Crime of Sheila Mcgough - Softcover

Malcolm, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1862078416 ISBN 13: 9781862078413

Publisher: Granta Books, 2006

Synopsis

In the winter of 1996, the writer Janet Malcolm received a letter from a stranger - a disbarred lawyer named Sheila McGough, who had recently been released from prison, and who wrote that she been convicted of crimes she had not committed. McGough's was an obscure fraud case, just as McGough herself was obscure: a fifty-four- year- old woman who when Malcolm met her 'looked and sounded like a blandly wholesome heroine of fifties movies', toiling in the lower reaches of the American legal profession. Malcolm, however, decided to look into her alleged crime. Out of her investigations and her compelling narration there emerges a startling portrait of American cupidity and American law, and of a woman too innocent to survive among either.

About this title

Review:

‘Malcolm writes eloquently of the difficulty that journalism and the justice system have in establishing the truth’ -- Observer

‘Out of her investigations and her compelling narration there emerges a startling portrait of American cupidity and American law’ -- Greenock Telegraph

From the Back Cover:

In the winter of 1996, Janet Malcolm received a letter from a stranger -- a disbarred lawyer named Sheila McGough, who had recently been released from prison, and who wrote that she had been convicted of crimes she had not committed. Malcolm decided to look into the case, and this book -- a dazzling work of journalism as well as a searching meditation on character, on the law, and on the incompatibility of narrative with truth -- is the product of her growing belief that a miscarriage of justice had taken place.

Sheila McGough was prosecuted and convicted because the government (and then the jury) interpreted her zealous representation of a con-man client named Bob Bailes as collaboration in his fraud. Malcolm's close readings of court records and her interviews with lawyers and businessmen connected with the case give a picture of American law and American cupidity that is startling in its pitiless specificity. And her portrait of Sheila McGough -- "a woman of almost preternatural honesty and decency", as well as maddening literal-mindedness and discursiveness -- brings an unconventional new heroine into vivid being.

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1862078416
• ISBN 13: 9781862078413
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176