Abstract
As law is an inevitable part of everyday life, from minor traffic offences to corporate takeovers involving lots of money and thousands of jobs, it naturally appears in the fictional universes of drama, novels and short stories. But narrative fiction or drama with more or less law in it is not necessarily of the nature of legal thrillers. The thriller element is one of structure, not of substance. It has to do with the way a story is made to unfold, keeping the reader on tenterhooks. Narrative fiction invariably has a modicum of structural suspense, in that the urge to learn more about events and characters is part and parcel of the literary experience of storytelling. In generic fiction given to suspense, such as police procedurals and legal thrillers, the suspense structure basically informs narrative procedure and is a substantial part of its reading fascination.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsBibliography
Adams, A. K. (ed.). Favorite Trial Stories: Fact and Fiction. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1966.
Aristodemou, Maria. Law & Literature: Journeys From Her To Eternity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Asimow, Michael and Shannon Mader. Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book. New York: Peter Lang, 2013.
Asimow, Michael, Kathryn Brown and David Ray Papke (eds.). Law and Popular Culture: International Perspectives. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
Bergman, Paul and Michael Asimow. Reel Justice: The Courtroom Goes to the Movies. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1996.
Bernhardt, William. (ed.) Legal Briefs: Stories by Today’s Best Legal Thriller Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1998.
Black, David A. Law in Film: Resonance and Representation. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Blaustein, Albert P. Fiction Goes to Court: Favorite Stories of Lawyers and the Law Selected by Famous Lawyers. New York: Collier Books, 1962 (first pub. 1954).
Cecil, Henry. Daughters in Law. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 (first pub. 1961).
Cecil, Henry. Just Within the Law. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1975.
Christie, Agatha. The Witness for the Prosecution. Craig 1990, 225–42.
Craig, Patricia (ed.). The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Darden, Christopher and Dick Lochte. The Last Defense. New York: New American Library, 2002.
Dolin, Kieran. A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Fish, Stanley. ‘Don’t Know Much About the Middle Ages: Posner on Law and Literature’, in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1989, 294–311.
Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1945.
Gemmette, Elizabeth Villiers (ed.). Law in Literature: Legal Themes in Short Stories. USA: The Buckingham Group, 1995.
Greenfield, Steve, Guy Osborn and Peter Robinson. Film and the Law. 2nd edn. Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2010.
Haining, Peter (ed.). Murder on the Menu. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1992 (first published 1991).
Kahn, Michael A. Bearing Witness. New York: Tor, 2003 (originally pub. 2000).
Komie, Lowell B. The Judge’s Chambers. New York: The American Bar Association, 1983.
Komie, Lowell B. A Lawyer’s Notes. Chicago: Swordfish, 2008.
Lloyd, Herbert. A Lawyer’s Secret. London: William Andrews & Co., 1896.
Machura, Stefan and Peter Robson (eds.). Law and Film. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. (Published simultaneously as Vol. 28 No. 1 of Journal of Law and Society.)
Martini, Steve. The Judge. London: Headline Book Publishing, 1996 (first pub. 1995).
Matthew, Theobald. Forensic Fables by O. London: Butterworths, 1961.
Porsdam, Helle. Legally Speaking: Contemporary American Culture and the Law. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
Posner, Richard A. Law and Literature. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Robinson, Marlyn. ‘From Collins to Grisham: A Brief History of the Legal Thriller’. 1998. https://tarltonapps.law.utexas.edu/exhibits/lpop/documents/history_legal_thriller.pdf (accessed 2 September 2016).
Robson, Peter. ‘Adapting the Modern Law Novel: Filming John Grisham’. In Machura and Robson, 2001:147–63.
Sarat, Austin, Cathrine O. Frank, Matthew Anderson. Teaching Law and Literature. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2011.
Shapiro, Fred R. and Jane Garry (eds.). Trial and Error: An Oxford Anthology of Legal Stories. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Ward, Ian. Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Welcome, John (ed.). Best Legal Stories. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1962.
White, James Boyd. ‘The Cultural Background of The Legal Imagination,’ in Sarat, 2011, 29–39.
White, Terry. Justice Denoted: The Legal Thriller in American, British, and Continental Courtroom Literature. Westport, CT and London: Praeger Publishers (Greenwood Publishing Group), 2003.
Online Resources
https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/exhibits/lpop/documents/bibliography_2011.pdf (accessed 9 October 2016).
https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/exhibits/lpop/documents/history_legal_thriller.pdf (accessed 9 October 2016).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sauerberg, L.O. (2016). Law and Literature: Legal Thrillers. In: The Legal Thriller from Gardner to Grisham. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40730-6_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40730-6_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-40729-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-40730-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)