I cannot say I have ever been a huge fan of the courtroom drama although I appreciate that this sub-genre of detective fiction most certainly has its devotees. My suspicion is that these fans are themselves likely also to be in the legal profession in one form or another and find the books to be comforting reinforcements of their extensive educations and rapier sharp wit/intelligence. This may be a rather unkind generalisation/assumption on my part of course, suggesting that my mistrust of the sub-genre may be rooted firmly in a sense of personal inadequacy; a certain begrudgingly accepted awareness that I never was nor will be Quite That Bright. Oh, I get by and I don’t believe myself to be entirely stupid, but, well, you know, perhaps that is not for me to say.

Anyway, if a blog is not a place for personal admissions then I am not sure what is, so let me also say that whilst attempting to refresh my shoddy memory about other courtroom drama stories that I have read over the years I made the rookie error of looking at a Goodreads list of ‘122 Best Legal Thrillers’. That this list appears to be almost entirely populated with John Grisham books perhaps illustrates only the tendency for these kinds of lists to be wildly skewed in favour of whatever happens to be the most popular/best selling items that are roughly contemporaneous with whenever the list is being compiled. One sees this tendency in any chosen media type and it is entirely understandable, if also endlessly frustrating. I should note here, of course, that I have never read a John Grisham novel and that whilst they may be marvellous things of estimable quality, that’s not really my point. Which is? Well, which is that on a blog called Unpopular one ought not to expect much energy being expended on those things that fall easily into what we might term The Mainstream. That one ought to expect, perhaps, a little light being shone under some of the smaller stones; a scratching about in the shadier, more cobwebbed corners of the bookshelves.

What did surprise me a little, however, looking at ‘122 Best Legal Thrillers’ was the complete lack of reference to Earl Stanley Gardner, whose Perry Mason novels were enormously popular in the 1940s and 50s. And whilst I like Perry Mason well enough, he is not a patch on the Bertha Cool and Donald Lam characters for whom Gardner (writing as A.A. Fair) wrote a lengthy series of magnificently trashy Noir Pulp novels in the same period. No space either on that Goodreads list for Cyril Hare, which perhaps is not surprising as the list appears to be heavily US-centric and Hare’s books from the 1940s and ‘50s featuring lawyer Francis Pettigrew are tastefully, parochially English. Whilst having been fairly regularly reprinted down the years they nevertheless seem to fly just below the radar, and I heartily recommend them all.

Missing from the list too are John Mortimer’s ‘Rumpole’ stories which I have never really got into but are most assuredly ‘good’, or Sarah Caudwell’s peerless Hilary Tamar novels which are not courtroom dramas but make tremendous use of characters from the legal profession and any excuse to remind ourselves of their brilliance ought to be grasped.

Also lacking in the Goodreads list are the novels of Sara Woods although this may not be so surprising since most of her 48 book run featuring serial lawyer/detective Anthony Maitland have been out of print since the latter half of the 1980s when just over a dozen were reissued by US publisher Avon. These editions, pushed out just after Woods’ death in 1986 and coinciding with the posthumous publication of the final few Maitland stories, have cover designs that could scarcely be more redolent of the 1980s, yet simultaneously also cleverly hark back to, when exactly? The 1930s? 1940s? The stylistic visual references are hard to pin down, and this is particularly apt because, at least in my reading of the first five Maitland novels (newly republished by the happily resurgent Dean Street Press imprint), this seductive slipperiness of period is largely inherent in Woods’ writing. For whilst ‘Bloody Instructions’, ‘Malice Domestic’, ‘Error of the Moon’, ‘The Third Encounter’ and ‘Trusted Like the Fox’ were all originally published in the early 1960s, for the most part they manage to come across as being infused marvellously with a spirit that feels older than one might expect.

The estimable Curtis Evans once more turns in tremendous introductions to these reissues and does a fine job of setting Sara Woods within the context of the times, literarily speaking. These notes necessarily reference Christie, Marsh and Sayers whilst also nodding to the more contemporaneous P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, with Evans making a sound case for rating Woods much more highly than the past forty years of invisibility might suggest she warrants. One reason for this slip into relative obscurity might be the fact that Woods, a Yorkshirewoman transplanted to Nova Scotia in 1958 at the age of 42 was ambivalent about self-promotion, allowing her books to speak for themselves rather than, in the parlance of the current age, expending most of her energies on Building The Brand. It is to the immense credit of Dean Street Press, therefore, that a resurrection of her work is underway, and on the evidence of these first five releases Woods and Maitland ought to find a welcoming new readership.

That said, I must say that the first instalment, 1961’s ‘Bloody instructions’, is for me by some distance the weakest of this selection. Perhaps inevitably the book reads as something of a fumbling in the dark, the necessary initial workings out of characters and approach. Being resolutely in the courtroom drama camp seems to fence everything in rather and I found if difficult to warm to any of the characters. In a contemporary review Francis Iles/Anthony Berkeley called it “a most accomplished piece of work“, and whilst this is true up to a point, it also feels that in hindsight the original publisher Collins might have been minded to hold this one back. Anyway, I’m not sure if Berkely-Iles’ recommendation coloured me against it from the off (I’m not for the most part a fan of Francis-Anthony), or if the theatrical angle allowing the (rolls eyes) Shakespeare quotations into the mix pushed my buttons in an irritating manner, but for me it never pulls itself out of the realms of the rather sedate and ordinary.

Better by significantly more than half is 1962’s ‘Malice Domestic’ in which the recurring characters of Anthony Maitland and his famous uncle Sir Nicholas Harding start to become more fleshed out and appealing. Again, there is an odd uncertainty about time period sitting over everything like a fine mist and if one wonders what the audiences of the early 1960s might have made of this, it is perhaps inevitable that our 21st Century reflections are themselves coloured wildly by the intervening 60 odd years of cherry-picked Pop Cultural references. So there’s not much Adam Faith or Billy Fury here, but perhaps there is a hint of Johnny Keating’s ‘Theme from Z-Cars’… In truth though Woods’ novel feels like it reaches back into a pre-war era, with its central trope of ‘inherited madness’ and the classic(al) themes of generational conflict/wilful misunderstandings, jealousy and financial gain all neatly threaded together in a pleasingly coherent manner.

Things continue to develop in the next couple of books in the series, with both ‘Error Of The Moon’ and ‘The Third Encounter’ (originally published in January and June of 1963 respectively) doing a fine job of drawing more detail into Anthony Maitland’s backstory as a WW2 secret service agent. ‘Error Of The Moon’ sketches the first lines of this in the form of a novel that more obviously roots itself in the early 1960s. A narrative around the development of anti-missile systems on the desolate Yorkshire moors allows Woods to use her memories of the dozen years spent farming the landscape to conjure a sense of place with aplomb, whilst also turning a hand to something that has the air of espionage thrillers being popularised at the time by John Le Carré and Eric Ambler. It may be tempting to wrinkle one’s nose at this and suggest Woods might be Jumping On The Bandwagon somewhat, but it is worth pointing out that she in fact wrote all four of these early Maitland books in the period of 1958-61, thus putting her firmly in the context of a Le Carré contemporary. As an espionage thriller ‘Error of The Moon’ may not scale the same heights as ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’ but then what does? And anyway, Woods’ novel is much more rooted in the murder mystery tradition than Le Carré’s work, although having said that I would suggest that it compares favourably to ‘Call For The Dead’ in which Le Carré introduces George Smiley in a work that, like ‘Error of The Moon’ also owes as much to classic detective fiction as to thrillers.

If ‘Error of the Moon’ sketches the first lines of Anthony Maitland’s backstory then ‘The Third Encounter’ adds colour and form. A shade of confusion may exist in the book being called ‘The Third Encounter’ whilst being the fourth instalment of the series, but this does perhaps also carries its own mystery. Having written all four books prior to approaching a publisher, might Woods herself have felt opener ‘Bloody Instructions’ in danger of being rejected in favour of ‘Malice Domestic’ as the debut? Might she originally have thought ‘The Third Encounter’ would be published before ‘Error of the Moon’, thereby allowing a more linear unfolding of Maitland’s history? Did Woods, indeed, pen them in that order? Or is the title simply a reference to the narrative of the story, in which the denouement does indeed (spoiler alert? Probably not really….) feature the third encounter between Maitland and his wartime nemesis, with the discord of the ‘third’ and ‘fourth’ inferences being a particularly humorous/cruel dig at the orderly infatuations beloved of so many devotees of the genre? Who knows (and who really cares, yes?), for what really matters is that ‘The Third Encounter’ is a thoroughly entertaining read and that its oscillations in time between the early 1940s and the early 1960s are elegantly carried off. Well executed too are explorations of the themes of identity, loyalty, love and betrayal, making it perhaps my favourite of these early Maitland stories.

Now quite why this batch of Dean Street Press reissues leaps over the fifth book in the series (January 1964’s ‘This Little Measure’) to arrive at ‘Trusted Like The Fox’ (also originally published in January 1964, according to Goodreads) I am not sure. Perhaps there is some disagreement/confusion about publication order (guaranteed to frustrate those aforementioned obsessions with order amongst many of the prospective readers) but regardless, ‘Trusted Like The Fox’ initially feels like it is taking rather a backwards step in being, like ‘Bloody Instructions’ much more firmly positioned within the courtroom drama context. If that might initially feel like a disappointment (and I must say that it was so for me) this is quickly dispelled by the realisation that Woods has apparently already mastered the balance so that the book develops and unfolds in a much more satisfying manner. Here Woods again plays on the theme of identity whilst also once again massaging a narrative that slips between the ‘present’ of the early 1960s and the ‘past’ of the early 1940s, pointing out as it does the threads of connectivity and the manipulation/obfuscation of facts in order to tell preferred stories according to individuals’ needs and desires. As with ‘The Third Encounter’ there are also references to questions of righteousness, loyalty, betrayal, love and self-preservation/narcissism which feel oddly prescient/relevant in 2024, although it is also arguable that those are timeless themes of relevance at any given point in history.

These five books then are (‘Bloody Instructions’ arguably aside) enormously welcome additions to the reissue market and allow the name of Sara Woods to be recognised by fans of detective fiction who might otherwise have been denied the pleasure. I look forward to the next batch with eager anticipation.

‘Bloody Instructions’, ‘Malice Domestic’, ‘Error of the Moon’, ‘The Third Encounter’ and ‘Trusted Like the Fox’ are set to be published on 2nd December 2024 by Dean Street Press.