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Pardon the Ravens

Alan Hruska

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Mar 22, 2015
Category: Fiction

When I met Alan Hruska, the law was far behind him. Very far — I know him as a novelist and film director. Were you to meet him, you’d never know he had been a hotshot lawyer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the firm consistently named the most prestigious in the country.

In fact, Hruska had been quite the star at Cravath, winning 200 cases, settling 200. (In baseball, that would mean a .500 batting average. In law? Much, much higher.)

His first case will give you an idea how very good he was. Back in the day, Estes Kefauver, a Senator who hoped to be President, decided to investigate the drug industry — on television. So that it wouldn’t look like grandstanding, he had a friend appointed to the chairmanship of the FTC, which then sued five sellers of tetracycline — then considered a wonder drug — for alleged price-fixing. Squibb was one of the five companies; Cravath was Squibb’s lawyer.

“The Cravath partners assigned to represent Squibb quickly peeled off into bigger litigation,” Hruska recalls. “That left me — fresh out of law school, having never previously been in a courtroom — trying the case. There were hearings, rulings. appeals. It took us two years to win.”

That victory was the least of it: “Somewhere during a recess, I found the time to take the bar exam. Though I’d been the ‘first chair’ for Squibb from almost the beginning, it had somehow escaped attention that I hadn’t yet been admitted to the bar.”

There’s a lot of Alan Hruska’s legal experience in his new thriller, “Pardon the Ravens.” Like the main character: In 1961, Alec Brno is only in his second year at Kendall, Blake, Steel & Braddock, but he quickly becomes the lead lawyer in the firm’s defense of a company charged with more than a billion dollars’ worth of fraud. Alec has taken the bar exam, but he’s as famous at a tender age as Hruska — at law school, he was so bright that one of his professors asked him to help teach a course. Later, the professor stepped aside. It’s said of Alec that he taught more classes than he attended.

Is Alec up to the legal challenges ahead of him? Yes, and those chapters thrill. The courtroom appearances are opportunities for him to dazzle. It’s not hard for him to figure out that the man behind the emptying of gas storage tanks in New Jersey is — what a surprise — a New York Mafioso. And he’s good at identifying witnesses and evidence.

“Pardon the Ravens” is a terrific reading experience — Hruska writes about a hundred times better than most thriller writers I’ve sampled. And it’s clear he’s read a book or two. Consider the title. It’s from Juvenal. “Pardon the ravens and censure the doves.” Translation: “Some guy keeps coming after you, it’s okay to beat the shit outta him.” Hey, an education only takes you so far. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Thrillers are about the intersection of circumstance and character. It’s key that the characters have weaknesses. Alec’s weakness is female, the wife of the Mafioso, who is 1) addicted to heroin and 2) mother of a small child and 3) a punching bag for her husband. You or I would run in the other direction, but we are not characters in a legal thriller.

The circumstance of legal thrillers — at least the ones I’ve sampled — is that the world is very small. Does the lawyer have a father with whom he has nothing in common? Yes. But Alec’s father will come to be doing some home security business for the Mafia don. And you can also depend on the main character to be involved in a violent action scene near the end. These are not bugs, they’re features. That they work, despite all logic, is testimony to Hruska’s skill.

In the one Patricia Cornwell novel I read, the main character takes a shower every few pages. I forget why, but it seemed really important to her — and really lazy to me. In addition to his courtroom knowledge, Hruska serves up salmon skeletons and ancient Japanese swords. Like his young lawyer, he works hard and smart.