Kill All the Lawyers

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Deverell’s ninth novel is not on a par with his best (such as Dance of
Shiva) but resembles another of his creations, “Street Legal.” We
have here a firm of Vancouver lawyers whose agendas, personal problems,
and sex lives make up the narrative. Consequently, the plot shifts back
and forth and never develops real page-turning suspense as a thriller.
Perhaps it was not meant to; there is much tongue-in-cheek humor here,
and the dénouement, teetering on parody, is a hoot. “Someone is
trying to kill the great lawyers of Vancouver,” says a character at
one point, and so it seems; but at times the murders are of less
interest than the soap-opera antics of the legal firm. One character is
in temporary exile in Central America, and almost one-fifth of the text
consists of his letters home; he is working on a mystery novel, and as
he discusses how a mystery should be plotted—how often a body should
appear, for instance—similar events are occurring in Deverell’s
pages. (The local color in those letters from Costa Rica may well be a
result of Vancouver lawyer Deverell’s annual six months in that
country.) Another character is writing a novel called “Kill All the
Lawyers,” taking its title from one of Shakespeare’s oft-quoted
lines. (“I say, old chaps, wish I’d come up with that,” says
another.) Neither consistently amusing enough to be a comic novel, nor
suspenseful enough to be a good thriller, the story nonetheless provides
passable entertainment, and its 46 short chapters make it a good book
for the beach.