Barrister’s new mystery novel offers glimpse inside the Inner Temple

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, the A BA Journal’s Lee Rawles, and today I’m joined by Sally Smith, author of the book, A Case of Mice and Murder. Sally, thanks so much for joining us.

Sally Smith:

Well, thank you very much for inviting me.

Lee Rawles:

We love to feature mysteries and legal thrillers, and we just don’t get a chance all that often. So I was thrilled to be approached and this is just such an interesting and different book for me as an American reader to dive into. Could you set us up a little bit and say what the setting of the book is and give us a brief synopsis. Now, this is a murder mystery, so we are not doing spoilers listeners, but we will be discussing this book.

Sally Smith:

Sure. Well, it is set in the inner temple in London, which is one of the four ins of court and the four which many of your listeners will know. They have famous names, Lincolns in graze, in middle temple and inner temple, and all barristers are called to theBar by one of those foreigns of court. They’re all really, really historic institutions which have existed for centuries in the buildings that they’re still in, very like the sort of Oxbridge colleges, but set in London, as I say, in the case of the inner temple between the embankment and Fleet Street, a small area, 15 acre area, and every barrister until recent years, most barristers practiced within one of the foreigns. Of course, as I say, they’re called to theBar, they become barristers. Some went off to big provincial centers, of which there have been many very distinguished ones for years. But if you stayed in London, you worked in one of those foreign ends of court.

Lee Rawles:

And what I didn’t realize was you not only worked in one of the ends of court, but you could also live there. And our hero, sir Gabriel Ward Casey does,

Sally Smith:

Yes, the book set in 1901 and in 1901, quite a number of senior barristers did live within the inn. Nowadays I’m lucky enough to do so myself, but nowadays it’s unusual. Most barristers don’t actually live in the inns of court, but there are residential flats for senior barristers as there always have been. And as I say, in the days of Sir Gabriel Ward, my fictional hero, detective and barrister, there were far fewer barristers and so it was far more possible to accommodate them. And in his day, two very senior members did live in the inns and the inns themselves are all set round squares. As I say. I mean the closest that you will get in your imagination is the Oxbridge colleges set round gardens, each with their own dining hall, each with their own library, and they operate as a little collegiate organization, each one of them,

Lee Rawles:

As I was reading, it just adds such a cloistered monastic kind of feel, especially for your main character. Sir Gabriel Ward, let’s talk about him a little bit as a personality.

Sally Smith:

Yes, he’s a bachelor. As I say, it’s set in 1901, and you have to remember that all the time because all the things about him by today’s standards perhaps seem odd than they would’ve done then. But having said that, he’s an unusual personality and is thought to be so in the book, and as I say, he’s a bachelor, he’s in his fifties. He’s a very brilliant barrister, very, very senior, very respected lawyer. He’s reclusive. I hope he doesn’t come over as anything other than a happy man, but he’s undoubtedly limited. He went to public school then to Oxford, then straight to theBar, so always in a male collegiate environment. He’s not happy outside the inner temple where he lives and works, and he has features which we would nowadays call OCD, but weren’t, that phrase was not used then, but he’s very meticulous, checks things for reassurance, and it’s a sort of anxiety release for him that everything is in the right place on his desk, et cetera, et cetera. So you’ve sort of got the picture. But he is a solitary man, but not a lonely man. And as I say, an odd man, but not an unhappy man.

Lee Rawles:

I actually was reminded of Phils fog of around the world in 80 days before he goes off on his adventure and he lives very much by the clock. He expects things to be exactly what they were the day before, and it seems prepared to go on like this until the end of his life and instead a real wrench is thrown into this. Gabriel literally falls over it one morning. So let’s talk about the murder itself. What launches this book, A Case of Mice and Murder?

Sally Smith:

Well, this is not a plot spoiler because it happens literally in the first line that you hear that the Lord, chief Justice of England, the most senior judge, we have Gabriel stumbles over his body in the temple and he has the inner temples. What’s what I’m insignia since time began is a Pegasus, a silver Pegasus, and he’s found with the inner temple’s carving knife from the dining hall, which has a silver Pegasus led into it through his chest. And the story goes on from there. And then the other odd thing, very odd, as I said, this is all in the first few pages. The other really strange thing is that he’s in evening dress in white tie, the most formal evening dress for dinner in Ed Edwardian Times, but he has no shoes and socks on. He’s got bare feet.

Lee Rawles:

Now as an American reader, my first thought is, oh, so you call in Scotland Yard and Scotland Yard investigates, but the setting comes into this again, the temple has a very special place in London and in the legal system. Can you talk about why they wouldn’t just have called in Scotland Yard?

Sally Smith:

Yes, this is what inspired me to write the book and I should say it’s, although it is absolutely accurate, of course in today’s time, and even in the time I was writing about in 1900, it was a very technical thing, but the temple is what is known in England as an ancient liberty. It’s one of these sort of peculiar little areas of land which have never been incorporated into the jurisdiction of anywhere. So that geographically, it’s in the city of London, but it isn’t actually under the auspices of the authorities of the city of London. And this stemmed from the fact that originally it was regarded as by the barristers as a private house and was treated as a private house. So that just as you have to invite people into your private house and the police can’t investigate without a warrant in a private house.

So in the temple, the city of London police who govern the whole area had no absolute right to enter legally to enter into the temple without the consent and invitation of the temple. And that applies to this day, which people find astonishing. And of course, if anything illegal happens in the temple today, the first thing that the temple do is to call the police. But even to this day legally, the police can only investigate in collaboration with the porters of the temple who are our own employees, who man our own private security in collaboration with them and by the consent of the temple. And it’s never actually been taken to court this issue. And the temple in centuries before have always avoided doing so because they haven’t wanted a ruling on it. It’s an entire tradition. And as I say, it’s such a strange thing and no one’s ever really written about it in a fictional sense. And I thought to myself, this is a perfect in setting for an amateur detective because the head of the temple simply says to him, I’m just not letting the police in reputation of the temple will be besmirched and I’m going to get of my own to investigate it. And so Gabriel Ward becomes a very, very reluctant sleuth.

Lee Rawles:

He has to be threatened with being turfed out of his beloved flat. In fact,

Sally Smith:

Absolutely. He says, I’m just not going to do it. I’m a busy man and I’ve got a huge great case coming up and I’m not interested. And they say to him, well, if you want to keep your beautiful residential rooms in the temple, you’ll tow the line.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we are about to hear about that great big case after a word from our advertisers. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host Lee Rawles here with Sally Smith, author of A Case of Mice and Murder. So we’ve heard a little bit about Sir Gabriel Ward and the Temple and the time period, but in addition to trying to solve the murder of the Lord, chief Justice of England, he has this fascinating copyright case essentially. So can we talk about that portion of the book?

Sally Smith:

Yes, in each one I’ve written, I mean, there’s another one coming out this year and another one after that and in each one. So Gabriel Ward has not only the crime to solve, but he’s got his case running in the background because in the end, he’s a barrister. And barristers, as I know from years of experience are much more preoccupied with their work than they are with anything else. And so Boal Gabriel is being forced to investigate a murder whilst he’s running a case. And the case is a case about a children’s book which was found by a publisher abandoned, presumably abandoned in the street. And the publisher can’t find the author. And remember, this is 1901, so communications were not like they are nowadays. He can’t find the author. And so he goes ahead and publishes to the book and it just takes off and it becomes a worldwide popular phenomenon that children adore this book.

And so the publisher begins to make huge sums of money out of it, and a woman comes forward and says, hang on a minute, I’m the author, and the case goes to court. And so Gabriel is representing the publisher and he has to find out whether this woman is indeed the author of this children’s book or whether she’s an imposter. The children’s book is about a mouse, hence the title of my book, about a mouse who lives in the Temple Church, and it’s called Millie, the Temple Church Mouse. And as I say, it becomes the Harry Potter of 1901.

Lee Rawles:

And I have to ask you, growing up, I did read a number of British children’s literature, and Diana Wynn Jones had a series called The World of Cressman. And in the lives of Christopher Chant, there is a fictional book series about Millie, a girl named Millie, and it plays a part in that book. And I was wondering, is that where Millie, the Temple Church mouse’s name comes from, or is that just a coincidence?

Sally Smith:

No, and it is interesting because all my reading was sort of shaped by my reading as a child, and there aren’t many things that people come up with, which I don’t know, but I don’t know that I don’t that book. So no, I mean Millie was just chosen because it’s a sweet name and it’s alliterative with mouse, and so that’s pure chance.

Lee Rawles:

No worries. So Millie, the Temple Church Mouse has become this phenomenon, and one of the questions is, well, if the manuscript was essentially abandoned and this publisher discovers it, would the author still have a claim? And so that’s being argued, and I really found it interesting, again, as an American sir Gabriel Ward is going back and forth with this other barrister over different legal theories and systems of law, have some commonalities but are very different. And one thing that Sir Gabriel Ward says is that certainty is more important than truth. And I found that really fascinating as sort of a window into his character and his ideas about the law. Could you expand on that?

Sally Smith:

Yes. I mean, I’m sure anyone who’s an expert in jurisprudence would shoot this down in two minutes. So I hate to think what all your genius lawyer listeners are going to make of this, but that comes from my own conviction after years and years of practice that what people really want from the law is certainty. You’ve got to have an end, whether it’s the truth or not, you have to have a moment when you say that’s it. You have to. And I mean, hence our whole system of appeal. And it was also my experience of the way human beings react to it. They want some sort of definitive answer, which of course nobody ever gets. I mean, whatever a judge may say, it isn’t true because they say it. And I think that we all have some sort of feeling that the judges are sort of God-like that.

That’s it. And I think the reason for that is because if you don’t have that, you go on forever. I mean, another word for it in modern terms is closure, really. And people use that a lot. They say, oh, now it’s gone to whichever court it’s gone to. I’ve got closure. And what they really mean by that is I’ve got my truth and that’s what I’m going to hang on to. And that’s my certainty. And that’s as far as I want to go that psychologically I can cope with. I myself find uncertainty, a very difficult thing. I want certainty. So I suppose that part of, so Gabriel, as I say, it came from my years of practice and my feeling about it

Lee Rawles:

In addition to the setting as a place, the setting as a time is so important. So it’s 1901, it is the summer of 1901. Queen Victoria passed away in January of that year. So this incredibly long reign has ended. They’re about to embark on the edu Edwardian period, a whole new ruler. And so it is a time of change for a character who is not interested in change. He’s interested in living this intellectual life and kind of being left to his own devices to do so. What made you pick 1901 to set your book?

Sally Smith:

Well, it’s a period I’ve always been interested in. Prior to my life as writing these novels, I had written a legal biography of an Edwardian barrister who was very famous sort of personality, of course, sir Edward Marshall Hall, who was our sort of Clarence Darrow. He’s one of these sort of people whose name became sort of legendary as an advocate. And I’d written a fairly, fairly academic biography of him. And this was his exact period. And the Edwardian period is regarded as being the sort of golden age for theBar that they had a huge amount of attention paid to them. The trials were all over the newspapers, I mean in far, far more detail than we would ever have nowadays. So it’s an interesting period from the legal point of view. And if I’m honest, from a pragmatic point of view of a writing detective novels, it’s quite nice because you don’t get sort of terribly tied up in incredibly technical forensic evidence. But it is just the beginning of forensics, the beginning of things like fingerprinting, so the Sherlock Holmes period. So it’s interesting from that point of view to write a detective novel about. So the combination of all those things and the fact that I’d done an enormous amount of research of the Edwardian bar for that biography made me think, well, this is my period really.

Lee Rawles:

And Sir Gabriel actually bonds with Constable Wright over their interest in these new forensic techniques that, oh, well, maybe we shouldn’t immediately pull out the knife and dust it for fingerprints to which the police officer who was actually in charge when that’s nonsense and yanked it out immediately.

Sally Smith:

And Wright says, perhaps we shouldn’t move the body because this was the very, very, and Gabriel says, there’s a chap who’s done a lot of work on this. It was the very beginning of the integrity of the crime scene mattering the very beginning. So Gabriel was sort of the vanguard, although he wasn’t a policeman. So yes, it’s interesting in that way.

Lee Rawles:

You have such an incredibly strict class structure in this book, that connection that Constable Wright and Sir Gabriel have that sort of intellectual connection. They don’t have many other similarities. And it’s interesting because Gabriel has been surrounded in his adult life and in his childhood with essentially the same circle of men. In fact, the man that he stumbles over was only a year ahead of him in school. They knew each other all their lives. They weren’t necessarily friends, but all of these men went to the same, at least kinds of schools. They belong to the same kinds of societies. They are incredibly homogenous, but to serve all of these men in their work as barristers, there’s this entire structure. You mentioned earlier the porters, I had no idea about the porters, and I found that fascinating, the clerks, the maids, the cooks who make sure that the meals appear in the dining halls. And Gabriel has his eyes opened a bit to this. So I was interested in hearing more from you about the things that you took into consideration, what you would have him notice and what kind of would go unnoticed or would need to be told through other eyes because he wouldn’t see it.

Sally Smith:

Yes. I mean, it’s England as you know. I mean to this day, many people would say England was fairly class bound. And in Edwardian times it really, really was. And not only class bound, but gender bound as well. I mean, aristocratic men, as you rightly say, would go to school and university and then onto the professions all together and they would know each other their whole lives. So there were very close male relationships. And I mean that reflected in the gentleman’s clubs that formed, which were a whole sort of, how can I put it? Sort of alternative domestic environment that men were in together. And Gabriel. So Gabriel is part of all that. I mean, he’s the absolutely archetypal Ed Edwardian barrister. In other words, he went to Eaton, one of the biggest and most famous, best public schools, public in our sense, private in yours and onto Oxford University and then to theBar.

And he comes from an aristocratic country background. My impression of it all is that really the middle classes, although they were emerging, and of course there were many, many more of them than we ever read about, but the world was very much divided into the aristocracy and the servants in the worlds like theBar, which were particularly upper class if you want to use that phrase environment. And so as you rightly say in the temple, I mean the temple to this is run now with for and by the barristers with professional staff, highly professional staff as an adjunct to them. But in those days it was run by servants. I mean true servants who were like domestic servants in the house, doff their caps and generally behaved deferentially. And Gabriel would’ve been brought up with that accompanied by a very strong sense of paternalism. And I mean, how much you think that’s good and how much you think that’s bad is very, very arguable.

But they undoubtedly had a very strong sense of protectiveness towards the servants in the temple. I mean, they looked after them for their lives and gave them pensions at a time when that didn’t exist. And there was a great affection that built up between them. So it’s quite a sort of complex class system. It’s not just as black and white as you can make it sound. It’s much more nuanced. And Gabriel meeting Constable Wright, who’s a working class lad, left school at 30 lives with his mom and his auntie next door and his big family in the east end of London with what particularly marked people out those days with a working class accent when Gabriel has this cut glass English accent and a complete nothing in common, no experience in common of any kind. And when Gabriel meets him, I mean Gabriel is a nice man and a kind man, but when he meets him, he’s slightly dismissive of him, of right, because he can’t begin to understand where he is coming from.

And then as they get to know one another over this investigation, they both learn things. Gabriel learns that your level of education has nothing to do with how clever you are. And Wright is a really clever young man, despite being, as I say, very ill educated, and Wright learns that toffs in top hats can be human and kind and amusing, and they discover a common sense of humor and a common fascination with this crime because Gabriel gets pulled into the investigation whether he likes it or not. And right of course is a policeman and they get to like one another and indeed to become friends, although they probably would never have used that word about each other.

Lee Rawles:

I did really appreciate that Gabriel Ward, he has many of the characteristics that in another set of hands, maybe they would’ve made him cold or a curmudgeon. And he is not, like you said, he is a kind man. He has warmth. He doesn’t necessarily know how to show it. When a serving maid finds the body and starts to scream, he is so taken aback and all he can think to say is, well, what did my nanny use to say to me when I was upset? And then he’s like, they’re there. They’re there. Or whatever he does, he does say it does not necessarily, he does not necessarily know what to do there, but he is not cold or uncaring. He simply doesn’t have the tools at the very beginning to sort of have that human outreach. The only women he recalls really knowing and only vaguely at the beginning of the book, our nanny and his mother who he saw for maybe half an hour a day at tea time.

Sally Smith:

And that as the books emerge a little more of Gabriel’s personal, how he ended up as he is emerges through the book. And I mean, I think it’s plain in the first one, and there’s no secret about it. He didn’t have a warm and loving beginning from anybody other than nanny. That again, you see is very interesting because he loved her. But there is this huge class Gulf. She was a servant, but she talked in platitudes. And Gabriel has remembered all the platitudes with love, and they’re his sort of mantras, as you say, he doesn’t quite know what he’s supposed to say or do.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take another quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Sally Smith about a case of Mice and Murder. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. So Sally, we have hinted at your background, but we haven’t gotten really into it. Could you talk about your own career?

Sally Smith:

Yes. Well, I’m a barrister. I was called to theBar like my fictional hero to the inner temple. And I was in chambers there all my life and my chambers were fairly sort of general common law chambers when I joined them. So I did a bit of everything that you care to mention and criminal law and family law and landlord and tenant and breach of contract and anything you care to mention. And then I began to specialize in medical work. And so I spent the last half of my career and certainly after I became a KC, doing exclusively specializing in medical work. Some what you call, I think you call medical malpractice, we call clinical negligence, some of that big hospital inquiries, a number of class actions. I very much enjoy doing big long cases rather than lots of short ones.

Lee Rawles:

Well, I have to say for a writer of murder mysteries, having a knowledge of anatomy and some medical lingo probably is very useful.

Sally Smith:

Well, I have to confess that I also have, my husband is a professor of cardiology, so I am inclined to check it all past him before I have anyone stabbed in the heart. But yes, I mean that is some help. And it was very interesting. And the other thing, as I say, I very much enjoyed class actions. I like mastering huge amounts of detail, and I think that has fed into writing detective novels because you have to have this sort of mind that retains 10 different threads in your head and plots ’em all together and ends up with a bow at the other end, 80,000 words later. And it’s the same sort of principle that applies to class actions with a lot of personalities all put together. And one common aim at the end.

Lee Rawles:

There’s a character in the book who is actually the sister of the murdered man, Theodora Dunning. Again, this is 1901. You revealed that she also wanted to become a barrister and she was prevented. And I believe you mentioned the first woman to be admitted to theBar was in 1922. I would love to hear more about this character, how you came to write about her, and what kind of strictures she experienced that may still have had some echoes when you were entering the profession.

Sally Smith:

Well, of course, in the present climate, when we are very interested in the lack of acknowledgement in the past of what women did achieve, there’s been a lot of research done in the ends of court, the four of them, about when women had first tried to become admitted and why they weren’t. And I was conscious of all that, and it’s a very interesting subject. And as you say, they didn’t get round to it until 1923. And then interestingly, my own inner temple were the first to have a woman called to theBar. But Theodora’s story is the amalgamation of the histories of a number of women who tried to become barristers from about, I think the earliest is about 1882 or three, something like that, up until 1923 when they were eventually admitted. And the most interesting thing which emerges in the book is there wasn’t any law against women becoming barristers, and they couldn’t find one because all the early legislation simply referred to persons who wished to be called to theBar.

So they couldn’t say, well, it’s always been men. But they said, oh, well, we can’t have women doing this job because inveterate usage has proclaimed otherwise. Well, I mean, that’s just about the most ridiculous argument that really that you can think of. But it stymied a lot of women who were very, very anxious to practice. And then of course, there were a lot of arguments about how if they must practice, then they should only practice in subjects which didn’t involve any kind of distressing detail. So they couldn’t possibly do crime or matrimonial or anything that involved, as I say, matters that women weren’t supposed to know anything about. And I mean, that attitude continued for a long time. By the time I came to theBar, I mean, I was not in the real vanguard. I think the generation before me were the real trailblazers, but there weren’t very many. And I was the first woman in my chambers in London to be offered a permanent place. So I did until I was joined by another woman. After two or three years, I was on my own as the only woman. So that was interesting.

Lee Rawles:

Well, now that you’re in this second career as a mystery writer, what are your plans for the future? You mentioned there’s another book coming out next year or possibly in the UK because I think this book was released earlier in the United Kingdom than it is being in the United States. How far have you plotted out Gabriel’s adventures?

Sally Smith:

Well, I’m in the middle of the third, and in order to get my publishing contract, I produced the summaries for three. And in England, I’m contracted to write another two more. Sorry, it gets complicated, but there will be one other certainly coming out in the us and then after that, who knows. But in England, there will be four in total. I’m in the middle of the third, and that will come out next year at the end of the summer, and then there’ll be one after that. So I don’t have any kind of plot for the fourth one at all. I haven’t given it any thought at all, but each one is a crime and a legal case. And so I start by choosing my crime and my legal case and then taking it from there.

Lee Rawles:

Well, if I could make a pitch, we at the A BA just celebrated the hundredth year anniversary of a huge trip that the American Bar Association took over to London, and they met at the Inner Temple. It was 1924. They came over by cruise ship three cruise ships, actually, and celebrated in the inner temple. And so that could be, if he makes it to 1924, I would be interested to see what Gabriel Ward made of all those Americans invading his inner temple.

Sally Smith:

How very interesting. Do you know? I didn’t know that. I’ll go and look that up, but that’s very interesting. I mean, in fact, I don’t think I’m giving anything away to say that. The third one, which I’m writing at the moment, involves not people coming from the US but a young Indian student. There was, I mean really by today’s standards extraordinary. But anyway, there was a initiative to bring Indian students over to England, put them in the foreigns of court, and then send them back to administer British justice in colonial India. And Gandhi was an early member of that and wrote quite a bit about the inner temple and what a miserable time he had because they couldn’t understand his vegetarianism. So he was hungry all the time, and everywhere was too cold. And so quite a lot of interesting reminiscences. And so I’m using that. And as I say, I’m going to have a young Indian, so I’ll have to think about a young American for a future one.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Sally, thank you so much for joining us. If someone wants to pick up a case of Mice and Murder, would you point them to any particular website?

Sally Smith:

Well, I think mean the easiest wave I think is through Amazon, but the publishers of Bloomsbury, both in the US and in England. So using either of those and they will steer you to where you can buy it.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you again, Sally, and thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If you have a book you’d like me to feature on a future episode, you can always reach me at books at ABA Journal dot com.