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.
