Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehrengraf (26 page)

E
hrengraf, waiting for his client to return from the lavatory, tried to remember what he’d paid for the leather sofa. Whatever the price, it had been money well spent. And it seemed to him that the piece of furniture improved with use, as if it were seasoned like a fine meerschaum pipe by the sport conducted upon it.

“That was lovely,” Maureen McClintock said upon her return. “But I still owe you a fee, and I’m sure it must be a substantial one, because you deserve no less.”

Ehrengraf named a figure.

The woman’s face fell. “It’s about what I expected,” she said, “and I’d write a check for the full amount, and even tag on a bonus. But—”

“But you’re in no position to do so.”

“I’m solvent,” she said, “and I’ve always been able to meet my expenses. But I’ve never been able to put money aside, and I don’t have any reserves to draw upon.”

“Ah,” said Ehrengraf. “My dear Ms. McClintock, you have an asset of which you may not be aware.”

“Oh?”

“You have a story, Ms. McClintock. A very valuable story. And I’m acquainted with a woman who can help you share it with the world.”

N
an Fassbinder sat back in the red leather chair and crossed her long legs at the ankle. “I’ve never been involved in anything like this,” she said. “I’ve hunted for
le mot juste
, and the best I can come up with is
fandango
.”

“Isn’t that a dance?”

“A Spanish dance,” she said. “Figuratively, it has several meanings. According to Wikipedia, where I looked it up just hours ago, it may mean a quarrel, a big fuss, or a brilliant exploit.”

“And when you use it now—”

“A brilliant exploit, of course. I’m in awe.”

“Well,” said Ehrengraf.

“I’m also hugely grateful,” she said. “I have to thank you for Cheryl Plumley and Maureen McClintock. The publisher’s over the moon, you know. Two women, both of them wonderfully articulate and deliciously attractive, and each with a gripping story to tell. And of course the two stories reinforce one another, and anyone who reads one of the books is impelled to reach for the other.”

“Which can only be good for all concerned.”

“Good for the publisher, who’ll sell a ton of books. Good for Cheryl and Maureen, both of whom are getting media coaching even as we speak. They’re competitive, but in a good way, and they can’t wait to chase separately around the country on their book tours, with a few joint appearances in major cities as a highlight.”

“I suspect they’ll be good at it.”

“No kidding,” Nan Fassbinder said. “So it’ll be good for them, and I guess it’ll be good for you, because the advances they got enabled them to pay for your services.”

“Almost beside the point,” Ehrengraf said. “Still, one does like to be adequately compensated for one’s efforts.”

“And good for me, Martin. May I call you Martin?”

“Of course, my dear Nan.”

“Good for me, because I’ll do very well as the co-author of both of these books, and if they’re as successful as I think they’ll be, it’ll boost my stock for future projects. You might say I owe you a debt of gratitude, Martin.”

“No more than the one I owe you, Nan.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “You know, both of those women speak very highly of you, Martin. And I got the definite impression that it was more than your legal acumen that they appreciated.”

“Oh?”

“That sofa,” Nan Fassbinder said. “Can it possibly be as comfortable as it looks?”

W
hen Lawrence Block asked me to prepare this introduction to his eight stories about criminal lawyer Martin H. Ehrengraf, I’m sure he was unaware how ironic the request was. Back in the early 1950s, when I was still struggling to make my first sale, I began corresponding with Ben Abramson, a bookseller and Sherlockian who had previously published
The Baker Street Journal
. I even met with him on one of my trips to New York.

Abramson had discussed with Fred Dannay (the half of “Ellery Queen” who was actively editing
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
) an idea for a series of stories about a criminal lawyer, in both senses of the phrase. This lawyer, patterned after the character of Randolph Mason created in 1896 by Melville Davisson Post, would be an unscrupulous attorney using the weaknesses of the law to defeat justice. Dannay was eager to run such a series, and suggested that Abramson seek out some young writer to tackle the project.

I had never read any of the Randolph Mason stories, but armed with a couple of plot suggestions from Ben Abramson I hurried home to write the first story. I sent the finished product off to Abramson and he liked it. Fred Dannay didn’t, and the project quickly died.

A quarter of a century later Lawrence Block wrote a story about a criminal lawyer named Martin H. Ehrengraf and submitted it to
EQMM
. “The Ehrengraf Method” (later reprinted as “The Ehrengraf Defense”) was published in the February 1978 issue of the magazine, with a headnote by Dannay which spoke of filling the footprints of Post’s Randolph Mason. Like me, Block had never read the Mason tales, but with the encouragement of Fred Dannay the new series lasted through eight stories, all but one of which appeared in
EQMM
. (“The Ehrengraf Appointment” didn’t quite catch Dannay’s favor, apparently, and found a home in
Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine
.)

What was there about Martin Ehrengraf, and Randolph Mason before him, that so fascinated readers? Perhaps it was the idea of outwitting the law, of finding some clever way around the firm structures of our legal system. In the first and best of the Mason books,
The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason
(1896), the title character usually springs his surprises in the courtroom, baffling judge and jury alike as murderers, forgers and embezzlers walk free. Ehrengraf, on the other hand, prefers that his cases never even come to trial, that the charges against his clients be dropped. Ehrengraf says, “I prefer to leave that to the Perry Masons of the world.” In a later story he explains, “I’m always happiest when I can save my clients not merely from prison but from going to trial in the first place.”

Of course Ehrengraf goes further than Randolph Mason ever did. If Mason might advise a client to commit murder, and then free him on a technicality, Ehrengraf actually commits murder himself to aid a client and collect his fee. As Francis M. Nevins has observed, “(Block’s) protagonist serves clients not by taking advantage of glitches in the system but by breaking the law in whatever way will work.” The fact that Ehrengraf’s felonies usually occur offstage and are only inferred does little to lessen their effect.

Randolph Mason developed in later stories into a sort of moral champion, defending clients victimized by villains using the legal system. Block, in the introduction to his 1983 collection
Sometimes They Bite
, pretty much assures us that this won’t happen to Ehrengraf. But the dapper little attorney does love poetry, quoting at times from William Blake, Andrew Marvell, Christopher Smart, Arthur O’Shaughnessy and others. Like Shelley he believes that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe.” Once he even speaks of himself as a “corrector of destinies” using the title of the very book in which Randolph Mason completed his metamorphosis into a force for good.

There has been no new Ehrengraf story now for ten years. Perhaps the little attorney with the neat mustache and a liking for poetry really has gone over to the side of rectitude. But somehow I doubt it.

Lawrence Block was recently a recipient of the Grand Master award from the Mystery Writers of America, one of the youngest writers to be so honored. It is a well-deserved tribute to an author who has proven adept in creating memorable series characters in both the novel and short story forms. With the current popularity of both the Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr novels, along with the Keller short stories, I’m pleased to see that Ehrengraf hasn’t been forgotten.

Edward D. Hoch
Rochester, NY, 1994

And here’s my afterword to that volume:

A
mazing what you find out. To think that Fred Dannay was once interested in a continuation of Melville Davisson Post’s Randolph Mason stories! To think that Ed Hoch once undertook to provide it!

I of course had no idea. When I wrote the first Ehrengraf story in 1977, I didn’t know anything more about Melville Davisson Post than his name. Fred Dannay was crazy about the story, and heralded Ehrengraf as a lineal descendant of Randolph Mason.

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. And I may have been just a tiny bit sensitive on the subject. Because, while I hadn’t pilfered any ideas from Post, the first Ehrengraf story was an example of what I’ve elsewhere called Creative Plagiarism.

I hadn’t stolen the character. Ehrengraf was my own creation, sprung from my high forehead like Athena from the brow of Zeus. No, what I’d stolen was the plot itself.

And not from Melville Davisson Post, either. I’d lifted it from Fletcher Flora.

I don’t remember the title of the story, or just where and when it appeared. I’d guess it was published in
Manhunt
, probably in the mid-to-late fifties. While the details of the story have long since left my memory, I recall that it concerned a good friend of the narrator, who was in jail, charged with murdering a young woman. The narrator, operating on the principle that greater love hath no man than to lay down someone else’s life for a friend, gets his buddy off the hook by committing another murder or two with the identical MO. The friend, securely in jail at the time, has an unshakable alibi, and is thus off the hook for the first murder, which he did in fact commit.

I read the story, I liked the story, I forgot about the story, and years later I remembered it again and thought what a pleasure it would be to write that story. There was only one problem. Someone had already written it.

So I thought some more about it, and started poking it and probing it, looking for ways to change it. I decided that an artful attorney would make a good hero, and it struck me that he’d be particularly well motivated if he worked, as negligence lawyers do, upon a contingency basis. Martin Ehrengraf took shape at once, the minute I started writing the first paragraph. All his traits and mannerisms were somehow there from the beginning, as if he’d been waiting patiently for me to sit down and write about him.

I didn’t intend him as a series character, but characters have frequently surprised me in this fashion over the years, and I don’t think a month passed after I’d written the first Ehrengraf story before I found myself writing a second.

Fred Dannay was the first editor to see the first Ehrengraf story, and he snapped it up for
EQMM
.
He
wasn’t surprised when there was a second story, and did indeed hail my little lawyer as the reincarnation of Randolph Mason, and went on buying the stories as they rolled out of my typewriter. He passed on one, “The Ehrengraf Appointment”, finding it too gory for his taste. Rather than rewrite it for him, I sent it off to
Mike Shayne
, where I sold it for the price of a dinner, and not a great dinner, either. Fred bought the next one, and the one after that, and after his death in 1982 Eleanor Sullivan continued to take what Ehrengraf stories I managed to write.

But there haven’t been all that many of them. Early on, Otto Penzler told me he’d like to publish a collection of the Ehrengraf stories as soon as I got enough of them written to fill a book. That sounded good to me.

It never happened.

Ehrengraf’s problem, you see, is that he has a severely limited range. There haven’t been that many story ideas that have worked for him. I haven’t wanted to write the same story over and over, and have waited for variations to suggest themselves. There have thus far been only these eight which appear together now for the first time.

I can’t tell you there’ll never be another. I write these lines in May of 1994, the publication month of
The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams
, Bernie Rhodenbarr’s first book-length adventure in over a decade. If Bernie could come back after so long an absence, I can hardly rule out an eventual future appearance of the wily Martin Herod (or Harrod) Ehrengraf. I wouldn’t hold my breath, but I’m not going to say it’ll never happen.

For now, though—and perhaps forever—all the Ehrengraf stories are available in a single volume, arranged in the order in which they were written. I hope you like the dapper little fellow. I can tell you I had a good time writing about him.

Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village, 1994

T
hat was then and this is now, and twenty years have passed without Ehrengraf’s having lost a step or a case. And I’m pleased to report that the reformation which sullied the latter days of Randolph Mason has not visited itself upon our little lawyer.