Miscarriage of Justice

Lawyer by day, writer by night...isn't that a way to sum up John Grisham? He's made a success of it, continuing to try the occasional case and keep his hand in the legal swamp. His courtroom dramas are top sellers, and his newest bit of non-fiction is coming out in the midst of a flurry of publicity. Yet no one at his law firm ever once thought to fire him for writing.

So one can see why Joyce Dudley, a deputy district attorney in Santa Barbara, would be more than shocked to discover that she is out on the street. All she did was write what she knows, which just happens to be crime and criminals. Legal thrillers are all the rage, and doesn't everyone have a book in them? The novelist-attorney would never expect to be pulled off a case for their literary effort.

Apparently, Ms. Dudley has written exactly what she knows, and that's where the trouble comes in. In her novel Intoxicating Agent she created a heroine who shares her line of work and her initials. Well, if you're going to create a superhero, might as well make it yourself. To keep her novel as realistic as possible, she used an actual case, one that she prosecuted. What better research could there be than all the preparation she did on the case? Why, the female star of the novel could easily be presented as a legal wizard, a veritable goddess of law, with that kind of information.

So real is the novel, in fact, that Ms. Dudley has been shown the courtroom door and her literary pursuit ruled a conflict of interest. It seems that the defendant in the real case has appealed the sentence and a three judge panel has determined that promoting her novel would not be a good thing for said defendant.

Justice Yegan's opinion was quoted in the New York Times. As far as the judges on the tribunal were concerned, Ms. Dudley would have no desire to accept a plea agreement because she is hawking her novel, and that would be highly prejudicial to the defendant. In her own defense, Ms. Dudley claims that she wrote about a make-believe case so her book promotion won't make a bit of difference to the pending appeal.

As for promotion, by all appearances Ms. Dudley will have to do a truckload of promotion. She went with a vanity press on this effort, and no one is going to buy her book unless she sets up a stall in the parking lot of the courthouse and includes a coupon for Starbucks with every purchase. The characters are drawn with a big crayon, with the star a beauty and the defense attorney a regular Snidely Whiplash. And after all that work to pen some very purple prose, she's gotten into a bind and had her wrist slapped soundly.

I have to wonder if she ever tried to get a literary agent. Thinking she's the female John Grisham, going to craft a series of page-turners with her fictional alter ego in the top spot, and it's a litany of 'not right for my list' or 'not the right agent'. Now the book's been printed and sales might climb up to the upper eighties. No fame and fortune, no book signings or book tours, and Ms. Dudley has been yanked from the case on an ethics violation. Need further proof that it just doesn't pay to go with a vanity press?