I don't remember the exact reason I picked up an old paperback of Robert Traver's late-50s legal-thriller bestseller, Anatomy of a Murder. I think it was that a friend from the Upper Peninsula, knowing my interest in representative state books, said it was a solid piece of U.P. lit. Not surprising that I bought a copy when I ran across it soon after; more surprising is that, unlike most of the books I accumulate, I actually read it not that long after, early on the road trip we're just about to finish (which, though long, did not take us to Michigan: the photos here were taken in Great Smoky Mountains National Park rather than the U.P.).
Did I love it? No. Did I like it? I'm not sure. As I read it, the book came to annoy and fascinate me equally (and for many of the same reasons). Part of what fascinated (and yes, annoyed) me was how the book confounded my expectations. I'll try not to spoil the story (can you spoil a 50-year-old blockbuster that was made into a Jimmy Stewart movie?), but I'll just say I expected the rug to be pulled out from under me time and time again, but at the end found it still there under my feet--which I guess you could say did give me the surprise I was waiting for after all. I've been schooled by my taste for noir to wait for (and enjoy) the revelation of duplicity in even those characters I least imagine possess it. And so, as the plot began to develop in Anatomy, I treated each new character (especially a certain attractive hotel proprietress) with deep suspicion. But the shock of the story, at least to me, was how few of those suspicions panned out. There were almost no twists, no revelations, except that pretty much everyone, except the heel whose murder the book anatomizes, turns out to be a swell guy or gal.
That's not entirely true. There is a classic noir turn at the very end of the book that, in the hands of another author, might have upended the whole contraption and made you question everyone involved as well as the clumsy machinery of justice. But in Anatomy this is the exception that proves the rule: the twist (on page 510 out of 512) is treated not as a revelation but as an embarrassing eruption that's quickly and anxiously papered over by interlawyer bonhomie. When faced with the fact that the defense they've spent the book pursuing might actually be based on a lie, one ol' lawyer says to the other, more or less: Maybe you two just used each other. Let's go fishing.
It's that same interlawyer bonhomie that became particularly interesting and frustrating. As the book went on, the actual details and personalities of the murder faded away (from lack of interest by the author, one imagines), in favor of sentiments about the majesty of the law (couched in a wry, chummy cynicism that I couldn't stand, though I expect it accounted for much of the book's popularity). Traver was himself a lawyer and judge (his real name was John D. Voelker) and in his book I heard all kinds of echoes of another Midwestern lawyer-turned-author, Scott Turow (anachronistic echoes of course, since Turow came much later--I wouldn't be surprised if Turow knew of Anatomy when he turned to fiction): a similar insider's knowingness about the sausage-making involved in the law, coupled with a battered faith in the decency of the system, or at least of those enmeshed within it. If I had more time to compare, I'd try to figure out why I love Turow but was less impressed with Traver, but I expect it comes down to the fact that while Turow is fascinated by the law he's even more drawn to the people it serves (or who serve it), while in Traver the characters (except the other lawyers) never come alive the way the courtroom does.
I'm not sure, from this distance, what made Anatomy such a hit, aside from the wisecracks that drove me nuts. Was it, for the time, a rare glimpse behind the veil of the law? Or shocking in the treatment of its central crime (a murder in vengeance for the rape of the accused's wife)? It does have a sort of John O'Hara bluntness about the way men and women can treat each other. What interests me now is how the novel relates to the actual case that Voelker tried. Perhaps it's that the noir reader in me, frustrated by the story, must now turn his cynicism toward its author, but I find myself a little suspicious of Traver's motives, and I wonder in what ways he altered the original to fit his purposes. (Or perhaps basing the story on his own case caused him to limit how far he was willing to go in examining the motives of the clients he had represented.) Somebody must be up to something in that dirty old town...
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