By Advice of Counsel by Arthur Train

Description

Few Americans have ever known the criminal law from as close as Arthur Train did and then chosen to write about it. Train served as a New York assistant district attorney in the years when the city’s courts were the great theater of American corruption, and he went on to become — before Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason took the crown — the most popular writer of legal fiction in the country. By Advice of Counsel brings together his characteristic material: the shifty practitioners, the detectives, the jurors, the sickening moment when a case turns.

The opening story, “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt,” sets the tone. It begins with a dictionary definition of the shyster and introduces Terry McGurk, whose flung brick through a butcher’s window lands him in the machinery of criminal justice — machinery Train knows so intimately that he can afford to be funny about it. The confidence, the timing, the inside detail are all those of a man who had stood in the district attorney’s office and seen the levers pulled.

Train’s sympathies are broad and modern. He is as interested in the accused as in the accuser, and his stories repeatedly ask what justice actually costs the poor. Written with the crispness of a good court reporter and the moral curiosity of a novelist, By Advice of Counsel is both entertainment and a remarkably candid picture of American law at the turn of the century.

Why readers pick it up

• Genuine insider knowledge of the law, wielded with a storyteller’s timing.
• Sympathetic, sharply drawn portraits of lawyers good and bad.
• The origin of the legal genre so many later writers fed on.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition brings you the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader.