Howe & Hummel

"This is a fun book and everyone should get it. It’s about two of the most shyster lawyers you can imagine in New York in the second half of the 19th century. In those days you didn’t need a degree or anything to be a lawyer. Howe was an English guy on the run for murder and he pitched up in New York and started a law firm on Center Street in downtown Manhattan. He fell in with the much smarter but equally impecunious Hummel, a ratbag from the Lower East Side. “In those days you didn’t need a degree or anything to be a lawyer.” Hummel was a brilliant lawyer but Howe was a brilliant trial advocate and Howe did over 600 capital cases and hardly ever lost. He never lost because of underhand practices like bribing judges and jurors. He also designed his own clothes and he would change his outfits as the trial grew closer to the verdict. All black apart from a diamond pin in his cravat. Brilliant indeed. If you’d killed someone you definitely needed him. He would also dress his clients. He once defended a seaman who had killed three captains one after the other. The prosecution showed up with these captains’ families, their wives and children, and Howe thinks: ‘Shit! What am I going to do?’ He sees his own wife and daughter in the courtroom watching his performance and he gets them to play the wife and child of the seaman who, of course, gets off. So they had a whole casting agency and would hire wives of fragile beauty suckling infants. He always dressed his clients as paupers even though they were paying him tens of thousands of dollars. He was a terrible sadist too and he once engineered for a guy to swing just because he could. Nicer isn’t the word I’d be looking for. Hummel’s favourite wheeze was sending showgirls round to chat up wealthy engaged or married young men and then blackmailing them and splitting the profit with the showgirl. There is a bit of Howe and Hummel in every lawyer."