Kill All The Lawyers

After reading three of his novels, I moved William Deverell into my top ten list of crime writers, and now after the fourth, Kill All The Lawyers, he solidifies himself somewhere in that renowned (at least in my mind) list. In this novel, he changed his writing style to one that was often tongue-in-cheek. While this was a serious murder mystery, there was a silly/humorous side that was most enjoyable. At times, Deverell showed that he could write in the ribald as well as anyone. If you’re a fan of this crime genre, you will get a kick out of this one.

In fact, this story centers around a series of murders or attempted murders of lawyers, some of whom were mob lawyers, some of whom where defenders of the poor, some of whom were just good attorneys, and some of whom were at the bottom of their class. What could be the connection? One of the lawyers who was nearly killed but survived, Brian Pomeroy, decided to take a prolonged vacation/escape in Costa Rica where he was working on his own crime novel. Pomeroy repeatedly quoted Mr. Widgeon who wrote many crime novels and also wrote a how-to-write-crime-novels book, as Pomeroy developed his own parallel plot to the main plot of this story. Deverell made use of that convention to tease everyone associated with the legal professions (including the readers of crime novels), and he tossed in corrupt cops, unethical judges, and a mafia hit man just for fun. Then, he pulled in a police detective from Costa Rica, Francisco Sierra, to help solve the serial lawyer killings in Vancouver, drawing on the image of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. When you see the unexpected resolution of this case, just as Mr. Widgeon recommends, you will laugh – good stuff, and it is not the formulaic stuff that we see from some authors in this genre.