The Second Man

The Second Man – Edward Grierson

This excellent courtroom mystery begins with our narrator Michael Irvine in a dour mood. In the north of England in a crowded set of chambers, he is forced to double up in a broom-closet of an office with The New Guy. The New Guy turns out to be woman barrister Marion Kerrison, who, on the bright side, is about the same age and has the same depth of legal experience as Michael. Over time he recognizes that while she may be young, green, and reckless in court, she’s brilliant, insightful, and possesses amazing gifts for speaking and cross-examining.

Marion gets her once-in-a-lifetime chance in a high-profile murder case. She must defend a shady Australian named John Maudsley, charged with the murder of his aunt. The two witnesses for the prosecution give unassailable testimony. Maudsley doesn’t help himself by looking deceitful and acting over-confidently. Nor does Marion when she flies off the handle in court and rankles the judge. She intuits that it was a second man, not her client, that did the deed.

Edward Grierson (1914 - 1975) was a lawyer himself so the settings of chambers and courts strike the reader as authentic. Set in the middle 1950s, this vintage mystery weaves together the murder case itself with a woman barrister’s struggle to be accepted as a professional and a damn good one. Vintage too are the various male attitudes ranging from outright hostile to condescendingly sympathetic. Also old-fashioned is Grierson’s assumption that we have read the same books that he has:

I was always moved too easily: by the death of Steerforth, and the perplexities of John Forsyte, by Soames walking in his picture gallery in Mapledurham, Uncle Pio, Natasha at the window in the summer night, and the dying fall of the words that record the passing of Socrates.

David Copperfield, The Forsyte Saga, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, and The Apology, but who’s Natasha? Where was her window?

In the spirit of “two great peoples separated by a common language,” American readers will have to brush up on Rumpolian terms such as “take silk,” “leader,” and “queen’s counsel” and picture barristers in gowns and little wigs. I daresay that Americans will be flummoxed by the idioms too: “[Women] want to make an Aunt Sally of you; so will you please to perch yourself up there to be shot at!” They will turn to the Web to figure out puzzlers from European history: “Cross-purpose crimes of the Reichstag variety have a respectable ancestry: do not some historians believe that there were two independent plots afoot on the night when Darnley died in Kirk o’Field?”

Still, these are mere quibbles, questions easy to answer in our wired world. I agree with James Sandoe, a critic for New York Herald Tribune, who ranked this mystery "among the very best of that long, diverse series of detective stories set within the formalities of a trial." In 1956, it won the Crime Writer’s Association Golden Dagger Award, when it was called (say it three times fast) the Crossed Red Herring Award.