Jake Gyllenhaal in the Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent.
The prosecutor-turned-author was drawn to revisit the life of his lead character Rusty Sabich - played by Harrison Ford and Jake Gyllenhaal on screen.
When Scott Turow was a prosecutor in Chicago his biggest case led to the conviction of a corrupt judge. “He abused his power and he was sentenced initially to 18 years in prison,” he recalls now. “One of his daughters cried out in anguish when the sentence was announced. Even though I believe this guy had been a complete jerk, it still tore my heart to realise the toll the crime was taking on his family.”
It was a theme Turow decided to embrace in his new novel, in which he revisits the main character from his staggeringly successful first novel, Presumed Innocent: Rusty Sabich, the prosecutor charged with murdering his former mistress. Turow’s 1987 book was credited with inventing the legal thriller, and became a 1990 film with Harrison Ford, then the world’s biggest film star. Last year a new adaptation became one of Apple TV+’s biggest hits, this time with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead. “You know you’re getting old when you’re alive for the remake,” Turow, 75, jokes.
Sabich has made an appearance in his books just once since 1987, in 2010’s Innocent, where he was accused of murdering his wife. In Turow’s latest book, Presumed Guilty, he makes a third appearance - this time returning to the courtroom to defend the son of his new fiancée, who is accused of killing his on-off girlfriend.
“I had it in mind that I was going to go back to Rusty one more time,” Turow explains. “At the end of Innocent, I had left him in an uncertain place. I was curious in my own mind about how his life worked out.”
His 13 previous novels have sold more than 30 million copies, and like them Presumed Guilty is a page-turner that uses the conventions of genre fiction to explore humanity’s shades of grey. No character is wholly good or wholly bad; even the innocent make stupid mistakes. As David Baldacci, one of the kings of the US bestseller lists, put it after reading Presumed Guilty, Turow is “just better at this than the rest of us”. If I read a deeper and more satisfying thriller this year, I’ll be surprised.
The story of a boy who is given a second chance and blows it is one that Turow recalls from his time doing pro bono defence work. “We represented a young man in a pretty high-profile case in Chicago in which a jogger had been attacked by a group of young African-American men.”
His client was acquitted. “Fast-forward 10 years, this young man, Jarvis, was accused of a murder.” It was an open-and-shut case. “What destroyed me was the conversation I had with his mother. The assumption is that the mothers of all of these poor kids who get into trouble must be neglectful. It ain’t true.
“There’s a lot of sympathy in the criminal justice system for the murder victim’s family, but very little attention paid to the family of the murderer. And yet it was clear that there were two families’ lives destroyed by what Jarvis had done. That was something I was determined I was going to write about.”
In Presumed Guilty, the trial and the revelations that follow have huge repercussions across the generations. Turow, whose father was a controlling bully, drew on his family history. “My grandmother, my mom and my uncle regarded my grandfather as this awful son of a b**** - mean to them, sometimes cruel, which, frankly, are things that I would say about my own dad. And yet somehow in his later years, he found it in himself to be a loving and generous grandfather.”
The final layer of the puzzle is that Aaron, the boy Sabich is defending, is black - he was adopted by a white couple and brought up in a rural area that is racist and suspicious of city people. Turow shows how alienating this is for him, while also sympathising with a neighbourhood that feels “ignored and looked down upon”. Turow is perhaps past caring about being cancelled, but in a world where authors are condemned for imagining the experience of others, it was a somewhat brave choice.
After outlining the plot to his editor, Turow says, “I called him back a month later and said, ‘What would you think if it turns out that Aaron was black?’ There was this long silence at the other end of the phone because publishing is certainly one of the wokest of American worlds. He didn’t say it, but I knew what he was thinking: ‘You’re playing with fire.’ But to me, it was important to account for the isolation that this character felt. He was deeply loved and yet he found himself isolated from virtually everybody.”
All of Turow’s work explores the ways in which truth and justice are not always the same thing. “The criminal justice system works well for the well-heeled in the United States,” he says. “The problem, however, is that for the poor, it is not the same system. The worse the crime, the greater the risk that innocent people will be convicted. Most people on death row did it, but in Illinois we figured there was a 10 per cent error rate. That’s way too high.
“The civil side is just a mess. The amount of lying that takes place in depositions leaves you shaking your head.” In one civil case he won, Turow recalls: “You never saw such a contest of liars. The only thing we did better was that we put on fewer witnesses.”
Like in the other Rusty Sabich books, the conclusion of Presumed Guilty provides an arresting twist - although the explanation presented is Rusty’s, a not always reliable narrator. There is sufficient ambiguity at the end of the first two books that not all readers accept Turow’s conclusions.
“If you ask the author, Rusty wasn’t guilty of either of the murders he was accused of, although there’s a significant coterie of readers who think he was guilty of both. I remember when Marcia Gay Harden, who played his wife, Barbara, told me on the set of [the TV film of] Innocent that Rusty had murdered her and murdered Carolyn [the victim in Presumed Innocent]. That’s the way she was playing the part. She is one smart human being.”
While the Ford film took Turow’s cues, the TV adaptation of Presumed Innocent tweaked the plot. “There were changes made from what I wrote,” he says. “I think some of them work and some of them don’t work as well. But the darkness of what’s going on between Rusty and Carolyn provides that ambiguity about who did it. And I like that a lot.”
The same team, the Ally McBeal creator David E Kelley and JJ Abrams, have now optioned Presumed Guilty. Turow knows that an option is not a guarantee. “As my friend Rick Patterson puts it about Hollywood, ‘Movie deals are like sperm: many are called, but fewer chosen.’” But it is a roster of talent that should ensure a show will get made.
Turow might have sold 100 million books if he had emulated his friend Stephen King (“a f***ing genius”) by writing one a year. But while he was once a writing fellow at Stanford University and dreamt of being the next Saul Bellow, Turow was always equal parts lawyer and writer.
“Going to law school was the great break of my writing career because I finally discovered the subject that was going to animate me as a writer and as a person,” he says. “I’ve had remarkable good fortune in both professions.”
He is already planning his next book. “This novel starts with a very old lawyer who, like a lot of elderly people, reads the obituaries because it’s the only time the people his age make news. And he’s stunned to read the obituary of a man who, for the past 50 years, he had thought was murdered by one of his clients. So that’s where we begin.”
And will there be more Rusty Sabich? “Well, if I live to be 90, then maybe.” Here’s hoping.
Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow (Swift) is available now.
Written by: Tim Shipman
© The Times of London
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