54 pages • 1 hour read
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Background
Genre Context: The Legal Thriller and The Heist Story
The legal thriller has a long and sustained history; its roots are in the courtroom drama which goes back as far as 458 BCE. Eumenides, a play by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, is a courtroom drama in which Orestes is put on trial for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. The courtroom drama gained popularity in mid-sixteenth century England, partly because of a renewed interest in Classical literature and because of a public fascination for scandalous trials. English lawyers often published accounts of trials for popular entertainment. Today, the legal drama is distinguished from the courtroom drama with the distinction that in the legal thriller, the reader knows the guilty party from the outset, whereas in the courtroom drama, the goal is to discover the identity of the criminal. After the rise of the novel as a popular literary form, mid-19th century British authors wrote bestselling works focused on crime and legal procedure, most notably Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White, The Moonstone) and Charles Dickens (Bleak House). In the US, Abraham Lincoln wrote “The Trailor Murder Mystery” (1846), based on a case he defended.
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By John Grisham
