A woman suffocates in her own blood, shot through the heart and lung. The next day detectives arrest a 16-year-old boy, IQ somewhere south of 60. His mother turned him in, afraid she’d lose her public housing subsidy for harboring a criminal. The child isn’t alone in jail: His older brother, just 18, is already being held for armed robbery. Meanwhile the victim leaves behind parents and a fiancé. A grieving community marches in the streets to celebrate her life and mourn her death. The police pick the day of her funeral to leak that she had a digital scale and cocaine in her bag. It’s hard to imagine what justice looks like here, for anyone.
Sometimes we can turn to fiction when our imaginations fall short. Good fiction offers empathy and creativity—insight into different lives, and a vision of how life can be different. But too much fiction about crime and the legal system skips that difficult work in favor of a tidy resolution that restores the reader’s sense of order and gives violence meaning: first as martyrdom, then as retribution or punishment. That consecration happens, most famously, through the heroism of a protagonist who stands outside the social order but embodies its noblest elements. The real perpetrator will be found and punished. If the boy isn’t to blame—maybe, in a surprising plot twist, the fiancé is—he will be exonerated. If it’s a noir, someone will walk off into an alley in the rain, lonely but vindicated. If it’s more conventional, the boys from the precinct will close the scene drinking at their local, the camera moving from face to face, in and out of amber light, reknitting the social fabric.
But crime fiction can do more. In the hands of reformers, a reshaped crime fiction could help tell the truth about a criminal legal system that too frequently does more harm than good. It’s a flexible and powerful genre, capable of subverting its own conventions, and possessing the sharp edges to cut through sentimentality. Its insistence on plot movement leaves little time for soupy, navel-gazing narcissism and moral confusion. Its readers often welcome a straightforward and forceful prose, stripped of frills and metaphoric pretension; this habit of directness positions crime fiction to offer an honest account of suffering. And it is willing to look past middle-class niceties, turning the camera—at least in passing—on poverty and misery.
I have to hope so, anyhow, because I’m all in on crime fiction. I was a public defender in New Orleans for ten years. For the last five, I ran a nonprofit that represented accused youth. When, in the quiet of COVID seclusion, I sat down to write about what I’d seen, I realized I couldn’t pull off nonfiction. Too much of the True Crime story wasn’t mine to tell. It belonged to other people, mostly youth who could never meaningfully consent to having their stories told.
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So fiction it would be, and genre fiction came naturally to me. After all, lawyers for the accused are steeped in genre storytelling. Good defenders don’t sow doubt; they tell stories. And the quickest way to make a story meaningful in court is by tapping into a genre—a comfortable, recognizable narrative that makes for quick connections with judges and juries, putting them at ease and drawing them into a shared world they find recognizable.
But as a former defender, I was also primed to believe that both the central convention of the crime novel (the minister of justice as heroic protagonist) and its central social function (the restoration of order through punishment) fall short of either realism or moral truth. The legal system that I knew nurtured anger, not resolution. It too frequently failed to protect anybody but the functionaries who served it. Its perpetual shell game substituted grievance for closure; offered empty process in place of genuine fairness; couldn’t distinguish between a pound of gold and a pound of flesh, since they weigh the same; confused justice and judgment; and deployed the pretense of blindness as an excuse not to see the people I worked for.
I wanted a crime fiction, then, that didn’t insist on the heroism of lawyers and police or on an easy resolution. A book made more powerful, ideally, by its tension with its own genre. But that didn’t seem so strange. Defenders, in their work, tell two kinds of stories. Both partake deeply of genre fiction, and neither sits entirely comfortably with the storyteller. The defender is used to being in tension with genre; she’s used to deploying it strategically, and subverting it, too.
Start with the mitigation narrative, as commonly told at sentencings and in plea negotiations. These can be long, sophisticated, densely plotted novellas put together by teams of social workers to save a man from death. They can also be a few urgently whispered sentences in a courthouse hallway, aimed at whittling a prosecutor down from youth prison to a treatment facility.
Mitigation narratives aren’t stories about factual innocence. They’re about diminished culpability. And they come with their own well-worn tropes. Crime is largely presented as determined by social forces unleashed long before birth: racism, poverty, neglect, all relayed in as much heightened, tragic detail as possible. The players are often types: alienated, desperate, manipulated. Repressed and unspoken family traumas manifest in transgressive thoughts and actions.
This is Southern Gothic, sometimes hybridized with a kind of Sister Carrie naturalism. For example, Jeffrey Toobin, writing about mitigation in the New Yorker, selected a prototypical story: an accused person who had been sexually abused as a child and given beer starting at six. Maurice Chammah’s story about mitigation over at the Marshall Project did the same thing, going back to the family’s trauma of fleeing racism and extending up through profound family violence and environmental trauma. And to what end? “I use the grotesque the way I do,” novelist Flannery O’Connor explained, “because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.” But it’s more than a way of getting people’s attention. The grotesque, O’Connor explained, invokes the elemental memory of—or creates the negative space for—the image of God. Instead of repelling the audience, it impels them toward sympathy, maybe even empathy.
But the defender, if she’s thoughtful, understands that the genre’s conventions—precisely because they’re so effective—risk flattening her client, bleeding away his agency, reducing him to an object. And if she’s ethical, that objectification repulses her. It’s antithetical to her client’s dignity. She works, and lives, in that tension.
If Southern Gothic is the genre for sentencing, defenders most often go with detective fiction, a classic crime fiction subgenre, at the guilt phase. Of course, defense attorneys are always trying, in a sense, to un-solve the crime; at the least, they’re professionally uninterested in whether it’s ever solved, so long as blame lands anywhere but on the person at the defense table. And they’re not looking for truth, like the iconic detective. They want instead an explanation, which is not the same thing.
But the conventions are the same. Like in so much crime fiction, defenders are trying to explain not just who dunnit, but also why. Why is legally irrelevant—prosecutors don’t have to prove motive, and accused people don’t have to prove anything—but psychologically, in court as in crime fiction, it’s everything. Why is the wrong guy sitting in that chair? Is someone lying? Was the accused framed? What could account for a mistake like this? How do we explain and rectify this break in the social order?
And, like in detective fiction, a brave soul is at the center of the courtroom drama, unraveling the mystery and restoring order. Most often that’s not the accused, but the lawyer. She’s the one telling the story—the one whose persistent search wins the admiration and confidence, and ultimately vote, of the judge and jury. Her questing nobility makes the story emotionally meaningful. That, as crime fiction writers have understood since at least Raymond Chandler, is what brings the audience in. Of course she must make them care about her client—but they do that because they believe in her.
All this, within the constraints of most lawyers’ skill and resources, is probably something close to necessary. A defender’s courtroom job is to do what works. She’s a performer, and that means being whatever she needs to be. But she knows heroism isn’t part of the job. She lets herself be a hero—makes herself that way—even though that’s not how defenders should or even mostly do think of themselves. Heroes, in literature, do more than restore the order. Instead they publicly enact the restoration of order. A defender, though, is just acting the role of an actor. In her head, she should know that she is not the protagonist; she’s really the agent, not the principal. She knows it’s not about her, even if she’s the one in the limelight.
And even as she calls on the jury to make it right, she also doubts the legal system’s power to restore any social order that deserves to survive. What lawyers do in court contributes, inevitably, to a public ritual of resolution. The most powerful imaginable form of dissent—the primal howl: this is unjust—is synthesized with, and ultimately sublimated into, the ever-unfulfilled ideal of equal justice under law. Criminal law, supposed to co-opt vengeance, instead co-opts resistance. The defender speaks the court’s secret language; she pays tribute to its customs. She celebrates the rite of assent, too, co-opted by necessity into a rhetoric of reaffirmation. Nothing else would serve the client, in that moment, and serving one solitary person is all she crosses the bar to do.
These tensions can be difficult, if not exhausting. They can leave lawyers cynical, burned-out, fatalistic. I know all that from experience. I’m not still a public defender, after all.
But there are more kinds of advocacy, and there’s much more to bearing witness, than the criminal practice’s constraints allow. Fiction is one way for defenders and other reformers to tell difficult and complicated truths about law, injustice, and disorder.
My novel Seraphim is about a child, Robert Johnson, who confesses to killing a leader of New Orleans’s post-Katrina renaissance. Robert’s public defenders, carpetbaggers who flowed down to the empty city, try and un-solve the crime, tracing it back to a friendship forged during Robert’s hurricane exile and opening up an avenue for acquittal. But across all the layers of distance and difference between them and their client, they can’t really hear or see Robert’s story for what it is. So they stumble. In the end, any chance at a just resolution comes instead from Robert’s father, McTell, who has been one step ahead of them the whole time. If there’s a promise of redemption, it’s only because a man who has spent most of his adult life in prison will not concede that injustice is inevitable. Justice isn’t a system; it’s a moral quality. A man who has been through prison has as much claim to it—and to heroism—as anyone else.
Seraphim’s defenders are a lens. The camera hovers close to Ben Alder, looking over his shoulder, because that’s the only perspective I know well enough to write. But I hope the book doesn’t take his side or preoccupy itself with his suffering. The central narrative tension isn’t resolved by his cleverness and nobility. He’s dishonest, frightened, and irresolute—nobody’s idea of a hero. He and his partner, Boris, aren’t the fiery angels of the book’s title, nor the prophets from which the biblical title was taken. They mostly do their best for their clients. But their perspective is imperfect, distorted by the simultaneous impossibility and imperative of bearing accurate witness to a violence that they fundamentally do not understand. If a worthy moral and social order can be instilled—not really restored—it’s not through their agency or on this novel’s timeline.
Instead of grit and toughness, the defenders are vulnerable, permeable, soft. Those aren’t such bad qualities. Maybe they’re even virtues. They struggle toward empathy, which sits uneasily with heroism. The first is a practice, almost devotional and too rare; the second a performance. They’re surrounded by violence and injustice but they’re not at home with it, and they won’t ever be. Chandler’s great fictional detective Philip Marlowe knew that sometimes you have to gut it out, and maybe that’s true in court, but a novel doesn’t have to reconcile with the unbearable. It’s free to imagine something different, and so are we.
Image: Andrew Solok/Unsplash
