Tony Gilroy`s 2007 neo-noir legal thriller tops this list for several reasons, which we`ll list because you`ve gone that far in the article: (1) a dense and wildly ambitious storyline, with a keen eye for individual details and big ideas swarming just below the surface; (2) the cast in which George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson work at the height of their powers; (3) artistic photography, flooded with twilight and aurora tones; (4) acceptance of ambiguity and moral gray areas that Hollywood rarely likes to make with commerce; (4) pure entertainment value; (5) the scene with the horses; (6) the stage with the chopsticks; and (7) that scene in the taxi at the very end. The legal world is also perfectly captured. Michael is a “fixer” at a white shoe company in New York, but he doesn`t have superpowers. It has only a few ties to the NYPD and the DA. The company office, the midnight closing sessions, the preparations for the motel`s dump in the Midwest, even the cars driving the characters — everything is perfect. The film is damn entertaining, but it`s also an ordeal, and like any good legal ordeal, everything feels a bit soiled. As the man said, “Give me fifty dollars.” Dugoni is the most literary of all legal thriller writers, and this thrilling court drama — surrounded by investigations presented by Seattle detective Tracy Crosswhite — could be his masterpiece. Opera prima di Scott Turow, Presunto innocente è il romanzo che, per molti, ha creato il genere legal thriller. Here is the plot (taken from our review by Alessio Massaccesi): “There are only a few days left before the elections when Carolyn Polhemus, a beautiful lawyer, is killed in her own house: it is a heinous and contradictory crime; above all, it could tip the political balance in the head-to-head race between Raymond Horgan, the outgoing prosecutor, and Nico della Guardia, the challenger, in favour of the latter. Unless Rusty Sabich finds the killer before the polls open. However, the paucity of evidence at the crime scene seems paradoxical: perhaps there was violence before the murder; Maybe a consensual relationship. But who is Carolyn Polhemus really? A corrupt and ruthless bureaucrat or the fragile and sensual young woman who, a few months earlier, was able to undermine all of Sabich`s certainties? To discover and solve the case, Rusty believes he is ready for anything, but reality and truth are fleeting concepts in Kindle County: Here, accusers and defendants are actually confused with friends and enemies. So far, we`ve tried to explain what it is, when and where the legal thriller comes from.
Now it`s time to make a list of essential legal thrillers that those who want to delve deeper into this particular subgenre of the thriller can`t overlook. This is clearly an incomplete list, as there would be many titles that should be included, even more than one for each author, but we will try to include as many titles and authors as possible. As always, we invite you to include the list in the comments to recommend other readings that you found enjoyable and exemplary for the genre to be analyzed. Having made the necessary clarifications, we can only move on to this arduous task. We will specify the titles strictly in the order of publication. Another aspect to consider is the geography of the legal thriller: a murder can be committed in a thousand ways, but once the mode is chosen, the “result” is the same in Italy and America and Sweden. This does not apply to the results of a trial or its stages: each country has its own legal system, what is a crime in one place may not be a crime in another, the penalty to be applied will be different, but above all, the procedure to be applied varies from place to place. The process, wherever it takes place, is a ritual: it has different formulas, moments, actors.
An example? The popular juries so popular in the United States exist only in the Court of Assizes and Assizes of Appeal, they are never totally autonomous and independent because the composition is mixed (professional and non-professional judges); Moreover, the trials that take place there concern specific and very serious crimes (massacre, intentional homicide, enslavement), they are certainly not in the majority. It is clear that an Italian writer who wants to write a legal thriller set in America will have serious difficulty making it believable and not a pure invention (and vice versa, of course). In general, we could argue, without fear of being refuted, that the presence of a popular jury in the American trial increases the spectacularity of the rite (selection of jurors, examination of their reactions, uncertainty of verdict). In our legal thrillers, this gap is compensated for by a greater focus on the investigation (by both the prosecution and the defense) as well as the conflict of conscience, especially in the case of a lawyer (see lawyer Guerrieri di Carofiglio).