Defending Billy Ryan

Jerry Kennedy #3

by George V. Higgins

Hard-drinking, hard-up attorney Jerry Kennedy takes on a case that nobody else will touch, that of defending a once-powerful commissioner of public works who has been involved in one shady deal after another. Reprint.

Genres: Crime, Fiction, Thriller

301 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

George Vincent Higgins was a United States author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, and college professor. He is best known for his bestselling crime novels.

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

George V Higgins is a delight. Even those critics who weren't a fan of his style, still felt it. Roderick MacLeish, in the Times Literary Supplement, once commented that, "the plot of a Higgins novel – suspense, humor and tragedy – is a blurrily perceived skeleton within the monsoon of dialogue." But that dialogue was amazing. Defending Billy Ryan is roughly a legal thriller, courtroom thriller, but with an inverted ending that disrupts the pace. I didn't mind the twirl at the end, but George Higgins does things because he wants to do them. Reading Jerry Kennedy novels is like experiencing a proto-Saul Goodman, 25 years before Better Caul Saul and 20 years before Breaking Bad. Nobody in the books is all bad and nobody in the book is all good. It's all business.

[False · Rating 4 out of 5]

George V. Higgins, how I miss you. I have been reading the body of his work. For the hardest to acquire, I've had to go through interlibrary loans into universities and sources that still have the books. Once so popular. Time takes it's toll. We shouldn't forget him. This book held me and I literally couldn't put it down. I reread passages with admiration. I loved his explanations (and you knew it came from experience) of what it means to be a defense attorney. I have probably 7-8 more of his books to read, and I'm going to dread coming to the end. Of course, I can reread them at any time, but it's the magic of the first reading and marveling at what he did in his work. I was the source for adding this particular edition and photography to Book Reads. I don't know why they wouldn't show a first edition copy, but they have it now.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is fantastic, but in a twist for Higgins it's not the dialogue but the (cynical?) descriptions of the American legal system that stand out.

Killer lines:
Then we went back out into the courtroom, and in due course my genuine client’s case came on to be heard. Colin listened patiently and intently while the prosecutor gave him a whole list of pretty good reasons why my customer should go to jail right off and stay there for a good long while so that he might meditate upon his many sins and maybe decide to turn over a new leaf. Which, given his record, did not seem to be very likely in the prosecutor’s estimation but was worth a try, at least. And anyway, if he was off the street and securely locked up, part of the crime wave would be stemmed. I must confess that even I found much good sense in the prosecutor’s argument.

Then I stood up and assured Colin that my pal was a fine fellow who only knocked over gas stations, convenience stores and suchlike in the dead of night when the fit was on him, and that he had promised me solemnly that he wasn’t going to do it anymore, and that neither one of us understood how on earth the policeman who’d arrested him in the parking lot at the 7-Eleven on Adams Street in Quincy at 11:48 P.M. on the night in question could possibly have spotted the fully loaded .38 Smith and Wesson revolver under the passenger seat without having conducted an unlawful search, not based on probable cause. Or how, having seen it, he could have leaped to the conclusion that it belonged to my client, whom the cop had recognized right off “as a known felon,” and that he had been planning to use the .38 to knock over the store as soon as the last stray customer left with his strawberry Slurpee and prepackaged ham-and-cheese sandwich.


Status offenses: Our system of criminal justice purportedly excludes status offenses: prohibitions of, and punishments for, being rich, poor, middle class, unemployed, professional, amateur, or being a member or nonmember of a given ethnic or religious group. Righteously we protest that we punish only acts, acts that are disruptive of the peace and good order, destructive of the common weal, or atrocious and barbarous by all civilized standards.

This is true as far as it goes, which isn’t very far at all. In operation, the criminal law and the people who enforce it permit the moneyed to do certain things—such as enjoy moderate (weekend) use of recreational drugs, provided they are sophisticated enough to know how to obtain their Andean marching powders without resort to street pushers—for which they punish those without the money or discreet connections. And by the same token, the enforcers permit the poor—i.e., blacks and Hispanics—to employ sharp kitchen implements for the settlement of domestic disagreements over such subjects as spousal fidelity or paternity without too much fuss, but vigorously capture and prosecute highly reputable persons (“community leaders”) who pound on their spouses while drunk. A laborer has a pretty decent chance of cheating on his income tax and getting away with it; an orthodontist does not (reasonable enough, I suppose; what the government loses to the laborer in taxes on under-the-table income wouldn’t pay for the cost of catching him, but the tax, penalties and interest on what the orthodontist hides will pay the salaries of two auditors for a year).

Life’s a trade-off. A middle-echelon gang-messenger from North Dorchester enjoys favorable odds of success as he sets out on a gun-running trip to Florida, where any drunk recruited fresh off the sidewalk for a sawbuck can buy half a dozen fine 9 mm. semiauto fifteen-shot double-stackers over the counter at the store, if he’s got the money; the well-known kidney specialist from Weston had better expect trouble if he decorates his game room with the hides, heads or tusks of species declared endangered, because he’s got the money, and people envy him. Envy accounts for many prosecutions instigated in the name of what is Right and Just. If you stick your head up high enough, someone will be tempted to cut it clean off your neck. If your situation, when you’re caught, would make a stranger think you ought to’ve known better than to get in that big mess, you probably should’ve.

When envy is the root of the proceeding, the government’s pretrial public gloating suggests the reality that forces the victim of the indictment to try the case: his entire life and career, significantly damaged by the mere accusation of wrongdoing, will be utterly destroyed if he’s convicted, regardless of whether he throws in the towel or demands that a jury decide. So if that client has any shot at all, he simply can’t deal.


Jury instructions: I couldn’t possibly overstate the sore-thumb problem of Billy’s reputation in his case. I’ve made some friends on the other side of this business in more than a quarter century at it (thus contradicting another one of those “Perry Mason” canards: Perry and DA Hamilton Burger may’ve hated each other, thereby heightening the drama, but in real life few defense lawyers and fewer prosecutors permit themselves the luxury of despising each other; personal animosities interfere with the orderly conduct of business). To a man they’ve cheerfully admitted that there’s nothing a prosecutor likes better than listening to the trial judge tell the jury that they can draw “no inference unfavorable to the defendant from his decision not to testify.” The prosecutors also like the judges’ warning that the jurors must not allow anything they’ve read in the papers or seen on TV, before or after they started the case, “to influence your judgment of the evidence in any way.”

Twenty years or so ago there was a kid in Middlesex then with the face of a Vienna Choir Boy—he probably looks like Bluebeard now—and the heart of an assassin who put it very nicely over beers one night in the old Esquire Lounge: “The only beef I’ve got with those instructions,” he said, “is that the judges only get to give them once or twice a trial. I had my way, I’d have ’em start and end each day by reminding those good men and women that they can’t decide the rat is guilty just because the papers say he’s Jack the Ripper, and he’s such a lying bastard that his crooked lawyer hasn’t got the guts to let him take the stand. Tell ’em and tell ’em and tell ’em again—that’s the way I’d like it. Because every time you tell ’em that, they say: ‘Oh yeah? Up yours.’ ”


Multi-denominational New England: . Tommy makes good use of many crafty prelates, of several denominations, as they simultaneously make of him. He’ll do it again, if it helps. When the interests of the secular intersect with the sacred, as they seem to have a way of doing, here in Massachusetts, alliances disintegrate, form and re-form at a dizzying rate (some decades back, the Calvinist clergy and the Mafia, the members of each echelon carefully holding themselves aloof from the members of the other, combined in opposition to legalization of church bingo nights—preachers disliking wagering of all kinds, legal or not, and gangsters all competition—but ultimately lost, valiantly but predictably, to the massed array of Roman Catholic and Jewish clergy), no one has been more adroit than Tommy in arranging coalitions.

Put the good stuff first, even if you can't prove it: At dinner in the evening after the opening day of trial, when he had every right to be downcast and woebegone, I told him not to be discouraged by the prosecutor’s opening. “Their rule is that if they’re not sure they can prove it, they put it in the opening. And hope the jury’ll remember what they said, not what got backed up on the stand. Our day’ll come. When we open, whatever we’re not sure of proving, I’ll use in my opening.”

[Philip Girvan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jerry Kennedy's back: damaged, divorced, down but not out. He's a hard guy not to root for.

Another exceptional novel from Mr. Higgins.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

George V. Higgins was a proscecuting attorney and a assistant U.S. attorney in Boston so he writes with precision and authority about the legal profession. The only other writer to approach him in this is Scott Turow. This is the best novel of its type out there.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Complex plotting and a lot of legalese still make for an entertaining lawyer novel, just not a customary Higgins sample of the underbelly of criminal filth who usually populate his stories. Here, it's attorney conflicts and political graft. Also, the kind of icky white collar behavior that nowadays draws applause and/or celebrity worship--at least in Florida and Georgia. Some strange nympho characterizations, especially the women, and you wish protagonist Jerry Kennedy was included more, especially his miserable yet hilarious home life.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended by a friend, incredibly great writing as both dialogue and description. Anyone who lived in Boston in the 70s or 80s will be transported back. The author’s description of the criminal trial practice from the defense lawyer’s perspective at the time was outstanding. The humor was that of a great writer who was not reaching to make the reader laugh.

[Ed Daniels · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring

[Danath01 · Rating 3 out of 5]

fairly good read