An Attorney’s Mission
What is the mission of an attorney within the judicial process? Wait, before you answer, what if that answer had to be dependent upon the judicial system being characterized as nothing but a bunch of lying liars lying to each other while everybody knows they are being lied to as well as lying? Now the answer becomes tricky enough to require metaphor in the answer. Now, the answer is that the attorney’s mission to wait for the perfect lie, otherwise recognized as:
“the one you can grab on to and forge like hot iron into a sharpened blade. You then use that blade to rip the case open and spill its guts out on the floor. That’s my job, to forge the blade. To sharpen it. To use it without mercy or conscience.”
The Title
The world of metaphors populating the novel starts on the cover with that title. Just what is the meaning behind this phrase about a verdict being made constituted of brass, anyway? The metaphor is put into sharp relief by a cop who identifies a brass verdict as
“a killing that came down to simple street justice?”
Los Angeles
L.A. is a city suffering no shortage of metaphors. Unfortunately, most of the best were already used up by the time Raymond Chandler quite writing novels and Billy Wilder stopped making movies. Every metaphor since then is really just a riff on what has been around for more than a century. But don’t blame the writers for lack of creativity; blame Los Angeles for not sufficiently being much different now than it was back then:
“Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare.”
Blue Ink
The defense attorney protagonist narrating the novel uses the metaphor blue ink in much the same way that most use red lining. Striking through text with a red line means it’s in the archives. Blue ink means much the same thing for any potential juror he foresees as trouble down the road:
“blue ink — my code for a juror who I perceived as being cold to the defense…Anybody who relished the idea of being a juror was blue ink all the way.”
Hollywood…Which isn’t the Same as L.A.
Don’t go thinking that metaphors about Los Angeles are automatically interchangeable with metaphors about Hollywood. Hollywood may be in L.A. physically, but metaphorically Hollywood has become a part of every town on the U.S. map.
“Mrs. Albrecht looked like a woman who liked her own skin. In my experience, this was a rare thing in Hollywood.”
