The Judge's List

The legal thriller is generally regarded as a variation on the courtroom drama, which itself has been in existence far longer than is generally recognized. The earliest recorded courtroom drama could be considered to be The Oresteia, a trilogy of tragedies written by the Greek playwright Aeschylus in 458 BCE. The third play in the trilogy, Eumenides, is a courtroom drama in which Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra, is put on trial for the murder of his mother. Orestes is acquitted by the goddess Athena, thus putting an end to a multigenerational saga of familial murder and revenge.

Without ever entirely disappearing, the genre resurfaced in the mid-16th century. The public at the time had an insatiable fascination for particularly scandalous trials, and lawyers often published accounts of actual trials for popular entertainment. During that period, French lawyer François Richer reported that he made a point of structuring his accounts to build suspense and maintain the readers’ interest. At a time when popular entertainment was less ubiquitous than it is now, crime and the law offered a form of dramatic entertainment.

The legal drama returned to popular fiction in the mid-19th century with authors like Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White, The Moonstone) and Charles Dickens (Bleak House). Even Abraham Lincoln in 1846 wrote “The Trailor Murder Mystery,” which was based on a case he defended. Collins combined the defining elements of the legal drama into one story: the detective, the innocent suspect, and the legal system.

The iconic lawyer protagonist of the courtroom drama appeared in the 1930s. Perry Mason was created by lawyer Erle Stanley Gardner, though Gardner probably based Perry Mason on Melville Davidson Post’s Randolph Mason, a very similar character. Perry Mason starred in 81 books, each of which saw Mason defend an innocent person arrested for murder. In the popular television series, Mason virtually always won the case by provoking—through sometimes dubious courtroom shenanigans—a spontaneous confession on the stand by the actual murderer. Despite the undeniable entertainment value, this was criticized as being unrealistic. Courtroom dramas became more realistic with Anatomy of a Murder (1958) by Michigan Supreme Court Justice John Voelker, writing as Robert Travers.

Today, audiences distinguish the legal thriller from the courtroom drama with the distinction that in the legal thriller, the reader often knows the guilty party from the outset, whereas in the courtroom drama, the goal is to discover the identity of the murderer. In the Perry Mason stories, for example, the audience knows that the defendant is innocent, but they are unaware of the identity of the guilty party. In Grisham’s stories, on the other hand, the criminal is usually identified at the outset, and the task of the lawyer protagonist is to gather evidence and successfully prosecute them.

Following the success of Perry Mason, lawyer authors continued to write courtroom drama and thrillers, but Grisham gave the genre a significant boost with his first novel, 1989’s A Time to Kill. The tension of that story lies in the question of whether a guilty man can or should be exonerated under some circumstances. A large part of Grisham’s appeal stems from his treatment of universal themes of right and wrong. The minutiae of the law are accurate but secondary to the grand themes.