"Crime is common. Logic is rare."
- Sherlock Holmes
Alice Williston is pried loose from Sleep's
embrace when a persistent buzzer disturbs the peaceful hours of an early April
morning, but the doorman informs her that the person will call back at a more
convenient time – after which she decides to freshen herself up and make coffee
for her companion, Jimmy Madena. Alas, even a brew of the strongest, blackest
coffee lacks the potency to revive the dead and Alice is charged with Jimmy's
murder.
This is the premise of Murder One
(1948) by Eleazar Lipsky, a lawyer and prosecutor with a couple of movies to
his writing credits, Kiss of Death (1947) and The People Against O'Hara
(1951), and evidently drew from his legal career when he began to write. And to
be honest, the peeking around in the District Attorney's office in Murder
One was more interesting than the story itself.
Esau "Easy" Frost is the Assistant
District Attorney who's charge of the Madena case and offers Alice repeatedly a
plea-bargain, but she refuses to admit that she was responsible for Jimmy's
death – and he's convinced that she did it and reluctantly charges her with Murder
One. Frost is described in the Cast of Characters as "a real lawyer who will
stick his neck way out to be fair to a defendant," while technically true, he’s
not exactly a White Knight either. He has a nasty taste for psychological torture,
or "the fourth degree," as he likes to call it, and excuses himself by
stating that he abhors physical violence. I understand this attitude towards a cut-throat
gangster, who's pleading for his life in the death-house as his date is coming
up, but keeping a witness from seeing his dying wife? A tacky move, if you
already have your guy and his methods made him about as unlikable as Thatcher
Colt in The Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930).
The upside is that this book, which can
be described as a hardboiled police procedural/courtroom drama, follows Frost
around in the D.A.'s office and I think this is the first time I saw such a
character being involved in more than one cases – even if they have no bearing
on the case the story is focusing on.
I already mentioned Frost's visit to the
death-house, where he turned down a high-ranking mob boss who suddenly had
second thoughts on the plea-bargain he had turned down, but he's also informed
that the police has dragged a headless body from the river and sits-in on a
meeting to decide what direction they would take on a number of murder cases. One
of them was very reflective of the time: "a drunken throat-cutting of a
harmless old Negro building superintendent by a white neighborhood hoodlum.
There was no motive beyond savagery, but the proof of premeditation and
planning was clear," however, "despite the delicate racial issue," they
voted to take the plea and safe the man's life. This attitude demonstrates why
even Frost's "gentler" fourth degree is dangerous. What if that old
man had turned on his attacker and killed him, legally, in self-defense, but, still
upset and confused over having killed someone, cracks under either their strong-arm
methods or Frost's mind games and confesses to cold-blooded murder – giving them
no reason to go for Murder Two. No doubt they could drum up witnesses of the
victim antagonizing the accused in the past and present it as a motive.
And the saddest part of that is that the situation
I just described would've made for a far more interesting story. Julian "Bloody"
Symons would probably have adored Murder One for it's realistic portrayal
of law officials (Frost has a wife and kids) filled with questionable police
methods, professional crooks and loose morals, but it all boils down to Frost
circling Alice, and when it's time to wrap up the story, pulls a pair of "surprise
witnesses" from his sleeve. Needless to say, the conclusion left me under
whelmed.
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