{"id":7962,"date":"2019-05-21T06:23:28","date_gmt":"2019-05-21T10:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7962"},"modified":"2019-06-20T07:24:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T11:24:00","slug":"lawyers-guns-and-money-crimeconn-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7962","title":{"rendered":"Lawyers, Guns, and Money: CrimeCONN 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"lawyer\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Organizers of this year\u2019s CrimeCONN\u2014led by Chris Knopf and\nCharles Salzberg\u2014truly delivered. Their MWA-NY sponsored committee put together\nexcellent panels and presentations, followed by entertaining keynote speaker\nPeter Blauner, whose resume includes the award-winning novel Slow Motion Rider<\/em> and several seasons of\nLaw & Order<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawyers as Characters<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Authors who are lawyers or are writing legal thrillers\npeopled several panels. Some of them use their lawyer-character as a nexus of\nthe story\u2019s conflict. The conflicts may be external to their character and\narise because of the inherent contentiousness of situations they set up, essentially\nbecause of the conflict between the lawbreakers they represent and orderly\nsociety. They also use characters who are advocacy lawyers\u2014say, working for an\nenvironmental or women\u2019s rights group\u2014to raise issues without clunky exposition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By contrast, other authors said their emphasis is on the\ncharacter they are developing, and the fact the character is a lawyer is almost\nincidental to the story. These characters\u2019 conflicts are often internal, when\ntheir needs and values conflict with the actions required of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Either way, writers and lawyers are professional\nstorytellers following a loosely analogous process. A lawyer starts a case with\nthe facts (novel set-up), makes arguments (development of the novel\u2019s plot),\nand arrives at a conclusion\/summation (denouement). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attorney-author Connie Hambley said when she writes, she\nenvisions her reader as \u201cvery smart opposing counsel,\u201d answering in one way or\nanother all the objections that reader might make. A variation on this point\nwas the observation that lawyers are logical, accustomed to preparing their\ncases in a logical way, and a crime story also generally follows a trail of\nlogic, through its accumulation and interpretation of evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Goes Wrong? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We remember the things that bug us, and though\nnovels\/tv\/movies get a lot of details right, panelists had a long list of pet\npeeves. These included stories in which: surveillance is easy (and affordable);\nextradition happens almost overnight; judges make snap decisions about motions;\nand if it\u2019s an organized crime case, there\u2019s lots of electronic evidence. IRL,\norganized crime figures know what our politicians haven\u2019t figured out: no\nemails, no texts, no Instagrams. And here\u2019s one of my eye-rollers: DNA evidence\nthat comes back in 24 hours. At the same time, panelists agreed that a story\nthat strictly followed what happens in an investigation or in the courtroom\nwould be unreadable (and cited this\narticle<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They said witness testimony is often presented as too\nblack-or-white. Either a witness is a truth-teller or a liar, when, in real\nlife, witnesses do a bit of both. What\u2019s more, they may not be intentionally\nlying, they may misinterpret something, they may misremember or simply forget. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Topic Pivot: CIA Fun<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For what goes wrong (and right) with spycraft in the movies,\nsee this entertaining\nvideo<\/a> with Jonna Mendez from Wired<\/em>.\nIt\u2019s a followup to her previous film of CIA tips on developing an effective disguise<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tomorrow: Tidbits that might make good plot points <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: “Bewigged\nman.”<\/a> by gappa01<\/a>\nis licensed under CC\nBY-NC 2.0 <\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Organizers of this year\u2019s CrimeCONN\u2014led by Chris Knopf and Charles Salzberg\u2014truly delivered. Their MWA-NY sponsored committee put together excellent panels and presentations, followed by entertaining keynote speaker Peter Blauner, whose resume includes the award-winning novel Slow Motion Rider and several … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Lawyers, Guns, and Money: CrimeCONN 2019 - how authors use lawyers in their crime fiction and what novelists and Hollywood get wrong!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,61,1567,60,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-authors","category-character","category-lawyer","category-storytelling","category-the-morgue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/lawyer.jpg?fit=310%2C375&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-24q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7962"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7964,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7962\/revisions\/7964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}