A Novel
By Michael Connelly
Little Brown and Company, New York, NY; 405 pp., 2008
Everybody lies. Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Witnesses lie. The victims lie. A trial is a contest of lies. Everyone in the courtroom knows this. The judge knows this. That’s my job, to forge the blade. To sharpen it. To use it without mercy or conscience. To be the truth in a place where everybody lies.
These first lines of Michael Connelly’s newest novel, entitled Brass Verdict state the high concept of the story. Most of us probably want to believe that our legal system is based on some concrete logic or steadfast process where only the bad guys go to jail and a higher cause is served.
Recently we’ve watched the widely publicized crimes that high ranking elected officials and appointees have committed such as Scooter Libby, among a long list from G.W. Bush’s cabal, including lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Bush himself.
We’ve watched the trials of Hollywood celebrities. What about the O.J. Simpson trial? Michael Jackson? Robert Blake? And Phil Specter?
Take Phil Specter. He made millions by writing and producing popular love songs. His money helped him out of a pinch when a much younger lady friend wound up with a bullet in her head in his mansion not much material for another love song. Like other celebrities, he used his huge bankroll to set the balance of justice tilting his way. The jury in Phil’s case fell into a hopeless deadlock. Legal experts said Spector financed a highly sophisticated defense. His wealth placed him above the law, literally in the top 1% class. This reality played out on national television, although many of us may have missed the subtle irony of how money swayed the opinions and legal process. Who would dare say that he went so far as to buy a couple of the jurors, maybe a judge?
At some level, Connelly’s fiction is based on a reality that might baffle a middle class notion of the justice system, even though aspects of his Brass Verdict fall right off the front pages of the LA Times.
Another level of his novels pushes the margins of reality into a slightly idealized world of detective work where the old-school Hieronymus (”Harry”) Bosch always gets the bad guy and operates on some magical gut intuition despite, and in spite of, the modern CSI techniques. Bosch is a devoted detective, driven by some personal demon.
Detective Bosch and a cast of other characters are already well dissected in the copious library of reviews on the New York Times. The coverage of the serial law enforcer, Hieronymus Bosch, and the clever criminal defense attorney, Mickey Haller, over the years borders on the gossipy chat of soap opera viewers. At other times, we glimpse into a deeper, darker psychological insight that makes the mystery noir novel series fascinating.
Defense attorney Mickey Haller tells us his story, opening with these lines but even he doesn’t do exactly what he seems to claim. Fans of Connelly’s novels already know that Haller is a lawyer who understands his business, interested in the truth only as much as it will help him to turn a buck. He defends people in trouble regardless of how they get into it. In a previous novel in this series, The Lincoln Lawyer, Haller is a cynic, financially broke from a recent divorce, and who befriends bail bondsmen for client referrals. In Brass Verdict, Haller has pulled himself out of the hole, at least financially, though maybe not morally.
In Brass Verdict, we meet Haller after he suffered a life threatening gunshot and still titters on the edge of an addiction to his prescribed painkillers. Hardly does he emerge from rehab and the court allows him to take over the practice of a murdered attorney, Jerry Vincent.
It wasn’t the 31 cases dropped in his lap that were the difficulty. It was the big one with the big client and highest stakes attached to it. Defense Attorney Michael Haller stepped into the shoes of the murdered Jerry Vincent two weeks ago and now finds himself at the center of this year’s so-called ‘Trial of the Decade.’
This ‘Trial of the Decade’ serves up a dossier full of intrigue and suspense as Haller walks us through the world of a high caliber defense attorney. His reputation is at stake as he struggles to stay away from the addictive painkillers and regain his footing. He proves to us that he’s an extremely competent attorney as he plows through many of the cases. Despite his weaknesses, he helps others. In Lincoln Lawyer a former crack dealer, Earl, chauffeurs him around. As an ex-client, Earl owes Haller money and is working off the debt. And now in Brass Verdict, Haller helps a sympathetic, young surfer, Patrick, who also became addicted to painkillers after a surfing accident. Overcoming addiction to drugs creates the affinity between Haller and Patrick who works off his debt.
This empathy for the surfer makes us want to cheer Haller to success even though he defends murderers from justice. Haller’s car plates brashly read: IWALKEM.
The most challenging case involves the double murder of Walter Elliot’s wife and her German lover. LAPD bets the entire case on the assumption that Haller’s client, Walter Elliot, is the killer. The evidence and motives against Elliot seem almost indefensible. How can Haller possibly win?
I picked up my fork and knife and remained silent while I cut into the steak again. Blood ran onto the plate. I thought about my daughter getting to the point of asking me the same questions her mother asked and that I could never answer. It’s like you’re always working for the bad guys. It wasn’t as simple as that but knowing this didn’t take away the sting or the look I remembered seeing in her eyes.
I put the knife and fork down without taking a bite. I suddenly was no longer hungry.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m in.”
As elsewhere, killings occur in Los Angeles. Blood runs from murders as easily as from the steak on Haller’s plate. His conscience weighs on him enough to prompt him to cooperate with Detective Bosch even though this pushes the limits of his own professional ethics. Though, Haller is not quite so simple. In the same breath that he agrees to work with Bosch, he sees how that collaboration might help him in winning the case.
This constant push-and-pull relationship between Haller and Bosch intensifies the suspense. The two men work on the opposite sides of the law. They share much more than this though. They’re both divorced and single, both have a daughter. Unbeknownst to either, they also share an affinity with drugs.
Adrenaline crashed into my veins and my blood took off running as everything came together. All in a moment I realized what Vincent had been up to and what he had been planning.
In this case, it’s not an addiction to prescriptive drugs. Adrenaline rush drives both Haller and Bosch in what they do. It’s the thing that keeps Bosch on the detective job even after he qualifies for a full pension retirement. The adrenaline rush in winning a case, finding “the magic bullet” in an argument, “forging the blade” propels Haller. Readers will learn that there’s still more that binds these two men together.
Haller is aware that he could serve some higher good, a higher, nobler sense of justice. His conscience nudges his shoulder occasionally to do the right thing by not working so hard to get the bad guys off the hook.
However, Haller enjoys all the fruits and pleasures of a well-paid attorney for the wealthy in Los Angeles. Is he more interested in serving his own interests than any higher, nobler cause?
“When you come to Hollywood it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from as long as you’ve got one thing in your pocket.”
“Money.” [says Haller]
Haller admits he prefers working as a defense attorney to the well heeled because he makes so much more money than as a prosecutor. He’s the one who persuaded Jerry Vincent to leave the prosecutor job and increase his income as a defense attorney.
We know that Haller loves the good life. He has a thing for the beautiful women. He still hankers for his ex-wife, Maggie. He’s had more than a fling or two with Lorna Taylor, his assistant. At the same time, he seems to have the hots also for an attractive woman, Julie Favreau, a new age philosopher whom he keeps on retainer for her seemingly useful abilities to read people’s facial expressions and body language.
Haller enjoys the finest restaurants in Los Angeles Dan Tanna’s, Water Grill, Traxx… The picture we might see emerging in Connelly’s stories resemble the paintings of the fifteenth century artist Hieronymus Bosch, whose art depicts the human weaknesses for indulging in pleasures and corruption.
Haller comes across as an extremely capable attorney, though flawed in his lack of higher moral calling. Technically talented in earning his big-bucks from the high-rollers of Hollywood, Haller nevertheless resists the nudges of his own conscience to make the justice system what it should be instead of what it is.
Haller might remind us readers of the political leaders and sycophants like Scooter Libby or press secretary McClellan or Colin Powell who could have served a higher good by blowing the whistle in a timely manner on the entire disaster of Bush’s erroneous, preemptive invasion. Perhaps the glory and prestige of high level government jobs keep these and other such men on the adrenaline rush they crave not to mention the salary.
However Connelly seldom, if ever, takes us down the slimy slopes of politics. Like many contemporary writers, he stays clear of such passionate controversy. Do popular writers fear they might lose readers? Lose revenues by adding the religious or political dimensions to their characters?
It’s the escapism that sells. Or at least that’s what some of the mainstream publishers aver. Readers don’t want to think of politics, right? Or is this just another one of those strange new ideas in our “new world order?” Most all characters in the real world have political opinions and sometimes odd beliefs about the supernatural. Why do the highly commercial writers neuter their characters in this way?
Could it be that Connelly does as a writer what Haller does as a criminal attorney?
What if Connelly, and other extremely popular, successful writers, broke the commercial mold? Obviously talented, Connelly ranks among the top tier of writers. What if he reconsidered his sanitized characters and changed direction by opening up his stories to new dimensions such as characters that actually think about or even discuss politics and religion?
What if our culture challenged the big money making authors? What if market demand for stories that included so much more? Aren’t the contemporary writers the ones who greatly influence our popular culture? Or is it simply market demand and Milton Friedman’s hideous ghost haunting every aspect of our lives?
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