William Deverell

• Born: March 4, 1937
• Place of Birth: Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

TYPE OF PLOT: Courtroom drama

Contribution

William Deverell’s chief contribution to the genre of mystery and detective fiction has been the legal crime novel, with its emphasis on lawyers and courtrooms, criminals and police, the manifold activities that bring these forces together, and the often strange results of their dramatic encounters.

Deverell’s novels, like those of his American contemporaries and , reflect the public fascination with criminal law and fictional depictions of legal proceedings that have the ring of authenticity. The appeal of legal crime fiction intensified tremendously in the aftermath of the televising of the O. J. Simpson criminal trial in the United States in 1995.

Most of Deverell’s fiction is set along the west coast of Canada, around Vancouver, a part of the country often associated with flamboyance, eccentricity, radicals, and excess. Deverell’s stories are filled with eccentric characters, colorful dialogue, and strange and surprising twists and turns. They are also enriched by references to classical literature and by Deverell’s deep concern for environmental issues.

Deverell’s novels are often based on actual legal cases and incidents. A practicing lawyer for many years, Deverell was involved in hundreds of cases. For his novels, he conducted extensive research to ensure accuracy. His work has enjoyed enormous popularity in Canada and worldwide. In terms of quality and impact, Deverell’s fiction bears comparison with the best in the field, including that of Turow and Grisham.

Biography

William Herbert Deverell was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, on March 4, 1937. He worked for several years as a newspaper reporter and graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with his law degree in 1963. Deverell practiced law for fifteen years, acting primarily as a defense lawyer in hundreds of cases, including murder trials. During that time, he also represented some minor and major figures in the drug trade, and this experience is particularly evident in his novels.

After tiring from his work as a criminal lawyer, Deverell began writing fiction in the late 1970s. He struggled with his first novel for several months but finally found his voice, and Needles was published in 1979. It was an immediate commercial and critical success. Needles won the fifty-thousand-dollar Seal First Novel Award in 1979 and the Book of the Year Award in 1981.

The financial and critical success of the novel consolidated Deverell’s career move. He began publishing novels regularly, about one every other year, and went from success to success. In the early 1990s, Deverell and his wife, Tekla, built a small cottage on Pender Island, off the coast of Vancouver, that served as a place for him to write. They also built a winter home in Costa Rica. The exotic locations and inhabitants of both Pender Island and Costa Rica have figured in Deverell’s later work, particularly in his preoccupation with the fragility and beauty of nature, and the depredations wrought by urbanization.

In the mid-1980s, Deverell wrote a screenplay that became the basis of one of Canada’s most successful television series, Street Legal, which ran from 1986 to 1994. Deverell also wrote the screenplay for the film Mindfield, based on his novel of the same name, published in 1989. Fatal Cruise: The Trial of Robert Frisbee (1991) is Deverell’s nonfictional account of his defense of a man accused of killing his employer.

From 1991 to 1992, Deverell was a visiting professor in the creative writing department at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. In 1994 and again in 1999, he was the chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada. His fiction continued to win major awards, including the Dashiell Hammett Prize for literary excellence in crime writing in North America for Trial of Passion (1997) and the 2006 Arthur Ellis Award for crime writing for April Fool (2003). The Arthur Ellis Award recognizes the best works in Canadian crime fiction and scholarship.

Deverell’s favorite author is the novelist . He shares with Updike a fascination with the mystery and complexity of apparently ordinary people and events, as well as a reverence for the natural world and a prose that is rich, evocative, and precise.

Analysis

Most of William Deverell’s fiction is grounded in fact and contemporary events. For example, Needles begins with a reference to a major report to the government of Canada on the illegal drug trade, published in the early 1970s. High Crimes (1981) draws on his experience as a defense attorney in a famous drug smuggling case. Trial of Passion is loosely based on a sensational sexual harassment case at a university in British Columbia. Mindfield draws on the United States government’s clandestine experiments with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) in Canada in the 1950s.

The pervading sense of authenticity and realism conveyed by Deverell’s novels is strengthened by his incorporation of “evidence” into his narratives: excerpts from court testimony, police and private detective reports, psychological assessments, wiretaps, and the like. This tends to convey a sense of direct, unfiltered contact with primary material. The reader often seems positioned as a juror, weighing and assessing testimony and evidence throughout the story.

Despite the aura of realism, Deverell is also a compulsively self-reflexive writer, often engaging in subtle and humorous postmodern touches. In Kill All the Lawyers (1994), for example, one of the main characters is writing a crime novel following the instructions in a how-to book entitled The Art of the Whodunit. His “fictional” plot strangely anticipates some important developments in the “real” story. The character also relaxes by discussing classic murder mystery fiction with the local police detective, who solves the mystery of the “real” story by methods gleaned from his reading of such writers as and .

Deverell often focuses intensely on the inherent drama of the courtroom duel between the prosecution and the defense. His work is enhanced by and reflects his knowledge of police procedure, forensic science, the interaction of local, provincial, national, and international police forces, and justice as affected by notoriety, power, and money.

Despite the humor and exuberance that mark Deverell’s characters, plot, and dialogue, there is throughout his work a sense of the importance and pervasiveness of legal concepts and structures in people’s lives. As one of his characters says, “The law. The law! I’m trapped in the bloody clutches of the law. Presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt, grand precepts, aren’t they?” Deverell would emphatically say that they are but that they are enacted by flawed and fallible human beings. This volatile mix is what makes his depiction of crime and punishment so readable and relevant.

Needles

Set in Vancouver, Needles explores the underworld links between Asian suppliers of heroin and the vast, voracious North American market for their product. Dr. Au, “the Surgeon,” a Chinese national and Canadian land-owning immigrant, is the local Asian syndicate leader charged with responsibility for the Canadian end of the drug trade. The story opens with a shocking scene of vivisection, as Dr. Au slowly and methodically tortures and then kills one of his underlings, who has been uncovered as a police informant.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the local authorities have been keeping Dr. Au and his operation under surveillance for some time and eventually arrested him for the murder. A twist in the plot is that the RCMP officer who recruited the murdered informer is also on the payroll of Dr. Au, and he plays both sides of the law. At this point, the story’s protagonist enters—Forster Cobb, a former government prosecutor who is pressured to take the lead in the prosecution of Dr. Au. Cobb is reluctant partly because he has relapsed into drug use because of professional and domestic stress. Eventually, he agrees to take the case.

From this point, the novel details the complex preparations by the prosecution and the defense for the trial of Dr. Au, including strategic delays and pretrial motions. Deverell includes the police activity in court and behind the scenes, including wiretaps, the disposition of evidence, and the protection and preparation of witnesses.

All of this is interwoven with the complex personal lives of the major figures, culminating in some surprising and profoundly human revelations about characters on both sides of the law, including the macabre and sexually deviant Dr. Au. However, the heart of the story is the ebb and flow of the trial itself with all of the legal and sometimes illegal maneuvering that money and power can buy.

High Crimes

Where Needles focuses primarily on the trial and the activities that accompany it, High Crimes is, at times, a caper, a legal thriller, and a police procedural. With a few brief snapshots at the beginning, Deverell outlines the main elements of his story. A rich, corrupt Colombian politician has a huge crop of exceptionally high-grade marijuana that he wants transported to the United States. Rudy Meyers, an American businessman involved in various intrigues, offers his services as a middleman. Meanwhile, Central Intelligence Agency personnel are monitoring suspicious activity among the Colombian drug lords. Members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are doing likewise. In Newfoundland, home to generations of daring sailors and fishermen, Captain Peter Kerrivan is about to beat a major drug smuggling charge on a technicality.

For several years, Kerrivan had been pursued by Inspector Mitchell of the RCMP, Canada’s chief narcotics officer, in a joint Canadian and American effort at drug interdiction. Mitchell embodies the righteous lawman—stern, relentless, and methodical. Kerrivan, however, is the embodiment of the romantic outlaw—handsome, brave, and reckless. From the story's beginning, these two are on a collision course.

Mitchell sets in motion a complex and costly sting operation to nab Kerrivan and his crew with a major drug shipment in Canadian waters. Through the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, Mitchell learns about and then engages the services of Rudy Meyers. For a half-million-dollar fee, Meyers agrees to lure Kerrivan to the Columbian drug lord, broker a drug deal between them, and set an ingenious trap that will ensure Kerrivan’s capture and conviction.

The scene shifts to Columbia, where Kerrivan acquires an aging tanker and arranges to buy fifty tons of high-grade marijuana for transportation to Newfoundland and then New York. He and his crew stand to make more than twenty million dollars for the delivery. The narrative then traces the vectors of both police and smugglers as plans evolve and complications arise for both groups. The tempo is extremely fast-paced throughout and enlivened by an eccentric cast of characters.

As Kerrivan and crew sail toward apparent disaster, the RCMP’s political masters in the nation’s capital get wind of some details of the sting, including its huge cost and some of the shady characters involved. They apply pressure to abort it, fearing a public inquiry. Eventually, Kerrivan and crew are arrested, and the scene moves back into the courtroom. There, the scope of the crime and the notoriety of the accused ensure a complex and sensational trial. The ending is as convincing as it is completely unexpected.

Trial of Passion

Trial of Passion is one of Deverell’s most accomplished novels in terms of characterization, suspense, and pacing. Jonathan O’Donnell is a handsome, successful lawyer and academic in his mid-thirties. He has recently been named acting dean of a major British Columbia law school when he is accused of rape by one of his students, Kimberly Martin, a bright and beautiful young woman who is also a gifted actress.

The undisputed facts include the following: There was an end-of-term dance at which students and professors mixed. O’Donnell and some students, including Kimberly Martin, continued partying afterward and ended up at O’Donnell’s home in the early morning hours. There was a considerable amount of drinking and drug use during the evening. Martin passed out on O’Donnell’s living room chair, and the other students soon left. What happened between O’Donnell and Martin after the students left is the question that propels the narrative forward.

The story opens with court testimony from a preliminary hearing of the sexual assault charge. With this dramatic opening, the reader is plunged into the heart of a “she said, he said” dilemma: Who and what does one believe, and why? Further excerpts of testimony at the preliminary hearing and later at the trial give the reader insight into the complexities and limitations of the legal process. These include the rules about disclosure of evidence, hearsay, voir dire testimony, the selection of juries, pretrial agreements, and the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of actual courtrooms. Despite all the testimony at the preliminary hearing and later at the sensational trial, the basic question of what transpired remains elusive.

Deverell complicates the reader’s response to the principal figures throughout the novel in various ways. He provides, for example, private letters that each writes to friends, colleagues, and legal counsels. Although the reader cannot know how candid each is, in every case, the voice in question seems forthright about actions, motives, and recollections. Later, the reader is given excerpts of conversations that O’Donnell and Martin have with their respective therapists. Again, these suggest candid, privileged revelations, but again, they are inconclusive about an assault. The more the reader learns about each character, the more appealing, sympathetic, and believable each seems. The reader learns there was a growing attraction between them, but it was kept in check by their mutual recognition of the proprieties of the professor-student relationship and other commitments in their lives.

At trial, students and colleagues are put on the witness stand to testify to what they saw and heard the night in question. Medical testimony is entered into evidence. Every fact and assertion seems to be interpreted in contradictory ways. The one touchstone the reader has in this maze is Arthur Beauchamp, a sixty-three-year-old celebrated defense attorney.

The reader is given privileged access into Beauchamp’s mind. His sensibility and outlook—erudite, self-deprecating, tolerant, and fair-minded—account a great deal for the story’s warmth, humor, and thematic depth. His struggles with whether to take O’Donnell’s case and later how to mount a defense reveal a fundamental principle from which the legal system derives its moral authority. Beauchamp expresses this principle in terms of his commitment to the old Roman maxim: Fiat justitia, ruat caelum (let justice be done though the heavens fall). For Beauchamp, the law is ultimately about the search for truth rather than a contest for victory.

How Beauchamp elicits the truth in open court and how that truth exonerates both the accused and the accuser is a brilliant and powerful insight into the mystery of humans not only to others but also to themselves. The courtroom may be a place of theatrical performance, but as with all great drama, it can be a place where the most profound and significant human secrets are revealed.

Other Works

Deverell's further twenty-first-century works include Kill All the Judges (2008), Snow Job (2009), I'll See You in My Dreams (2011), Sing a Worried Song (2015), Whipped (2017), Stung (2021), and The Long-Shot Trial (2024), which continue Arthur Beauchamp's story. Remaining relevant to modern environmental struggles, Stung is a political and ecological thriller featuring Beauchamp's legal defense of environmentalists accused of sabotaging a chemical plant that kills bees. In The Long-Shot Trial, readers learn about Beauchamp's backstory and his path to becoming an attorney.

Bibliography

"Books." William Deverell, www.deverell.com/books. Accessed 20 July 2024.

McBride, Jim, ed. In Cold Blood: A Directory of Canadian Crime Writing and Crime Writers. Crime Writers of Canada, 2002.

New, William H., ed. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Winks, Robin W., and Maureen Corrigan, eds. Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage. New York: Scribner & Sons, 1998.