Crime 문학, Crime 소설, 사회와 법, 법과 문학

1.  이번주에 출간된  Scott Turow의 이 Innocent 소설을 아직 읽어보지 못했슴다.   나도 이렇게 소설 하나 쓰고 싶은데 능력이 없어서리~~그게 서러운거져~~~언제 시간을 내어서 이책을 읽어볼 수 있을련지~~~      2.  내가 관심을 가질 장르가 크라임 픽션인데요, 이 크라임 픽션 영역은 독자층이 넓고 큰 영역이라고 봄니다.  한국은 독자층이 아직까진 미흡하지 않을까 그런 생각을 어렴풋이 하는데요.  그 이유는 법에 대한 이해도가 높은 좋은 소설가가 없기 때문이라고 봅니다.  암튼 댄 브라운의 음모론도 기본적으론 크라임 픽션에 포함할 수 있을지도 몰라요.  결국 우리 인류 사회의 발전 양태가 크라임 장르로 몰고가는 것 같습니다.    3.  크라임 문학: 도스토예프시키 죄와 벌 톨스토이 소설 빅토르 위고의 레미제라블 세익스피어 희곡 모두가 다 crime 문학인거죠. 암튼 책 표지 하나를 스캔만 할께요.      1. Scott Turow Author: PAOLA TOTARO Date: 05/06/2010 Words: 1571 Source: SMH           Publication: Sydney Morning Herald Section: Spectrum Page: 34

In resurrecting the character who made him a star 23 years ago, the best-selling American writer and lawyer has seen a dream come true, writes PAOLA TOTARO. When Scott Turow walks into the frenetic lobby of London's Waldorf Hotel, it is the author's still demeanour that strikes first. A small man with the deep, mellifluous voice of the trial lawyer, he exudes a quiet presence that transcends even the overwhelming noise of an elderly Italian businessman shouting into his mobile phone. The American novelist is touring Europe to promote his new book, Innocent, which has just been published in the US to seriously good reviews. Twenty-three years have passed since his first novel, Presumed Innocent, turned the then 39-year-old County Cook prosecutor into a publishing star, spawning the legal thriller genre that exploded not long after with John Grisham and others. Turow had been writing fiction - unpublished - for 20 years but this was the miraculous book that earned $US1 million ($1.2 million) in screen rights from Sydney Pollack before it came out and $US3 million in paperback rights, a record at the time. Seven novels have followed, translated into 20 languages and selling 25 million copies. But this one is special: Turow's first great protagonist, the prosecutor and now sitting Supreme Court Judge Rusty Sabich is back, something his creator insisted for years he would never do. "If I've learned one thing it's never to vow I won't write anything again," he says with a laugh. "I just kept going back to him, thinking about him. He was 39 then, like me when I wrote it. He's entering his 60s. What happened in his life? I felt like I needed to check back in on him." Turow says the book was born while he was asleep: in a dream he saw a man seated on the edge of a bed beside a woman's body. He jotted the idea down on a Post-it note, sure that it was a subconscious echo of an Edward Hopper painting and imbued with the intense sense of isolation that is the artist's signature emotion. "Ordinarily, if I have a story idea I file it in the computer. But the problem with this was that it was just a line, an image, nothing much to it. I went off on a book tour after that but when I came back I started thinking about Rusty again. I'd been asked by The New York Times to do a serial novella for their magazine and had an idea about a judge who couldn't decide a case. I'd always known Rusty would become a judge and so I ran the idea past my agent. Fortunately, she said, 'No you don't want to do that, you've told me an idea that's not big enough to carry a novel. This guy's too important to you as a writer to use him this way.' " As Turow hung up the phone after talking to his agent, he saw the note. "I thought, 'Oh my God, the man on the bed is Rusty.' I knew in that moment what I would be writing about. It was electrifying, a pretty rare experience to feel that a book has come to you in a moment. And I was very excited by knowing what I was doing. But I was also scared to death. It was a huge burden." The story begins with that haunting image and the voice of the narrator - Sabich's only son, Nat - saying the man sitting on the bed is his father. The woman, dead under the covers, is his mother, Barbara. The scene posed an immediate, vexing question: How could these two people still be together? At the end of the original book it was Barbara who took a hatchet to her husband's lover and it was her revenge plot that saw him in the dock, falsely accused of murder. As one American reviewer noted acidly, putting Barbara and Rusty Sabich back in bed together is a little like Glenn Close and Michael Douglas re-uniting for a sequel to Fatal Attraction. And yet in this seemingly unbelievable reunion lies so much of the book's humanity and power. While it is a fast-paced thriller, full of the twists and turns of modern forensics, computer science and courtrooms, Innocent is also an acute psychological examination, a devastating study of marriage and the toxic dynamics that keep people together, even if their lives are coloured mostly by unhappiness. "At the end of Presumed Innocent, they'd already begun a half-arsed reconciliation," Turow says. "I realised that I had implied in the last two pages that he was staying with her, that they'd resumed their sexual relationship. I wondered what it would really mean if they did." In Presumed Innocent, Sabich's brief affair with an ambitious young lawyer had long ended when she is found beaten, raped and dead. He is assigned to her case, hiding their past, but is finally charged with her murder when he is pursued by his nemesis prosecutor, Tommy Molto. After a cliffhanger trial he is set free, only to discover his wife's horrible secret. Innocent finds Sabich back with Barbara two decades later, living in a kind of eggshell-walking marital ceasefire about the time of his 60th birthday party. It is a dark, melancholy affair filled with opportunities lost and the sense of mortality. Then Rusty succumbs into the arms of a much younger associate again: "How, my heart shrieks, how can I be doing this again?" he asks himself. But this time it is his spouse who is found dead and when anti-depressive medication is found at high doses in her blood stream, the coroner's initial ruling of natural causes is overturned and Sabich is again charged with murder. Turow says it didn't take him long to understand that the book was to be about life, about change and the "courage it takes to embrace it when it has become inevitable and the consequences of not doing it. The reality is that people stay in lousy marriages for long periods of time, that women go back to men who beat them, husbands endure wives who cheat on them and cheat on them again and truer the other way around, too. Yes, it is extreme but, you know, people do it. And the foolishness of it is not something that seems to deter people; they go from one bad marriage to another making the same mistakes." I had read that Turow divorced his wife of 35 years in 2008, about the time he was writing the book. I ask him if the visceral nature of the portrait of this failing marriage is resonant of his own life. He pauses and then talks with candour - but mostly off the record - about what was clearly a difficult time. "The hardest thing to do in life is to know yourself and to change. Nobody ever fully recognises who they really are ... that is supposed to be the great advantage of getting older, the one compensation. For Sabich, it takes going through the wringer twice before this man realises who he is and what he wants." Turow says his father, a physician, was tough and critical of his son. His mother, who had wanted to be a novelist, was his saving grace, constantly helping to rebuild her son in the face of unstinting criticism. The author has described his father's reaction to his first book's phenomenal success before: "He read it and I said, 'OK, what do you think now?' By then it was No. 1. And he looked at me and said, "I still think you could've gone to medical school.' " In the book, Sabich's self-punishing personality is balanced by his desperate desire to be a better father than his own. Turow says what was happening to him in real life undoubtedly explains some of the pessimistic observations about bad marriages. But his happiness now, at a svelte, fit 61, is palpable. He lives with his new partner, a neurologist - the woman who saved his elderly mother's life after a stroke - and happily continues to practise law. He is involved in Democrat politics and judicial policy and worked on a commission considering the reform of the Illinois death penalty. He lectures and has won significant trials, including a case in which he secured the release of Alejandro Hernandez, who had spent 11 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. Going to law school all those years ago, he says, was an existential necessity at the time - a practical way to stave off the obsessive feeling that that if he didn't write, he would die. Now, golf is his greatest non-work passion ("I hang with my male friends and smoke cigars") but he also "sings" in a covers band made up of writers, including the humourist Dave Barry, Stephen King and Amy Tan. They call themselves the Rock Bottom Remainders and Turow has been known to don a curly pink wig and belt out '60s numbers with tuneless gusto. All in all, this latest chapter in life is unexpectedly joyous. "It's a weird thing because Rusty's trial was a cataclysm for him and an enormous celebration for me. It darkened his life and made my dreams come true." Innocent is published by Macmillan, $32.99.