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FIVE BEST
Reading From the Bench
My favorite modern novels set in the legal world.

BY SCOTT TUROW
Saturday, June 17, 2006 12:01 a.m.

1. "Anatomy of a Murder" by Robert Traver (St. Martin's, 1958).

This is the ur-book for much contemporary legal fiction. Traver was the pseudonym for John Voelker, who was sitting as a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court when his novel about a murder trial in the iron-ore country of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan took America by storm. An experienced criminal trial lawyer, Voelker took a new approach to writing about the courtroom, eschewing the melodrama of Perry Mason or the portentousness of the classics in which every case was foremost a symbol for Justice. Voelker contented himself with the workaday details of a trial, believing that the law's very atmosphere of restraint would enhance the essential drama. His narrator, Paul Biegler, is a former prosecutor taking on his first defense. Paul's unsympathetic client is U.S. Army Lt. Frederic Manion, the killer of bar owner Barney Quill, who may or may not have raped Manion's sultry wife. The subject matter was torrid in 1958, but the novel's straightforward approach stands up, and the book still echoes on every page with the authority of a world fully known.

2. "A Passage to India" by E.M. Forster (Harcourt Brace, 1924).

One of the towering achievements of 20th-century literature, this novel is appropriately regarded as a nuanced examination of the British Raj in India and of colonialism in general. Yet its plot is constructed around the trial of an Anglophile Indian doctor for allegedly groping a young Englishwoman during a sightseeing trip. While the preceding events and the aftermath take up the greater part of the action, the legal proceedings mark the dramatic and thematic highpoint, and provide the novel's pivotal moment of transformation. Forster rivaled Chekhov in his total understanding of his characters' shortcomings and his embracing sympathy for them notwithstanding.

3. "Snow Falling On Cedars" by David Guterson (Harcourt Brace, 1994).

A flawless novel, set in rural Washington in the 1950s, in which the murder trial of a fisherman serves as a community ritual to expiate the resentments still seething in the wake of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. An entire universe of social relationships--a shattered love affair, grimy business dealings and an elderly lawyer's devotion to his profession--come to the fore and are tenderly portrayed.

4. The Just and The Unjust" by James Gould Cozzens (Harcourt Brace, 1942).

Once regarded as a major American author, Cozzens has fallen into a state of literary neglect, but this novel about a small-town district attorney undertaking his first murder trial is a gem. Cozzens was a practitioner of American Realism, whose central vision was of the overwhelming dailiness of experience, meaning that even a trial for murder at moments seems ordinary, but the reward is a portrait, unrivaled in its subtlety, of the complications of life as a trial lawyer.

5. "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee (Lippincott, 1960).

Told from the point of view of Scout, an eight-year-old girl, Ms. Lee's novel recounts the fearless defense mounted by Scout's father, Atticus Finch, in behalf of Tom Robinson, a Negro accused of rape, then a capital offense in a small Alabama town in 1935. By now, after 50 years of epochal change--which this novel in its own tiny way helped to inspire--"To Kill a Mockingbird" can read like a close cousin of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a melodrama of race prejudice updated to the Jim Crow era. The truth, however, is that Ms. Lee (a central character in the movie "Capote") was so successful in dramatizing the cruelties of segregation that her book has been tirelessly imitated ever since, with the result that characters once hailed for their startling originality can seem like stock figures. But to notice that, you would have to elude the spell of a novel whose voice remains perfectly pitched and whose ultimate art rests in its escape from its own sentimentality.

Honorable Mention: "American Appetites," by Joyce Carol Oates. A characteristically unique rendering by an American master of the somnambulistic experience of being a defendant on trial.
Mr. Turow's most recent book, "Ordinary Heroes" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), was published in November.

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