50 pages • 1 hour read
John GrishamThe Racketeer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: The Racketeer and the US Judicial System
In the 1760s, jurist William Blackstone asserted that it was better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent person to be wrongly convicted. The sentiment, famously echoed two decades later by Benjamin Franklin, was not original to Blackstone. The same idea appears in the first book of the Bible, in Genesis 18:23-32, and finds expression in Greek and Roman jurisprudence, even in legal systems that operated on the presumption of guilt. Presumption of guilt is not the foundation of American law, but it does resonate with the average person who deals with the fear of wrongful conviction by presuming that it cannot happen. The American system of jurisprudence relies on public confidence in the legal system. Grisham makes the point in the Afterword that The Racketeer has no basis in fact. In another series, The Judge’s List and The Whistler, featuring Lacy Stoltz, Grisham makes the point that the American judicial system is remarkably free of crime or graft, and only four sitting federal judges have ever been murdered.
Maintaining the integrity of the legal system is a matter of public vigilance. Grisham makes the point in the course of the story that every wrongful conviction costs the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Grisham also makes the point that many convictions may be technically in accordance with the law, but they often violate good sense. Draconian legal contortions sometimes introduce new laws that ordinary citizens may not be aware of, and they consequently find themselves arrested for something they have been doing legally all their lives. In each case of this type, taxpayers pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a “crime” that could have been prevented by simply issuing a warning to the perpetrators.
In the novel, Malcom is caught up in a racketeering scheme in which he is manipulated into laundering money for a criminal enterprise. Racketeering was originally associated with organized crime, but the definition has since been expanded to include any illegal business dealings that are designed to collect a regular payment or profit. A short list of examples includes extortion, blackmail, protection rackets, money laundering, confidence tricks, counterfeiting, identity theft, contract killing, white-collar financial crimes, weapons dealing, and political and corporate corruption. Malcolm plays a confidence game on the FBI to free himself, get revenge for the way the FBI and the federal prosecutor railroaded him, and pay himself back for all his losses. Within the context of the story, even the FBI could be said to have done some racketeering when they arrested and prosecuted Malcolm, knowing that he was barely more than an innocent bystander to the crime. They also lie to Quinn when they arrest him, and they engage in interrogation tactics that skirt the line of legality. As Malcolm observes, the legal system is often treated like a game that has more to do with winning than with justice. Malcolm has to game the system to get justice for himself, using illicit means to restore the moral balance.
Genre Context: The Legal Thriller and the Heist Story
Grisham uses the medium of the legal thriller to explore the moral values of the characters and the law, and the result is both educational and thought-provoking. The legal thriller is generally regarded as a variation on the courtroom drama—which itself has been in existence far longer than is generally recognized; the earliest recorded courtroom drama could conceivably be the Oresteia, a trilogy of tragedies written by the Greek playwright Aeschylus in 458 BCE. The third play in the trilogy, Eumenides, is a courtroom drama in which Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra, is put on trial for the murder of his mother.
Without ever entirely disappearing, the genre resurfaced in the mid-16th century. The public at the time had an insatiable fascination for scandalous trials, and lawyers often published accounts of such trials for popular entertainment. During that period, French lawyer Francois Richer reported that he made a point of structuring his accounts to build suspense and maintain the readers’ interest. At a time when popular entertainment was less ubiquitous than it is now, crime and the law offered a form of escapism.
The legal drama returned to popular fiction in the mid-19th century with authors like Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White, The Moonstone) and Charles Dickens (Bleak House). Even Abraham Lincoln, in 1846, wrote “The Trailor Murder Mystery,” which was based on a case he defended. Collins in particular combined the defining elements of the legal drama into one story: the detective, the innocent suspect, and the legal system. However, it was not until the 1930s that the iconic lawyer protagonist of the courtroom drama appeared. The character of Perry Mason was created by lawyer Erle Stanley Gardner (probably based on Melville Davidson Post’s Randolph Mason, a very similar character). In each Perry Mason drama, the titular defense lawyer defends an innocent person arrested for murder.
Grisham’s own contributions to the genre are so notable that he is sometimes credited with the creation of the legal thriller with his first novel, A Time to Kill. Today, the legal thriller differs from the courtroom drama in that the guilty party is known from the outset, whereas in the courtroom drama, the goal of the story is to discover the identity of the murderer. The Racketeer departs from the usual format of both the courtroom drama and the legal thriller by telling the story through an unreliable narrator. In a typical detective story, the reader often competes with the protagonist in an attempt to solve the mystery first using the same information. Alternatively, if the reader already knows the culprit, the suspense comes from anticipating how the detective will solve the mystery. In The Racketeer, however, Grisham refrains from informing his readers that Malcolm himself is the mystery. Because his character withholds critical information about the true nature of the plot, Grisham places the burden of figuring out Malcolm’s plan on the readers themselves.
A large part of Grisham’s success stems from his habit of addressing the universal themes of right and wrong. While the minutiae of the law in his books are accurate, they remain secondary to the grand themes. Accordingly, The Racketeer addresses the overarching theme of whether—in an unjust justice system—an unfairly convicted man has the right to manipulate that same system to free himself. Technically, Malcolm does engage in racketeering—running a confidence game—when he manipulates the FBI. In the process, however, he and his co-conspirators restore justice by freeing Malcolm, compensating him with a fortune, and punishing the actual murderer. In this case, the idea may be that it takes a crime to reverse an injustice.
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