Scott Turow’s third and fourth novels are where his practice of doing something different each time, avoiding formulae and patterns, first becomes conspicuous, and they come between the two which mark the high point of his work. One is darkly playful and mischievous, the other seriously ambitious.

I’ve written about Scott Turow’s novels twice before in Talk about books. First, I discussed judicial corruption and aggressive prosecution, which together constitute one of his major recurring themes. Later, I pointed out that each of his novels differs markedly from the ones that went before, as if he’s determined to avoid writing to a formula or even to a vaguer pattern. Taken together, these two posts provide as good an overview of Turow’s fiction as I’m capable of. However, I feel that I haven’t yet finished writing about it. After all, he’s written 14 novels so far, each (according to my hypothesis) quite distinct from the others. There’s more to be said, and more that I want to say.

For this post, I first thought about dealing with two of the outliers — the two books in which he’s most obviously writing something different from a legal thriller set in Kindle County. The books I had in mind are Ordinary Heroes (2005), in which journalist Stew Dubinsky tries to unearth the truth about his father’s conduct during the Second World War, and Testimony (2017), which features the investigation of an alleged war crime in Bosnia. However, while I’ve been meaning to reread Ordinary Heroes for some time, the hardback copy that I bought when it first came out seems to have evaporated, and I haven’t yet managed to work up much enthusiasm for a rereading of Testimony, which I reviewed here, although I suspect that it will turn out to be better than I thought first time around.

So, instead of these two books, I eventually settled on his third and fourth novels, Pleading Guilty (1993) and The Laws of Our Fathers (1996). They’re the two where Turow’s practice of doing something different each time first becomes conspicuous, and they fill the gap between the two that I still think of as the high points of his work, The Burden of Proof (1990) and Personal Injuries (1999).

Though the title might lead one to expect otherwise, Pleading Guilty does not feature a criminal trial or arraignment, or indeed a trial of any kind except a disciplinary hearing at which the disbarment of octogenarian, semi-retired mobster Toots Nuccio seems inevitable. There’s a brutal murder but it’s incidental to the plot and goes unmentioned for most of the length of the story. The main crime at issue is the theft of $5.6 million from an escrow account held by Gage & Griswell, a 140-lawyer firm who act for a major airline.

The narrator, Mack Malloy, has been given the task of finding the missing money and getting it back. Mack is almost 50, a recovering alcoholic, a former cop and an unregarded partner in Gage & Griswell. His narrative consistes of his dictated report on his investigation. It’s by no means a typical legal report. The accompanying memo is marked “Dictated but not read”: he hasn’t checked or revised it, just sent in the tapes to be transcribed. Sometimes he addresses directly the three partners who make up the Management Oversight Committee, sometimes he speculates as to their reactions as they read, he’s often irreverent, profane, even insulting.

The tone of Mack’s report is just one of the indications that, when his investigation is over, he’s not expecting to come back to work. He jokes that, when he finds the missing partner who is presumably the thief, he’ll ask him to share the loot, instead of returning it. As it turns out, although the missing partner had signed the cheques (which were then paid into a bank in a Central American tax haven with strict banking secrecy laws), he didn’t know about the theft and his reasons for disappearing were unrelated.

Mack is well used to seeing authority figures behaving badly. His father, a heroic firefighter, habitually stole jewellry and similar small items of high value from the houses where he put out fires. When the son of the local politician who had got Mack his job in the police needed help to pass his bar exams, Mack sneakily altered the son’s marks. He understood he was being asked for a quid pro quo. The son, Jake Eiger, went on to become General Counsel to the airline and had sent Mack lucrative work, up to the point where Jake’s cousin divorced Mack. Jake would become first the apparent victim, and then the apparent perpetrator, of the theft.

Years earlier, Mack’s police partner, Gino Dimonte (generally called “Pigeyes” by Mack), stole money from a drug bust and gave half to Mack, who (after a few days’ uncertainty) donated it to his sister’s school. Later, he gave evidence against Pigeyes, keeping quiet about his share of the money. Mack wanted to be better than the people who had disappointed him, his father, Jake, Pigeyes. He probably would have preferred to be better ethically but since this is beyond him, he settles for being a better crook.

Mack is smart and cynical and, in some respects at least, very quick on the uptake. He sees, or imagines he sees, through everybody’s motives. When he discovers that the managing partner, Martin Gold, who chairs the committee that asked him to investigate, has been misleading him, he thinks he knows exactly why. At this point, they both believe that Jake is behind the theft. Everybody agrees that, without the airline’s business, Gage & Griswell won’t last long. So Mack concludes that Martin has been protecting Jake in order to avoid a catastrophic drop in income for the firm. But he has misjudged Martin:

“… My God, Mack! Could you really have missed this? Don’t you understand that the point was to offer Jake a discreet way, a last opportunity to give the goddamned bloody money back?” (p. 354)

Martin, who up to this point has remained admirably calm in the face of Mack’s provocations, is finally furious when he realizes that Mack has quite likely pulled down the whole Gage & Griswell edifice, not because he disapproved of what Martin was actually doing but had “been propelled by imagining malefactions far grander” (p. 355). As Martin berates him, calling him a “goddamned dumb bastard”, Mack finds he’s relieved.

When I recovered some sense of myself, I realized I was smiling. I’d misjudged Martin and his complexities. You wouldn’t call his conduct saintly, but he’d done better than I thought — and, God knows, a hell of a lot better than me. (p. 356)

Jake, too, turns out to be far less blameworthy than Mack and others believed. He had written a memo to Bert Kamin (the missing partner), asking him to requisition cheques in favour of a nonexistent company, Litiplex, which cheques had been paid into an offshore bank account. But the deception wasn’t on Jake’s part but instigated by the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Peter Neucriss, who was trying to get a large part of his enormous fee paid in a tax haven. In going along with this, Jake may not have understood that he was abetting tax evasion, though his lack of judgment would still cost him his job — even if he had been able to give back the money.

So there were no real villains. Or at most one or two. One was the person who stuffed the corpse of a hapless actuary/amateur bookmaker into Bert Kamin’s fridge. And Mack was probably another.

I had wanted to believe they were no better than me. All of them. But we think what we do for a reason. Call me a fool or the victim of my own expectations. The one guy I wasn’t wrong about was me. (p. 364)

In the end, Martin Gold is retiring and he doesn’t expect Gage & Griswell to last very long without him. Jake is out of a job (and in danger of prison), and Emilia Bruccia (“Brushy”), the partner that Mack has been closest to, and his sometime lover, is lined up to become the airline’s new General Counsel, Jake’s replacement. Except that Mack’s behaviour might well cost her that position — a possibility that leaves him chillingly unmoved. Early in the story, he tells the reader “I would no sooner try to get a jump on Brushy than I would a hungry panther” (p. 29) but by the end he seems to have reconsidered.

I think I read somewhere a long time ago that Turow wrote Pleading Guilty as a bit of light relief from The Laws of Our Fathers, in which he was stuck. When I first read the later book, I thought it was a misfire, overambitious, attempting to combine too many disparate elements. It’s his longest novel, at 647 pages in the Penguin edition that I read. Until last week I’d never reread it. In retrospect, I think part of my problem with it was that it seemed too much of a departure from the kinds of book he’s written before — it would be a long time before I noticed that doing something new and different each time was actually his trademark.

The plot is based on a frankly contrived situation: a group of characters who had been involved with each other in California in 1969–70 meet again in a Midwestern courtroom in 1995 for an unusual murder trial. As one of the characters remarks, it’s like The Big Chill meets Perry Mason.

The story is divided into three parts, Accusation, Testimony and Judgment. Part 2, Testimony, is by far the longest, taking up 450 pages. While the first part is in the third person, and the third part mostly so, Part 2 consists of the alternating first person narratives of two former lovers, Sonny Klonsky and Seth Weissman. Judge Sonia Klonsky, who is presiding over the trial without a jury, narrates the present-day events, while Seth Weissman, a syndicated newspaper columnist now going by a different name, tells what happened 25 years earlier.

Though he wasn’t particularly suited to the job, Seth used to babysit the 6-year-old son of a Maoist couple, Loyell and June Eddgar. In the 90s, the son, Nile Eddgar, now a probation officer, is accused of paying a gang leader $10,000 to murder his father. In fact it was his mother, who had been driving Loyell’s car, who ended up being killed. Seth’s old best friend, Hobie Tuttle, is defence counsel and Loyell is a reluctant prosecution witness who has also mortgaged his own house to put up Nile’s bail. Seth watches the proceedings with the other journalists and contrives to have some conversations with Sonny, who at first is keen to avoid him because of his close friendship with defence counsel. Seth has kept in touch with Nile, and it was he who referred the accused man to Hobie.

In 1969/70, Seth had been in imminent danger of being drafted, and had intended to escape to Canada. His mother threatened to follow him there if he went, and his father, a refugee from 1930s Vienna, had urged him not to run. The Eddgars persuaded him to help them to raise money for their underground activities by pretending to have been kidnapped. Seth’s father has a similar name (Bernhard as opposed to Bernard) to a very wealthy man, so the Eddgars pretends that Seth’s “kidnapping” was a case of mistaken identity but they still wanted $20,000 before letting him go, to cover “expenses”.

In fact, the supposed kidnapping was cover for a completely different operation. The $20,000 was useful but incidental. Seth himself was tricked, and came away with a lasting hatred of Loyell Eddgar, even though the plot arguably left him better off: he now had a new identity and social security number, and was no longer at any risk of the draft. There was no need for him to run to Canada. He comments, “I have always felt I had been stolen from myself”, and that his new identiy “gave my existence a persistent renegade air” (p. 86).

Eddgar had always seemed the cold-hearted, conspiratorial and calculating mastermind, never present when his wife briefed their Maoist cadres, so that he could never be implicated if things went wrong. When Seth eventually confronts Loyell after the case against Nile has collapsed, a different picture of Loyell emerges: he’s really been a kind of figurehead, there to take the flack, drawing attention away from June, the real organizer. He remains a highly unsympathetic character, not nearly as smart as he sometimes seems — he is, among other things, a university professor — who ends up being excessively punished: he loses his beloved ex-wife, son, reputation (and, most likely, his house, as Nile has jumped bail). The antipathy towards Eddgar shown by Tommy Molto, who is prosecuting the case against Nile, is all the more striking given their similar personalities.

Nile’s trial has been proceeding in a highly unorthodox manner. It’s a murder trial without a jury. Judge, defendant, major prosecution witness and defence counsel were all known to each other years before. Said prosecution witness (Loyell Eddgar) and defence counsel have been colluding — up to the point where defence counsel betrays the witness in crossexamination, puttin to him a theory of the crime which defence counsel knows to be totally false. The prosecutor comes to realize that he has been assigned because nobody else in his office will touch the case, and he’s been set up to fail. The judge feels similarly.

In The Burden of Proof, Sonny Klonsky was an assistant US Attorney, i.e. a prosecutor in the federal system. Here, she’s a judge in the state courts. She’s one of a handful of lawyers of undoubted integrity who were drafted into the state system following a judicial corruption scandal. As an outsider, she’s regarded with suspicion by the old guard, many of whom remain (as will become clear in the next book, Personal Injuries). She, too, suspects that she’s been set up to fail. After a social encounter with Chief Judge Brendan Tuohy, she realizes that the purpose of her assignment is more specific than that: it’s expected that her previous acquaintance with Loyell Eddgar will lead her to exclude evidence that is embarrassing to the local political establishment. To her chagrin, she finds that she has already excluded the evidence — because of Hobie’s tactical disregard of his disclosure obligations — by the time she sees what Tuohy is up to.

After Hobie’s sensational crossexamination of Loyell, the case ends suddenly on an anticlimax. Seeing an opportunity she can’t pass up, Sonny grants Hobie’s application for a mistrial — to Hobie’s utter consternation. It soon becomes clear that the case can’t be retried. The credibility of main prosecution witness, Ordell Trent, known as “Hardcore”, is in shreds.

Hardcore claimed that Nile had paid him to kill Loyell Eddgar. June Eddgar, Nile’s mother, was the one who died. In fact, Nile hadn’t wanted either of his parents dead. As Seth later learned from Loyell, Nile’s actual crimes (into which he had been pressured by Hardcore) were quite different. If he’d been convicted of those crimes, he could never have been released, whereas he could expect to have been out in 20 to 25 years for commissioning the contract killing of his mother. In other words, the defence had to operate within tight constraints.

None of the character says so explicitly, but Hobie presumably feels that his ethically questionable conduct of the defence is justified by the fact that he’s up against the grotesque effects of mandatory minimum sentencing rules, particularly in drugs cases.

One apparent flaw in the novel might be that the characters’ various predicaments in the 1990s don’t obviously have their roots in the same characters’ behaviour in 1970. It might equally be argued that the connection, though not obvious, is real enough. It’s probable that Nile’s erratic behaviour in the later period results from the adults’ neglect of him, and the boy’s loneliness, in the earlier one. His parents were busy fomenting revolution, his babysitter was out of his depth, not at all skilled or interested, and the adult to whom he felt closest, his mother’s lover, Michael, disappeared abruptly.

In the end, Loyell Eddgar tells Seth that he had always loved Nile, from the moment he was born, but had been terrified that he might have to give him up to the revolution (p. 632).

Strained relationships and mutual incomprehension between fathers and sons is one of Turow’s recurring motifs. Sandy Stern is never really reconciled with his gay son, Peter, though he makes an effort. His client in The Last Trial has to skip bail to avoid being convicted of his son’s crimes. Rusty Sabich’s prosecutorial zeal is in part a reaction against his father’s systematic tax evasion. We’ve seen that Mack Malloy similarly reacts against his father’s habitual thefts. Mack himself seems quite happy — even eager — to abandon his teenager, whom he now calls “the Loathsome Child”.

In The Laws of Our Fathers, Seth voluntarily takes part in a plot to defraud his father of $20,000, while putting the old man under the intolerable strain of believing that Seth’s life is in danger. That episode has some echoes in Loyell Eddgar’s ill conceived plan to use his son’s role as a probation officer to try to politicize the Black Saints Disciples, Hardcore’s gang.

In this particular novel, difficult maternal relations also play a part. June Eddgar turns out to have been an even more implacably committed revolutionary than her husband, with no more idea than he had how to cope with a young child. Sonny Klonsky’s mother, too, was a relatively prominent left-wing figure. Unlike the Maoist June Eddgar, Zora Klonsky had been a labour organizer and a Communist. Sonny had clearly loved her mother — one of her main points of conflict with Seth was that he saw Zora as plainly a figure of derision — but their complicated relationship had left Sonny uncertain as to where she belonged in the world. She tried several different postgraduate programmes, starting with Philosophy, before eventually settling on the law. To a friend who said that she was still “working something out” with her deceased mother, Sonny replies:

“I’m always working something out with Zora. I’m working something out with Zora when I send Nikki to school in the morning.” (p.149)

The Laws of Our Fathers is a big, complicated novel that attempts to capture and make something like sense of a crucial period in recent US history. To criticize it as overambitious, as I did on first reading, is — as I now see — to miss the point. Of course it’s overambitious: it could hardly be anything else, attempting what it does.

About my title: At one point, to disrupt Tommy Molto’s examination of Loyell Eddgar, Hobie Tuttle objects that Molto is impeaching his own witness. As narrator, Sonny says:

Lawyers in this country have been allowed to question the credibility of their own witnesses for forty years now. (p. 375)

I hadn’t known that. It makes me wonder why, in legal dramas on film or tv, it’s ever necessary for a lawyer to apply for permission to treat a witness as hostile.

Editions: For Pleading Guilty, I’m using a trade paperback from Quality Paperbacks Direct by arrangement with Penguin Books, 1993. I found it in a secondhand bookshop in the 1990s and it seems to be based on the Farrar, Straus & Giroux edition. The Laws of Our Fathers is a Penguin paperback, 1997. As usual, emphasis is original, ellipses are added.