Author: Time Green Title: The Letter of the Law Genre:mystery
Every one of us has been on the short end of the stick a time or two: my co-worker got that big promotion; the other girl got the guy; your competitor got the contract. We know the resulting platitudes: "There's always tomorrow..." "When one door closes, another one opens..." and all the other saccharine twaddle. Wanna know what I think?
Horse puckey!
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm actually at peace with the notion that there has to be a single "best" in every competition, no matter what the subject. I'm also OK with not being the winner every time (something like, "That which does not kill us makes us stranger" comes to mind). But I am never OK with the other guy winning because the contest was rigged to begin with, or winning simply because of better connections. It's particularly galling to realize that I'm smarter and more talented, but just don't know the right people.
So I sometimes wonder how it would feel to be an aspiring writer or a published author who's achieved critical acclaim and watch all those bozo celebrities cashing my advance checks and sucking the life out of my royalties! Not that there's any thing wrong, mind you, with a famous person (co-)writing a memoir about important events -- that is, after all, the idea of a memoir, at least in theory (though I wonder what momentous insight a twenty-seven-year-old NBA player might have to share). But there is certainly something amiss in the publishing world when a mediocre -- or worse -- writer trades on cinematic or sporting fame to swing a publishing contract. Ponder, if you will: would Billy Shatner be able to publish a letter to the editor without Capt. James Tiberius Kirk on his resume? Could Tabby King publish a first edition of a fortune cookie without Steve in her corner? How about Margaret Truman? Elliott Roosevelt? Tim Green?
Yes, that Tim Green -- at one time a defensive star for the Atlanta Falcons of the NFL -- and author of a handful of football-tinged thrillers. He's back again, and now he's trading on a post-football career as an attorney to fashion a courtroom drama / crime novel: The Letter of the Law.
A Scrawny Plot
Society lawyer Casey Jordan -- West Texas trailer trash made good in the big city -- may have missed out on a chance to defend a young rap artist, but her consolation prize might well be a career maker in its own right. She's been asked to defend one of her former law professors, charged in the brutal murder and mutilation of one of his current students. Casey's not just gorgeous and sexy as all get-out, she's also darned good at what she does. A ringing defense of her client, in which she first casts doubt on the competence of the investigating detective and then implicates the dead woman's father in a sordid plot to kill his daughter, is good enough to make Eric Lipton a free man.
Little does our Ms Jordan know that one day soon she'll find herself depending on the same two men she humiliated in court to keep her alive. A killer is loose...
A Change in Course
Green's first stab at a courtroom drama is complete with macabre "psychological insights" into a deranged mind -- a man who bears a striking resemblance to the urbane genius of Hannibal Lecter (not to mention some of his culinary habits). Other characters are equally derivative; the hard-drinking police detective whose wife left him because of his job, the beautiful country girl with brains who marries well and becomes a success... Neither is the plot any more original.
The Letter of the Law is set in Austin, Texas -- the defendant is a law professor at the University of Texas and Casey dwells in the ritzy suburbs of West Austin (not far from my office). So why doesn't the place look familiar to me? One might consider it nit-picking to complain that, contrary to Green's narrative, Houston does not lie "down I-35" (San Antonio does), and that caves in the hills west of town are not in granite (they're in limestone). Nor, for that matter, could Norton Utilities be described as a "gray box with cables hanging from it." But it's not merely nit-picking: these research faux pas are symptomatic of the lack of care given to The Letter of the Law.
Now don't get me wrong: I've heard Green's commentary on NPR; I know that he was an English major at Syracuse; I know that he earned a law degree even while playing in the NFL. No doubt he's intelligent, and he seems well-spoken on my radio. But facts is facts: the plot of this clinker is thinner than Michael Chiklis's hair and the characters have all the depth of an inflatable kiddie wading pool.
The Rant
Sure, Green -- trading on his status as one of the NFL's most literate retirees -- was able to get a publishing contract, especially after what by many accounts was an excellent memoir about his playing days (The Dark Side of the Game: My Life in the NFL) and another about his search for his birth parents (A Man and His Mother: An Adopted Son's Search). After that, he was able to get a string of sports thrillers published, even in the face of reviews such as (of Ruffians), "Green... fades back to take a pass at writing a football novel and is sacked," from Kirkus. And heck, Kirkus likes darned near everything!
Nope, this is surely a case of an author whose celebrity opened doors that others of similar talent would have found securely locked -- someone who picked up a publishing contract only because he is (or, rather, was) famous: he certainly didn't earn it as a literary genius! And you know what? That means that somewhere out there is a more talented writer with a closetful of unpublished manuscripts; work that remains out of sight while the likes of King, Shatner, and Green get published.