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Murder's
Out of Tune
The
second Amicus Curiae mystery:
Ageing
Des Cheshire is a cat who swings. For 25 years, he's featured
on sax with the Billy Wonder Quartet, written the quartet's
hugely popular tunes, given witty interviews to promote
the band ... and played second fiddle to pianist and leader
Billy Wonder. Cheshire's iron-clad contract with Wonder
prevents him from working with any other band, and forces
him to sign over 75 per cent of his publishing royalties.
So when Billy Wonder turns
up dead, "the Cheshire cat" is a principal  suspect.
Paired up once again with appeal judge Ted Mariner (who
reluctantly adopted our feline narrator in the popular
first volume in the series, Murder at Osgoode Hall),
Amicus meets Des Cheshire at the Chicken Alley jazz club
in trendy Yorkville. From there, it's two cool cats on
deadly nocturnal adventures.
“...
A smart and amusing return for Amicus, the courthouse
cat. ... A clever little book.”
Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail
“One
wickedly witty and very funny novel”
Eric McMillan, Town Crier
“The
story is told ... in a voice full of wit, sarcasm,
and literary and musical references. You’ll
find it the cat’s meow.” I
Love a Mystery
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For
more information and to order this book click here.
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Murder
at Osgoode Hall
An
Amicus Curiae Mystery
Lawyer
Jeremiah "The Splinter" Debeers is an anti-Establishment
champion of the little guy ... and a pain in the backside
for his fellow "benchers," the wealthy old-boy
governors at the Law Society. So his sudden death in
the Society's library raises some pointed questions.
For one, what are the confidential records from the
Society's wine cellar doing near his corpse? Will the
Society's resident cat, Amicus, be sent to Her Majesty's
"Doghouse" (the humane society shelter) for
the murder of a bird on the Law Society lawn? And speaking
of environmental crime, will Amicus's companion human,
judge Ted Mariner, ever complete his seminar paper on
the constitutional rights of tree-huggers? Amicus, Q.C.
(Questing Cat) is on the prowl for the answers.
"As
literate as it is funny."
Leah Bowness, Maclean's magazine
"…a
clever whodunnit. … Miller has a nice light touch."
Margaret
Cannon, Globe & Mail
"One
wickedly witty and literate novel."
Eric McMillan, Town Crier
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For
more information and to order this book click here.
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Where
There's Life
There's Lawsuits:
Finalist, Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction;
optioned for Hollywood production.
Not Altogether Serious Ruminations On Law and Life
If the police sniff at your door without a warrant, is
it an illegal search? Can you kill your spouse if you
find her in bed with another man? Who owns that bronze
cast of Jimi Hendrix's sexual parts -- the artist or the
"sculpture's" custodian? If someone misplaces
your cremated remains, can your family get compensation
for lost property ? Is it a crime to try to pick an empty
pocket? Is Yiddish displacing Latin as the second language
of our law? And exactly why is it that Robin Hood's merry
men "couldn't have been very merry"?
The law concerns the most dramatic, poignant, and ridiculous
moments of our lives. Judgments in lawsuits often make
vivid tragicomic literature, throwing the very essence
of human nature into high relief. Where There's Life,
There's Lawsuits collects Miller's two decades of
bemusement as a chronicler of that tragicomedy. It will
be available in the spring of 2003, from ECW Press. From
the introduction:
I
come to law as a writer, more interested in the
problem of justice in The Merchant of Venice
than the rule in Trovato's Case. I have always
read the case law as literature, a cultural artifact
with its own mythic foundations ...
The actual writing of this book started 20 years
ago, just after Butterworths Canada had launched
Canada's first newspaper for the legal profession.
I worked in Butterworths' marketing department at
the time, more or less gainfully combining my legal
training with prior -- if ambivalent -- experiences
as an English major and ad-agency copywriter while
I waited for the New Yorker to anoint me
the next James Thurber. It's been a long wait. Happily,
however, a few weeks after Ontario Lawyers Weekly
started publication in May, 1983, Geoffrey Burn,
Butterworths' president of the day, came into my
office and asked if I could "liven the thing
up a bit with something allegedly humorous for the
back page."
I haven't always been funny since then, even allegedly,
but the paper soon went international and I still
have the job. And I'm never short of material. |
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For
more information and to order this book click here.
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Ardor
in the Court!
Sex and the Law
1656:
A Boston court sentences a ship's captain to sit in
the stocks for two hours for "lewd and unseemly
behavior" on the sabbath. Arriving home that Sunday
after three years at sea, he had kissed his wife. 1889:
The chief justice of England debates with fellow judges
whether a man can have sexual connection with a duck.
1968: J. Edgar Hoover tries to ban the recording
"Two Virgins" because the cover depicts John
Lennon and Yoko Ono stark naked from both directions.
1991: Police in Florida arrest Pee Wee Herman,
star of children's television, for pleasuring himself
during a public screening of the film Nancy Nurse.
2000: A stripper sues her plastic surgeon because
her bottom looks like her top after he stitches breast
implants into her buttocks.
Ardor
in the Court is an anecdotal history of sex and
the law. As with all of Miller's work, the emphasis
is on the curious, bemusing, and culturally evocative
-- which is to say, events that reach the heart of the
human tragicomedy, casting it in high relief. Drawing
mainly from official law reports -- which most people
never otherwise get to see -- Ardor never loses
sight of actress Shelley Winters' observation: "I
think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful, and damaging
to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great
body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and
a progressive religious experience." |
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For
more information on this book click here.
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The
Law of Contempt
in Canada
This 1997 legal text is the first and, to date, the only
book of its kind: a comprehensive treatment of the Canadian
law of contempt of court. Miller wrote it while practicing
media law and civil litigation with the Toronto law firms
Porter, Posluns & Harris and Gowlings. From the introduction:
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came to write this book after a media client approached
my law firm and asked exactly how much they could
publish about the notorious Paul Benardo/Karla Homolka
[sex-murder] trials, following conviction but before
anyone knew if there would be appeals. In researching
that question, I noticed that there were a few cursory
treatments of Canadian contempt law in two or three
books on general media law, and one old re-working
of a British treatise that was "Canadian"
something in the manner of the Canadian edition
of Sports Illustrated. That is, there were
odds and sods, most of it outdated, and there was
no decidedly Canadian treatise on the subject. |
In
addition to detailing all the elements of every kind of
contempt, the book includes a nutshell, and often amusing,
history of contempt of court; definitions; constitutional
considerations; evidentiary considerations; procedure
and forms; defences; sentencing; and appeals.
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For
more information on this book click here.
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Naked
Promises:
A Chronicle of Everyday
Wheeling and Dealing
Unfortunately, Naked Promises is
out of print, although apparently some copies are available
second hand. It is a bemused history of everyday contracts
-- the transactions all of us make everyday from buying
breakfast to renting a room to going to the dentist. As
the publisher's blurb puts it, the book covers: |
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transactions
big and small, from the covenants Moses and Abraham
made with Jehovah to a land deed that was signed, sealed
and delivered by an amputated hand, to attempts by prostitutes
to welsh on debts by pleading their own immoral acts.
... Focusing ... on the ordinary citizen as the hero
of the law, Naked
Promises
explores ... disputes involving such familiar figures
as Mark Twain, Bette Davis, J.D. Salinger, and Lee Iacocca.
... [The book] borrows from literature, fairy tales,
movies, art, and science to demonstrate how our law
is a vivid reflection of our larger culture.
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Street
Talk:
The Language of
Coronation Street
Much
of Jeffrey Miller's work concerns the joys and vagaries
of language. Although it derives from the wildly popular
English "folk opera," Granada Television's Coronation
Street, Street Talk started life rather seriously,
as an historical study of the northern English dialect
heard on the program. To broaden the book's popularity,
the publishers replaced most of the etymological and philological
information (word histories and context) with photographs,
so that the book went from being a true dictionary to
a glossy sort of souvenir book. It sold very well, however,
going out of print only when the lead publisher, CBC Enterprises,
was closed down by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
We feature it here only to set the record straight.
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This
anthology of legal humor, collected by a law professor
at the University of Manitoba, includes one of the first
pieces that Miller wrote for The Lawyers Weekly,
which at the time (1983) had not "gone national"
and was called Ontario Lawyers Weekly. The piece,
"Murder's Out of Tune: A Criminal Lawyer Looks at
Shakespeare," plays with an old canard about Othello,
namely, that, by censoring the play in his Family Shakespeare,
Dr. Thomas Bowdler supplied a whole new motive for Othello's
murder of his wife Desdemona. Supposedly, when the notorious
prude came upon the (non-existent) line, "She plays
the strumpet in bed," he simply dropped the s from
the offending word. |
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