The book is sincere and his characters are integrated with the wit and wisdom gathered from decades on the bench.
By Toni MessinaBecause I write this column, I was asked to review a legal thriller by Eastern District Federal Judge Frederic Block, Race to Judgment (affiliate link).
While I generally like legal thrillers, I started the book with a sense of trepidation. After all, Judge Block had never written a novel (although he has written an autobiographical work, Disrobed (affiliate link)). And I know from having taken a stab at penning my own courtroom thriller that writing fiction is a lot trickier than writing court opinions, legal memos, and editorials to the Times.
To my surprise, Judge Block’s book drew me in and kept me interested. It’s the story of firebrand African-American attorney Ken Williams (loosely patterned on the late Ken Thompson, the former Brooklyn District Attorney). The book starts with Williams winning the freedom of a black man wrongfully convicted of murder; he then takes on the case of a black man accused of killing a rabbi’s son seven years earlier, and soon finds himself protecting a young Hasidic woman impregnated by her father and assisting her to pursue a criminal prosecution against him. By the end of the story, Williams, himself, is running for District Attorney, challenging the long-standing incumbent (modeled after Charles Hynes, the former Brooklyn District Attorney).
There’s a bit of a who-dunnit after Williams receives death threats and his office is firebombed by one of many people who hate him, but this is almost an afterthought in the plot.
Judge Block calls the book “reality fiction.” This includes the melding of fun facts, real-life events, historical information about Brooklyn, info on the inner workings of the criminal justice system, the Hasidic Jewish community, and (thrown into the mix) country music and lyrics (all written and musically notated by Judge Block), which are sung at various points of the book by his protagonist Williams.
While the book could have been tighter in spots, the dialogue more natural, and the old rule “show, don’t tell” adhered to more stringently, I found it a swift and fun read — a great backseat view of how things work from the perspective of judges, a defense attorney, cops, and victims. It was also very bold for Judge Block to posit his feelings about the criminal justice system so openly, with no holds barred.
Those sentiments, accrued after spending more than 30 years in practice and on the bench, include information about corrupt cops who push cases forward by getting cooperators to make up information (often using the same cooperator case-to-case); the susceptibility of head prosecutors to make pay-to-play prosecutorial decisions based on their funding base (in the book, the Hassidic community doesn’t want the Brooklyn D.A. to move forward on the father-daughter rape), and a lot of factoids about stop-and-frisk, unlawful convictions, and the threats federal judges face just by being on the bench.
Judge Block took on another bold challenge by writing the book from the perspective of someone not his race — something even experienced writers are cautious about.
“I wanted to flex my muscles. The great thing about age is you reach a certain comfort level with yourself. I put myself out there, but these are things I feel strongly about,” he said in a phone conversation. “I’m not going to be going to the Supreme Court. I don’t have to worry what other people think about me. That’s tremendously freeing. Plus, how can you not feel strongly about wrongful convictions and the death penalty. It’s the world we live in, you can’t hide from that.”
The book is chock-full of interesting information, characters, and even a bit of sex. In addition to this, Judge Block is a fascinating study in and of himself — an 83-year-old jurist who didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, who wrote a musical that played up and down the East Coast, who welcomes criticism and stands up to it (once called “Judge Blockhead” in the press), and is still going strong. “How do you know what you can or cannot do, unless you try,” he told me.
The one disappointment he’s had since writing the book is that it hasn’t yet been reviewed by the New York Times. Maybe because it doesn’t easily fit into any obvious genre, the paper has skipped it or maybe reviewers are just skeptical (as I was) of the possibility that a first-time novelist and sitting judge could write something good. But they’re missing out.
The book is sincere and his characters are integrated with the wit and wisdom gathered from decades on the bench.
So, New York Times — take the plunge. As the judge put it, “Even John Grisham doesn’t write country music.”