With its adversarial structure and set procedural rules, the trial can be a perfect dramatic vehicle, offering the strategy and suspense of a sports event alongside the seriousness of life and death. The Big Trial subgenre of American fiction dates back at least as far as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Ways of the Hour (1850), about a murder prosecution and very similar in structure to later courtroom and detective novels. Though contemporary readers may find its societal viewpoints disturbing, it’s at least readable as a curiosity.
Twentieth-century Big Trial highlights are numerous: Journalist Frances Noyes Hart’s The Bellamy Trial (1927), set almost entirely in the courtroom, drew on her experience covering the Hall-Mills murder case; Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (1956), a fictionalization of the Leopold-Loeb case, and Robert Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder (1958) were major bestsellers that preceded a plethora of trial books in subsequent decades. Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent (1987) and John Grisham’s A Time to Kill (1989) gave new energy to the vogue for legal thrillers.
The most recent candidate for the Big Trial hall of fame arrives by a circuitous route. When a horrendous traffic accident almost ended his life in 2011, novelist Greg Iles had already published three books about lawyer Penn Cage, a former prosecutor in Houston who returned to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, and was elected mayor. In common with many contemporary series characters, widower Penn and his precocious preteen daughter have dealt with one personal tragedy after another, beginning with the early death of Penn’s wife. Iles’s ambitious post-recovery project, a trilogy beginning with Natchez Burning (2014), has several themes and concerns. One is the New South’s need to come to terms with the Old, and another is surely a reflection of his own survival: the human resilience of many of the characters to achieve amazing feats when other characters (and readers) have given them up as virtually dead.
The main action is set in 2005, with flashbacks to the 1960s. Penn’s father, Dr. Tom Cage, a dedicated physician beloved by local citizens both white and black, is about to be charged with the murder—whether euthanasia, assisted suicide, or something with a more sinister motive—of his African-American former nurse Viola Turner, who had left town years before under threat from the Double Eagles, a deadly offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. Suffering from terminal cancer, she has now secretly returned to Natchez, where she has been treated by Dr. Tom.
Though the reader has reason to expect the case to be tried (or at least resolved short of court) in the first volume’s nearly 800 pages, it doesn’t happen. Enough else is going on—focused on the murderous activities of the Double Eagles, including an early plot to assassinate Robert Kennedy, and, late in the novel, an extraordinarily powerful series of action sequences—that the lack of a definitive answer to whodunit is excusable, even for those of us who usually resent anything resembling a cliffhanger in a novel. The case is still pending in Natchez Burning’s equally hefty sequel The Bone Tree (2015). Iles is not given to writing short books: The third of the trilogy, the comparatively compact 705-page Mississippi Blood, finally delivers what the trial buff has been waiting for. More than a third of the book is spent in court, and the case is covered thoroughly from opening statement by the prosecutor to closing arguments from both sides, with many plot twists and dramatic confrontations along the way.
The makeup of the trial court illustrates how much things have changed in the Deep South. Though the defendant is white, the judge and both advocates, district attorney Shadrach Johnson and aged defender Quentin Avery, are black. The jury makeup is seven blacks to five whites. Whether because of the peculiarities of Mississippi law or the odd choices of the advocates, many aspects of the trial are surprising: There is no required discovery unless the defense requests it—and they don’t; the jury is not sent out during the cross-talk of advocates and judge; and both sides get away with presenting evidence that is arguably inadmissible.
The great defender Avery, who made his name as a civil rights lawyer before making the bulk of his money in corporate law, works from a wheelchair after losing both legs to diabetes and has other health problems. His client is no better off, suffering angina attacks. As the trial gets underway, Avery’s decisions make the Cage family and its supporters wonder if he is up to the job. He does not invoke “the rule” that would prohibit witnesses from attending others’ testimony. He makes no objection to the prosecutor’s emphasis on race in his opening statement. He makes no request for a change of venue. He makes no objection to a reference to the defendant’s involvement in an earlier murder. He gives no opening statement. He stipulates to the admissibility of a disturbing videotape of the victim’s death. He doesn’t cross-examine the coroner on the autopsy results. He doesn’t object to possible hearsay or leading questions—and essentially appears to be doing nothing at all.
He has told Penn he will be taking an unconventional approach to the defense, but as one lawyer-friend notes, “Like driving thirty miles per hour is an unconventional way to win the Daytona 500.” The Cage family wants the old advocate off the case, but Penn points out that only Dr. Tom, who hired Avery, can fire him. Fortunately, the defender has some surprises to spring, but the outcome remains in doubt throughout.
The characters here are all harboring secrets, whether their own or those of others; and by the end, all will be made clear. Having read the first two volumes is not essential to the reader’s pleasure or understanding. Iles fills in all the necessary backstory.
Despite the high page counts, Greg Iles can’t be called a long-winded writer. Far from being padded, the novels are packed with incident, with new plot points and character insights on nearly every page. The intricacy of plot, large and well-differentiated cast, vivid background detail, and relentless pace justify the length. Who brought on the death of Viola Turner is uncertain until near the end of the third volume, and though the final revelation may surprise, clues were already there in the first book. In some respects, Iles is an old-school detective-story writer, including bizarre murder methods made believable in context.
There are a few things to gripe about in Mississippi Blood: Soldier-turned-writer Serenity Butler seems too much of a superhero, and her romance with Penn is unconvincing and tiresome; the evil Snake Knox is a one-note villain, less interesting than he was in Natchez Burning; shifts in viewpoint from first to third person are occasionally intrusive; and the action finale, well managed as it is, struck me as anticlimactic. But these are minor complaints. Mississippi Blood is a significant contribution to legal and mystery fiction, and the whole trilogy to the literature of the South.
Jon L. Breen is the author, most recently, of The Threat of Nostalgia and Other Stories.
