in translating the source text (ST) within the boundaries of the same genre. The features of a technothriller and legal thriller as a subgenre of the detective novel are analyzed to determine the role of genre in the process of translation and to demonstrate how the qualities of these types of thrillers are conveyed in Lithuanian versions of the novels. Since the novel contains a great number of professional (technical and legal terms), the discussion of the translation of professional vocabulary, as genre-specifying determinant, has been a part of the research. However, the focus of the research is to discuss the awareness of genre during the process of translating contemporary popular fiction and to investigate the translator’s role and attitude — sensitivity to or disregard of genre-related issues. It has been determined that sensitivity to genre and, thus, to the function of the text, is one of the most important factors in discussing the general quality of translation.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.20.1138

The Life and Times of Perry Mason: The Evolution of Today's Legal Thrillers

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012 9 PHOTO: EVERETTCOLLECTION E rle Stanley Gardner lasted only one month in Indiana’s Valparaiso University law school. More interested in boxing than law, he organized illegal matches and later bragged he was suspended for punching a professor. Whatever happened, the school swiftly showed him the door. This didn’t augur well for a young man who had only completed high school and just entered his twenties. His story, however, took one of those twists stranger than his fiction . Gardner’s wealth and worldwide fame would come about because of his creation of fiction’s most famous lawyer, Perry Mason. Gardner was a tireless man who would accumulate seven pseudonyms and write over 150 novels, but first he studied law on his own while working as a typist. He passed the California Bar exam in 1911, about a year after leaving Valparaiso. He practiced for a while, getting whatever clients he could among the Chinese and Mexican immigrants, took a job as a tire salesman for a few years, then returned to the law, joining a firm in 1921. He began to write at night—thousands of words each night—banging away for two years before getting his first pulp publication . The floodgates opened. He became Black Mask’s most prolific author and appeared in many other magazines, both pulps and slicks. In 1932 he earned $20,000 writing short stories, no mean sum in the Depression and an enormous output in the heyday of a penny a word. Perry Mason’s debut came in 1933 with Gardner’s first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, and continued through eighty-nine titles, several of which were published after his death. The first screen appearance of Mason, starring Warren William, followed a year after his debut in The Case of the Howling Dog. Three others with William and then one TheLifeandTimesofPerryMason The Evolution of Today’s Legal Thrillers CRIME&MYSTERY INTERNATIONAL J. MADISON DAVIS Raymond Burr as Perry Mason in the CBS series that aired from 1957 to 1966. 10 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY with Ricardo Cortez followed. (Both of these actors share the distinction , coincidentally, of playing the Sam Spade character in pre-Bogart adaptations of The Maltese Falcon.) Warner Brothers played loose with Gardner’s characters. Perry Mason became a gourmet and a sophisticate, more like S. S. Van Dyne’s popular Philo Vance. Mason even marries his secretary Della Street in one of these movies, destroying the will-theywon ’t-they game Gardner played so successfully through years of the television series. Forawriterusuallymoreobsessed withpaychecks,Gardnerwasnothappy with Warner Brothers. He insisted on control of his characters in the future, a major reason CBS television’s Perry Mason (1957–68) was so successful. There was sufficient romantic possibility in Perry Mason that CBS also proposed a soap opera (which became The Edge of Night) based on the novels , but Gardner refused to let them use his characters’ names. He even exerted control over casting the television series. Raymond Burr generally played a “heavy,” like the murderer in RearWindow, a cop, or other such roles. He supposedly showed up to audition for Hamilton Burger, Mason’s nemesis, but Gardner took one look at Burr and immediately chose him as Mason, over network objections. Burr’s dark sex appeal attracted women viewers, widening the audience, and perhaps producing a significant shift in television to less pure heroes. To create Mason, Gardner had drawn from his own experiences at the inelegant end of the law. Mason never appeared in short stories, but one of Gardner’s continuing characters was attorney Ken Corning, who represents clients framed by corrupt police and officials. American crime fiction from the 1930s casts a skeptical eye on John Law, and police are uncommon as heroes until the postwar period. In 1937, incidentally, Gardner flipped the roles of his main characters by creating a series in which Doug Selby, district attorney, must outwit a crafty shyster. Mason, it must be said, is about 50 percent shyster himself, although he is always on the side of the innocent. As the novel series became more popular, Mason’s toughness softened to make him more palatable for serialization in the...

The Life and Times of Perry Mason: The Evolution of Today's Legal Thrillers

The Life and Times of Perry Mason: The Evolution of Today's Legal Thrillers

Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Powerby Joseph Margulies

<i>Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power</i>by Joseph Margulies

The Man Who Emptied Death Row: Governor George Ryan and the Politics of Crime

The Man Who Emptied Death Row: Governor George Ryan and the Politics of Crime. By John S. Jackson. (Southern Illinois University-Carbondale) Is this politics or is this a crime? (158) This quote, taken from Prosecutor Patrick Collins's summation of the government's case against George Ryan, effectively captures the central question of the book. It is a question not entirely answered in any definitive way by the narrative of the book. Basically the book resembles a good legal thriller in that it provides a lively and interesting account of the case against George Ryan and his co-defendants. It also provides a good insight into the Ryan era and Illinois politics. The book attempts to get inside George Ryan's head and figure out why he did what the federal government convicted him of doing. There it encounters rougher going, and at the end the reader is left with no completely satisfactory answer to that most profound question. Given how smart and experienced Ryan was, given the many comparable Illinois politicians who had gone to jail before him; and given the many signs that the federal government could and likely would prosecute top Illinois politicians if they had grounds, how could Ryan not have seen the handwriting on the wall and changed the way his offices and underlings did business? At the end of the book that compelling question remains unsatisfactorily answered. Perhaps the answer is that there is no final accounting for human nature, and a deep understanding of an idiosyncratic personality like George Ryan is not possible with the methods of standard investigative reporting. Perhaps those teleological questions are ultimately unanswerable and unknowable outside the confines of philosophy and theology. Even with that most basic question hanging unanswered within the covers of this book, it is still an interesting and useful summary and review of the downfall of one of the leading recent figures in Illinois politics. This book reads like a well-crafted morality play about the corrupting influences of money and power in politics. Indeed it uses at the end of the book the Illinois of as an all-purpose answer to why anyone would do the things Ryan and his associates were convicted of, much less think they could get away with it. Maybe better than the ubiquitous of corruption, the more relevant explanation is the potential for corruption inherent in all human nature. In other words, it may be an individual level explanation rather than a cultural explanation for this tale of original sin. People are ultimately responsible for their actions; culture is not. However, it is important to add to the balance the counterweight on the other side of the equation. George Ryan did a lot of things right in Illinois politics. He was an effective governor; he passed a $12 billion capital bill to build infrastructure, which will serve the people long after he is gone. Ryan made compromises and deals with other strong leaders and kept the process of government, especially the legislative process moving along. And it moved generally in a direction that was good for the State of Illinois in many respects. Compared to the stalemate and government-by-outsizedego seen in Blagovich-era, Illinois politics, there is much to recommend the Ryan years and much to recommend at least the legal part of the traditional political process in Illinois. …

Errors and Omissions

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessErrors and OmissionsPatricia R. Recupero J.D., M.D.Patricia R. Recupero J.D., M.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Dec 2007https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2007.58.12.1615AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail In this legal thriller by first-time novelist and intellectual property law expert Paul Goldstein, we meet Michael Seeley, protagonist of Errors and Omissions, when the author opens with "The worst part of being drunk before breakfast is the hangover that returns before noon." Seeley is an artists' rights lawyer whose successful career seems to be next on the list of casualties in the war between the bottle and man. Goldstein wastes no time in drawing the reader in to witness the spectacle of Seeley's drunken misbehavior in a judge's chambers, followed by a glimpse into his failing marriage and floundering career. His partners give him a humiliating ultimatum: take a case he doesn't want or lose his job. Seeley takes the case but stops short of agreeing to sign a fraudulent opinion. The novel is a suspense-driven mystery with a strong film-noir feel, somewhat far-fetched in its premise but well suited to the Hollywood setting where much of the action takes place. Goldstein weaves a number of interesting subplots into the story, including the Communist blacklist in the mid-20th century and its impact on Hollywood, the Nazis, and the cutthroat code of modern corporate politics. This book has all of the elements of a well-crafted mystery except for a sympathetic main character.Seeley's alcoholism may be one of the central themes in the plot, but at times it seems superficial. One understands why the author would need his main character to remain sober throughout much of the story; it's hard to play detective or to conduct business while drunk. However, the author has not taken adequate time to give some much-needed depth to Seeley's character. As a consequence, he seems to be a caricature of a hero with an Achilles' heel. Other characters are often used as shallow "bad guys" who are all out to get him, whether by humiliating him through his alcoholism or by tempting him to give up sobriety—one character even refuses to conduct business with Seeley unless he shares a drink with the man. Such moments often seem out of sync with the other characters' roles in the book. Undoubtedly, this is often how Seeley—who comes across as rather narcissistic and passive-aggressive—sees the world: he is the victim/hero, and the others are his tormentors, who secretly delight in his failure.Toward the end of the novel, the narrative waxes philosophically: "How little we know about the motives of those we would let control us … the long line of … oppressors, real and imagined. Our ignorance gives them a power over our lives that none of them would even dream of; our attempts to undermine their authority work only to enhance it … . We are victims of victims." Goldstein should have spent the time to elaborate on these themes more clearly throughout the story!Goldstein is at work on his next novel featuring Michael Seeley. One hopes that next time, Seeley might have more insight into the difference between abstinence and sobriety.Dr. Recupero is clinical professor of psychiatry at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and president and chief executive officer of Butler Hospital, Providence, Rhode Island. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 58Issue 12 December, 2007Pages 1615-1615PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES December 2007 Volume 58 Number 12 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2007 Published in print 1 December 2007

John Grisham’s Megabestsellers

110 million copies of John Grisham’s books have been published so far, and Grisham is now at the head of an elite of five “megabestselling” authors. Courted by Hollywood (ten screen adaptations so far), heavily promoted by the book industry and its distribution channels, Grisham’s international success makes him the number one world-wide bestselling author. Grisham cooked up his own recipe: a legal thriller which defies Todorov’s typology but which includes a certain number of the usual detective novel ingredients such as Eco’s Superman. The editor turns this market-driven product into one of its “megabestsellers” on which the book industry has now become commercially dependent.

Justice Denoted: The Legal Thriller in American, British, and Continental Courtroom Literature

Justice Denoted: The Legal Thriller in American, British, and Continental Courtroom Literature

Justice denoted: the legal thriller in American, British, and Continental courtroom literature

Justice denoted: the legal thriller in American, British, and Continental courtroom literature

Encyclopedia of pulp fiction writers

From the early days of dime novels to contemporary mass-market paperbacks, pulp fiction is a vital part of popular culture. This volume offers a survey of the scores of well-known and unsung heroes of popular literature. It seeks to cover the entire spectrum of pop literature's greatest entertainers and artists; the multimillion-copy bestsellers; and the inventors of the modern genres, such as the western, the hardboiled detective novel, the spy thriller, science fiction, horror, the legal thriller, crime fiction and the erotic/romance novel. The work also profiles colourful but lesser-known underground figures, as well as a wide variety of talented paperback authors who were never given their due. Each of the 200 entries includes a brief biography along with a list of the author's writing credits. The authors covered include: V.C. Andrews; Ray Bradbury; Jackie Collins; Lester Dent; Ian Fleming; Erle Stanley Gardner; David Goodis; Zane Grey; Chester Himes; Louis L'Amour; H.P. Lovecraft; Mario Puzo; Jacqueline Susann; and more.

This Is Your Book: Marketing America to Itself

In February 2001, Knopf Publishing Company, a division of Random House, reportedly purchased the rights to publish two novels by Stephen L. Carter for $4 million. As the Daily Variety Gotham stated, “Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter emerged from the ivory tower last week and shook the book world from its February doldrums” (Bing 43). And the New York Times wrote, “The advance is among the highest ever paid for a first novel and is all the more unusual because of the author's background. Mr. Carter, 46, is an African-American who has written several works of nonfiction, including ‘Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby’ and ‘The Culture of Disbelief‘” (Kirkpatrick, “Knopf”). Whether this purchase is considered “unusual” because it is a first novel or because the author is African American, it is part of an important shift for American literature: the jacket art, prepublication publicity, and sales materials shape this novel as a mainstream, blockbuster, best-selling legal thriller, not as an African American novel per se. The mainstream feel of Carter's novel brings up pertinent questions about race, literature, and the marketing of ethnic identity in the United States. Looking at the positioning of this novel allows us to understand how the publishers, newspaper reporters, and marketers have planted seeds that will influence the reception of the text by reviewers and readers.

Interrogating Judicial Bodies: Women and the Legal Thriller

There are heroes in this world: they are called district attorneys. They don't get to have clients, people who smile at them at the end of the trial, who look them in the eye and say thank you. Nobody is there to appreciate the district attorneys, because we work for the state, and our gratitude comes only from knowing there is a tide out there, a tide the size of a tsunami, coming out of a bottomless cesspool, a tide, which, left unchecked, will rob every American of his freedom. A tide which strips individuals of the privilege of being able to walk down a dark street, or take $20 out of an ATM machine without the fear of being mugged. All Congress does is talk, but it is the district attorney who grabs his sword, who digs into the trenches and fights the fight, who dogs justice day after day after day, without thanks, without so much as a simple pat on the back, but we do, we do it, we do it because we are the crusaders, the last frontier of American justice, knowing that if a man cannot feel safe, he can never, never feel free.'