Kill All The Lawyers

by William Deverell

Overview

Arthur P. Besterman, criminal lawyer and reformed alcoholic, was the first to go. Counsel to Vancouver's assorted shifters and grifters, Besterman almost always lost his cases. But a recent victory defending a low-life client might be a clue as to why he was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Then someone takes a pot shot at philandering lawyer Brian Pomeroy after he successfully defends a group of controversial eco-terrorists. All of a sudden lawyers whose clients are less than savoury start second-guessing the ethics of their profession, and going to court becomes possible bloodsport. In a cat-and-mouse game involving the better part of Vancouver's legal community, Pomeroy's firm (the famous Pomeroy, MacArthur, Brovak and Sage from the best-selling Dance of Shiva) pieces together some very disturbing truths about lawyers and the law. As one sleazy lawyer after another disappears, the reader can't help but ponder the wisdom of Shakespeare's famous dictum, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

-- Praise for Kill All The Lawyers --

"A lawyer is killed shortly after he has astonished everyone by successfully defending an undoubtedly guilty client. A second lawyer who has a similar success is shot at, and the legal community begins to think that someone out there is attempting to correct undesirable verdicts by sentencing lawyers to death … The social comedy is hilarious. This is a brilliantly wrought novel, ingenious, entertaining, and continually surprising. Deverell deserves an award for this one." - Robin Skelton, Books in Canada

"This is a fast, funny novel, West Coast thriller king William Deverell's response to the blockbuster legal potboilers of such lesser, wealthier writers as John Grisham and Scott Turow." - Quill and Quire

"Deverell's crime fiction has always been exceptional. As always, Deverell offers a cynical insider's view of the legal profession. A smart, witty book with great characters and a clever plot." - Margaret Cannon, Toronto Globe and Mail

"A bitingly funny whodunit." - Maclean's

"Kill All the Lawyers is clever, amusing, laced with black humour and viciously accurate depictions of lawyers and judges." - Toronto Star

"Terrific." - Toronto Sun

"This is just an all-round great romp of a book, a wonderful and uproarious whodunit with a magnificently convoluted plot and a cast of characters to die for – a bunch of which do – by one of the country's best (and most irreverently funny) crime and mystery writers." - Ottawa Sun

"As usual, Deverell has whipped up some of the slimiest, scummiest and hilarious characters you're ever going to find between the covers of a book. It's a first-rate whodunit, populated by folks you won't want to forget." - Regina Leader Post

"Kill All the Lawyers is Deverell at his best — tongue-in-cheek, slashing and burning member of his other profession — lawyers. Simply magnificent. - Brantford Expositor

"Smart, contemporary and tart." - Edmonton Journal

"A highly readable tale, a lighthearted novel displaying throughout a deftly light touch." - Winnipeg Free Press

"Sly, wickedly amusing, … irreverent, refreshing." - Vancouver Sun

Product Details

BN ID:	2940032824251
Publisher:	William Deverell
Publication date:	10/20/2011
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	569 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

After working his way through law school as a news reporter and editor, Bill Deverell was a criminal lawyer in Vancouver before publishing the first of his 16 novels: "Needles", which won the $50,000 Seal Award. "Trial of Passion" won the 1997 Dashiell Hammett award for literary excellence in crime writing in North America, as well as the Arthur Ellis prize in crime writing in Canada. "April Fool" was also an Ellis winner, and his recent two novels, "Kill All the Judges" and :Snow Job" were shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Prize in Humour. His two latest Arthur Beauchamp courtroom dramas, "I'll See You in My Dreams", and "Sing a Worried Song" were released in 2011 and 2013 respectively. His novels have been translated into fourteen languages and sold worldwide.

He created CBC's long-running TV series "Street Legal", which has run internationally in more than 80 countries. He was Visiting Professor of Creative Writing University of Victoria, and twice served as Chair of the Writers' Union of Canada. He is a founder and honourary director of the BC Civil Liberties Association and is a Green activist. He has been awarded two honourary doctorates in letters, from Simon Fraser University and the University of Saskatchewan.

He lives on Pender Island, British Columbia.

Read an Excerpt

1
The Last Summer of Arthur Besterman

Arthur P. Besterman was a reformed alcoholic and a criminal lawyer. He had been droning away for so long at 222 Main Street that he was regarded by the court staff as a fixture, like one of the cement waste bins or water fountains. If the Provincial Court Building were ever to be sold, Besterman would go with it, still passing out his cards.

He was a dogged lawyer but not very gifted, losing most of his cases. Two failed marriages and a nebulous sense of his own incompetence had led him to seek solace in alcohol, but a few years ago he took the cure and joined the Vancouver Trial Lawyers’ chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Most of his clients were persons for whom crime had not paid, shifters and grifters assigned to him through legal aid. He earned enough to keep a small office in the Gastown area and a half-day secretary.

An accused person who applies for legal aid often does not know who his lawyer will be. The Legal Services Society might assign a very good lawyer, or at least one of middling skills. Or an accused might get Arthur Besterman. It is a lottery.

Thus, did Arthur acquire the file of O.D. Milsom, a dull-witted middle-aged loner who had confessed to the random stabbing deaths of three young women in the previous fall. By the time the trial began the following July, the media had already convicted Milsom, and the court was packed daily with outraged citizenry.

For Besterman, a very unusual thing happened.

He won.

A hearing was held to determine the admissibility of Milsom’s confession–and though Besterman hadn’t argued it well, he did raise a point which interested the judge. O.D. Milsom had been apprehended by a group of citizen vigilantes known as the White Angels, the leader of which threatened to emasculate him unless he confessed. Did that make the following outpouring of guilt inadmissible?

Counsel for the Crown, the wily Leroy Lukey, Q.C., argued through two days that Milsom’s confession was not induced by threats or fear of violence.

The judge sat silent through all of this, then ruled the confession inadmissible. Since there was little other evidence against Milsom, the judge then ordered the jury to acquit him. An appeal was filed on the same day. Milsom packed up his few belongings and disappeared into the void.

Arthur P. Besterman, enjoying the best day of his life, drove straight from the courthouse to a bar in the Gastown area of Vancouver, near his office, where he ordered his first whiskey in three years. He stayed there until midnight, when he was observed stumbling out the back door to the parking lot.

At five a.m. on the next day, the twelfth of July, his body was found in the parking lot behind his office, his skull caved in. A fan of blood was spread across the pavement and on nearby cars, leaving a shadow where the assailant had stood. The coroner guessed a baseball bat, or something similar.

A mugging was ruled out, since Besterman’s wallet, still in his jacket pocket, contained four hundred and fifty-five dollars. Vancouver homicide visited the families of the murdered women, but no anguished father, no vengeance-lusting brother or cousin was found to be without alibi. The leader of the White Angels was questioned, too, but his witnesses confirmed he was snug in his bed at the group’s downtown barracks all night.

For a while the Bar Association maintained pressure on the authorities to solve this crime. Lawyers don’t get killed. Lawyers were members of a professional elite, safe, sacrosanct, removed from the battle. Police and criminals get killed, not lawyers.

After several weeks of failed leads, investigators became apathetic. Soon Besterman was earning, at best, only the occasional paragraph in the back pages.

The memory of Arthur P. Besterman seemed to slowly dribble away with the coming of the winter rains …

“… those ceaseless, sullen rains of winter. Little did Lance Valentine know, as he stared out into the grey watercolour wash outside his window, that he had also been chosen to die.”

Brian Pomeroy punched the period key, then scanned his opening paragraphs with a critic’s stern and cautious eye. Imperfect, yes, but surely you must agree, Mr. Widgeon, that the yet unheralded author of these virgin paragraphs has obeyed the do’s and don’ts, the edicts and statutes that you have promulgated.

We have a corpse. The law according to Widgeon: waste little time in wasting your first victim.

But first, please: know your victim. “The writer must always retain a photograph of this unfortunate soul at an earlier time–while still in the flower of life. Take a few snapshots to remember him by, but do not dwell on him; the reader cares not whether the victim collected stamps or picked his nose or grew prize pumpkins (unless indeed it turns out he was felled, in a jealous rage, by the loser of the annual Southampton Fall Fair).”

Mr. Widgeon (The Art of the Whodunit, $24.95, Cheltenham Press) also instructs: immediately create an air of mystery. “Something about this death must engage the reader: the senselessness of it, the apparent lack of motive, the odd choice of modus.”

Had Brian sufficiently complied? Is a blunt instrument too blunt a device? Does it limit one’s options? Poison, says Widgeon, is so much more subtle, and one should never ignore the possibility of suicide.

The hunt must be taken up quickly, and the protagonist more formally introduced. But who is Lance Valentine? Alas, the author has never met this shadowy figure with the brave and romantic name–is he a private eye with caustic tongue, a pipe-smoking homicide inspector in rumpled tweed, some kind of nosy, cozy Hercule Poirot?

Which brings us to that annoying rule number one: Know where you are going.

Brian examined the typewriter keys, as if seeking coded answers there. No suspects, no motives. One victim. Crushed to death beneath an enormous writer’s block.