Any author of legal thrillers has to be able to write a good speech, and Scott Turow—the godfather of the genre, which dominated pop literature and then pop filmmaking in the 1990s—is no exception. But one of my favorite Turow speeches isn’t delivered as an opening or closing argument by any of his great litigator protagonists. It doesn’t come in a courtroom scene at all. It comes courtesy of a sad sack, oft-defeated prosecutor at the end of a shitty day in court in Turow’s best book, 1996’s epic The Laws of Our Fathers.
The prosecutor is Tommy Molto, a short, overweight, pockmarked schlemiel who pops up, as many characters do, more than once across Turow’s interconnected literary universe. Turow tends to run long, so I’ll give you the highlights of Molto’s moment of candor, when this hapless loser takes his own measure after someone calls him a hero. “Hero?” he says. “You know what I am? I’m the chump…I’m just doing my job. That's all I've ever done…I read the reports, I talk to the witnesses. I come up to court. What they're doing or thinking downtown, I don't begin to fathom. I never was a politician. That's my problem. I don't think their way…I'm just up there trying the case. They think I don't know I’m the burnt offering. They sent me up there to lose that case. l know that. I've known it all along. But I was up there anyway. Trying to win."
This moment of humanity—granted to a familiar sort of genre antagonist, who a lesser writer would have rendered as a one-dimensional weaselly asshole—crystallizes what has distinguished Turow from his peers since the late 80s. He’s a unique, sensitive author hiding in plain sight within the strictures of formulaic genre. Alan J. Pakula translated this peculiarity to the screen in his masterful first adaptation of Turow’s genre-birthing breakout hit Presumed Innocent in 1990, but it would take 34 years—and several false starts—before a director would nail it again, as David E. Kelly has with his recent Presumed reboot, an equal parts excellent and coked-out AppleTV+ miniseries starring Jake Gyllenhaal, with Peter Sarsgaard as Tommy Molto.
Kelly's Presumed Innocent keeps an obscure streak alive: It’s the fourth adaptation of a Turow property on television over four decades. There was a Burden of Proof miniseries on ABC in 1992, a Reversible Errors miniseries on CBS in 2004, and a made-for-TNT Presumed Innocent sequel in 2011. Each of these were only moderately successful in their attempts to honor Turow’s work, which may be why the author most indelibly associated with the legal thriller is John Grisham. The Mississippi Law School graduate took Turow’s lead, writing his own steamy legal thriller A Time to Kill two years after Presumed Innocent, and from there became an entire industry unto himself. Including Grisham’s second novel, The Firm, in 1992, he wrote nearly as many novels in the next ten years (12) as Turow has written over the course of his entire career (13). Grisham’s most recent novel, 2024’s Camino Ghosts, was his fiftieth consecutive #1 bestseller. He’s sold 300 million books worldwide—compared to Turow’s mere 30 million—and directors like Sydney Pollack, Robert Altman, Joel Schumacher (twice), and Francis Ford Coppola have adapted his books into blockbuster films.
Grisham—along with fellow supermarket-checkout-aisle-lit word-machines like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton—powered an era of nearly direct page-to-screen adaptations by authors who became brands by cranking out books that read like treatments for hit movies (if they weren’t already in production on pub date.) What defined their output was a manic prolificacy. With few exceptions, this pace forces writers to embrace convention. Their art is in the premise, and in this respect, Grisham is a master of rapidly generating compulsively readable plots: What if two Supreme Court Justices were assassinated in one day? What if a top Chicago firm was in thrall to the mob? What if an ambulance-chasing down-on-his-luck law-school graduate came up against a white-shoe practice?
Grisham’s protagonists tend to be scrappy underdog idealists made of starched moral fiber, fearlessly tackling organized crime, government conspiracies, crooked insurance companies, the death penalty, racism, and other big, systemic, nefarious forces. In his pages, Hollywood found a succession of leading-lawyer parts for stars like Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Matthew McConaughey, Chris O’Donnell, Julia Roberts, and John Cusack; his pure-evil antagonists, meanwhile, provided juicy, hammy roles for a deep bench of great character actors (and, bizarrely often, Gene Hackman.) What all these characters, good and bad, have in common is that they’re largely functional, built to make the machinery of the plot move; there’s little separating Mitch McDeere from Rudy Baylor or Adam Hall.
It’s easy to understand why producers gravitated more toward Grisham’s well-oiled plots and good-vs.-evil dynamics rather than what Scott Turow was up to during this period. Turow had announced himself immediately as a two-sport talent—after a two-year postgrad stint at Stanford’s Creative Writing Center in 1972, he arrived at Harvard Law School having already secured a book deal to write about his experiences there, which became his first autobiographical non-fiction work, 1977’s One L. From there, he began the unconventional schedule that would define his career, practicing law during the day, and writing in his limited spare time, an inconceivable weekend-warrior routine he’d maintain even after achieving literary stardom, up until he finally gave up practicing law in 2020.
This partially explains why Turow never matched the hyperproductivity of his peers, but I suspect it’s less a function of work ethic than approach. Turow had three failed novels in the drawer when he hit on Presumed Innocent, the story of a prosecutor named Rusty Sabich who suddenly, helplessly finds himself a defendant, on trial for the murder of a colleague who’s also his former lover. It’s a steamy, near-Russian premise, as most Turow novels are, but Turow animated the novel with an insider’s understanding of the legal process and the imperfect people who carry it out. Similar to what Ed Burns accomplished with The Wire—embroidering David Simon’s massive, elegant civic superstructure with details drawn from his experience as a detective and middle school teacher, perfectly capturing the rhythms of Baltimore’s school system and police force—Turow used his experience as a white collar criminal defense counsel to write about the depravity of the Midwestern professional class in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
What sets Turow’s work apart from the thousands of novels it would inspire is its thorny, fleshed-out character work and interpersonal drama. He works frequently in first person or close third rather than the clinical, dispassionate, omnipotent third person, spewing plot inelegantly, if propulsively. Presumed Innocent was released the same year as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, and both thread the needle between the literary novel (written with an investigative journalist’s rigor) and genre fiction.
In Turow books, people make choices and say things that are odd, surprising, and fucked up. His “heroes” make the irredeemable, life-swallowing mistakes people make in real life. His borderline-serialized novels all take place in the fictional Kindle County in Illinois, a fairly transparent facsimile of Chicago’s Cook County (in interviews and speeches, the Second City native speaks with an unvarnished Midwestese accent that evokes Dennis Farina with an English degree) and his characters recur in book after book or become protagonists in their own novels. The Kindle County universe. Imagine Salinger’s Glass Family if it was full of broken, vainglorious, messy Chicago lawyers on their second or third spouse.
Within the confines of ‘90s genre, Turow was a writer’s writer, with a poetic flair, a design major’s physical vocabulary, a real facility with dialogue, and an intimate knowledge of his characters, all the way down to their favorite colors. He’s always been more interested in the human stakes of his stories than he is in taking halfhearted swings at the kind of hot-button issues that sell books and make elevator pitches land. As a genre writer, Turow is far closer to Richard Price, or Stephen King when he’s really cooking, than the other lawyer-turned-writers he was frequently lumped in with.
But as a lawyer-turned-writer, Turow is concerned with the in-session procedure of law, the cat and mouse between the bench and the defense teams laying evidentiary trails, the gamesmanship between two lawyers willing to do whatever it takes to win—including ignoring ethical and moral questions—and the palace intrigue and political maneuvering within a prosecutor's office, even amongst lawyer/politicians all theoretically playing for the same team. He unfurls his plots through designed arguments, like a lawyer patiently building a case witness by witness from the stand, but he also understands that the idea of impartiality in law is an absurd and fanciful lie. He layers his cases with complex interpersonal connections that demand recusal, but never grants it. He’s interested in the cosmic joke, the hypocrisies and contradictions of the black-and-white institution he participated in his entire working life. These upstanding public servants, these guardians of society's rules, are supposed to be sober and thoughtful and clinical and professional, but of course they’re also horny fuck-ups who drink too much and cross lines and need therapy.
All this makes for tricky page-to-screen adaptations, and for the most part, after Pakula’s version, the television adaptations that followed in the ensuing decades have missed the magic of their source material. On the set of Presumed Innocent, Brian Dennehy told Turow that a cinematic adaptation is equivalent to the Readers Digest version of a novel, and this is largely the content we've ended up with. Burden of Proof, Reversible Errors, and Innocent are star-packed television “events” that mine Turow’s stories for their most maudlin, overheated beats, hitting the thriller pacing and extracting maximum suds and froth over melodramatic strings, their schlocky network packaging indicative of the era. But it’s work that elides the procedural detail and deeply-felt pathos that made Turow’s novels remarkable within the context of ‘90s airport fiction.
But there are moments, even in these adaptations, where the real Turow breaks through the schmaltz barrier of network television, yielding drama as striking and shocking as anything on TV at the time. In Burden of Proof, Hector Elizondo is middle-aged lawyer Sandy Stern, whose wife has just killed herself mysteriously. Stern, still grieving and lost, has his first tryst as a widower, followed by a pang of regret, as well as paranoia, which leads to a skin-crawling scene in which he asks his physician—hypothetically, of course, asking for a friend—what the ramifications of a venereal disease could be. His physician shames him and essentially kicks him out of his office. This was on ABC, in prime time, in the midst of sex-panicked 1992; it hints at what might’ve been if Hollywood had gravitated towards Turow along with or instead of Grisham. Brian De Palma in peak sicko form could’ve made magic from this material.
Turow by way of De Palma appears to be the precise interpretation—and the blinking, grimacing, twitching energy—that Gyllenhaal and (in particular) Sarsgaard have brought to David E. Kelly’s update of Presumed Innocent. It captures both Turow’s signature walls-closing-in tension and his unhinged frailty. Much like what Steve Zaillian accomplished earlier this year with Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley on Netflix, its eight episodes—with a second season on the way—expand the book's universe, updating some of the near-40-year-old novel’s more dated references and depictions while exploring Turow’s prose and the meandering threads that have made his work so much fun to luxuriate in on summer beaches for decades. I mean this as high praise: It’s almost as good as the book.