Brain Storm - Hardcover

Dooling, Richard

 
9780679452393: Brain Storm
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0679452397 ISBN 13: 9780679452393
Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

The author of White Man's Grave, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award, presents a humorous and smart whodunit about a young lawyer's personal and professional collision with homicide, race, sex, and lawn care. 35,000 first printing. Tour.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<b>Richard Dooling</b> is a writer and a lawyer.   His second novel, White Man's Grave, was finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. He is also the author of Critical Care and Blue Streak, and he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the National Law Journal. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife and children.

Aus dem Klappentext

Watson had never been to court except to be sworn in. He did legal research, investigating copyright infringement in video games (addressing such matters as: Did CarnageMaster plagiarize their beheading sequence from Greek SlaughterHouse?). <br><br>He was a Webhead, a cybernerd doing support work for the lawyers in his firm who did go to court. And he was good at it. He was on track to become one of the youngest partners in the firm, and he was able--by a hair--to support his wife and children in an affluent neighborhood. Then he got notice that the tyrannical Judge Whittaker J. Stang had appointed him to defend James Whitlow, a small-time lowlife with a long rap sheet accused of a double hate crime: killing his wife's deaf black lover. When Watson stubbornly decides not to plead out his client, he is soon evicted from his comfortable life: His boss fires him, his wife leaves him and takes the children, and the Whitlow case begins to consume all of his time. <br><br>He has only two allies

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"The beheadings are almost identical," said Joe Watson, placing his memo on the walnut expanse of Arthur Mahoney's worktable. Watson resisted the impulse to retrieve the memo on beheadings from the senior partner's elbow and check it again for typos. Arthur Mahoney--silver-haired mentor and the partner in charge of young Watson's career at Stern, Pale & Covin--had been less than enthusiastic about the last two memos Watson had done for him, and Watson feared that another unsatisfying piece of work might jeopardize the comfortable, protected niche he'd made for himself as research and writing factotum to the head of the litigation department.

"Almost identical?" asked Arthur. He set aside the stack of correspondence and enclosures he had been reviewing, swiveled in his recliner, and attended to his young associate and the press of the business at hand: decapitations.

"Yes," said Watson, panicking as he suddenly realized he had forgotten to use the spell checker himself (instead of just having his secretary do it), so he could activate the homophone feature of the firm's word processing software and double-check for words that were spelled correctly but were misused, like discrete instead of discreet, or principle instead of principal. He'd used stationery instead of stationary in the last memo, and Arthur had filled the margins with a handwritten screed on the importance of precision.

"Is this something more than look and feel?" asked Arthur. "We've seen so many of these damn beheadings. And you associates tend to make wild, very serious, highly theoretical allegations without thinking about the weeks of courtroom labor you'll need to prove them. How do you distinguish one beheading from another? I'll have to rely on young people to teach me about decapitations. We didn't have such grisly spectacles in my day."

"Both heads are severed at the third cervical vertebra--right here," said Watson, running a finger across the back of his own neck by way of illustration.
"So?" said Arthur. "Seems a likely enough site."
"Similar-sounding crunches occur when the blades strike the vertebra. The arteries and veins sprout like seaweed and spurt blood everywhere. I'm having the splatter patterns analyzed to be sure, but the splotches look identical. The heads topple forward and then roll down stairs--three stairs, to be exact, with three kerplunks. The animated victims turn
their headless stumps toward the gamer and squirt blood through the windpipes onto the screen. The heads themselves are mounted on pikes, and in both cases the heads say, "Ouch, that smarts!" in a kind of cartoon voice, at the instant of impalement."

Arthur made a small steeple of his index fingers and tapped it against his pursed lips. "Joseph," he said with a benevolent smile, "I can imagine myself arguing to a federal district judge that one beheading is identical to another. I can imagine myself arguing that one beheading is wholly distinguishable from some other beheading which has been served
up by way of comparison, but I'm straining somewhat to imagine myself arguing that two beheadings are almost identical. Instead of issuing general proclamations of their near identity, perhaps your analysis could commence with a succinct delineation of the difference or differences, however slight, between the two beheadings. I'll speak plainly: What is keeping our almost identical beheadings from becoming completely identical beheadings?"
"A halberd and a scimitar, sir," said Watson. "A halberd," said Arthur.

"It's kind of a combination poleax and pike mounted on a six-foot handle," Watson explained. "You've probably seen knights and beefeaters and whatnot holding them. Or maybe if you've been to a museum you've seen them leaning against suits of armor. The Met in New York has quite a collection."
"I know what a halberd is," said Arthur.
"I knew you would," said Watson, deciding not to mention that he had exhaustively researched the subject of halberds to the tune of six or seven billable hours, had viewed the Met's collection of halberds on-line , and had submitted his time under the heading "Research Look-and-Feel Issues Involving Ancillary Armaments, 6.75 Hours."

"In CarnageMaster, the Crusader's head is cut off by a Maltese knight with a halberd, but in Greek SlaughterHouse, Medusa is beheaded by Perseus, who uses a blazing scimitar."
"And a polished shield for a mirror?" Arthur asked eagerly.
"No," said Watson, "I don't think our clients are up on their Greek mythology. Perseus just kind of looks right at Medusa and whops off her head with a scimitar he must have stolen from a vanquished Turk after doing a little time traveling. Now, you're probably thinking, That's
different--Perseus and his scimitar are different from a Maltese knight with a halberd. But when the weapons are displayed later, the blood drips in precisely the same patterns from the blades to the same reticulated stone floor of an identical castle--the Castle of Skulls--which was designed by our client's multimedia programmers."

"Sounds like more than a coincidence," said Arthur, "but is this copyright infringement? Something more than look and feel? Has CarnageMaster stolen the story of Greek SlaughterHouse? The characters?" "CarnageMaster has stolen the soul of Greek SlaughterHouse," Watson said.

"Hmmm," said Arthur. "So we have these 'almost identical' beheadings, and we have the 'very similar' dungeon torture sessions, followed by the 'almost identical' disembowelments."
"That's right," said Watson. "Don't forget the nearly identical large-breasted blondes wearing see-through chain mail shackled to ringbolts and stones inside pink, secret chambers. In both games, male assailants brandish flesh-colored broadswords at them."
"We need more," said Arthur. "Subliminal Solutions and the SlaughterHouse team want to be absolutely certain of their position before amending their complaint and adding a request for punitive damages. We need to be sure this is all--what are the magic words?--'well
grounded in fact and warranted by existing law,' or we risk Rule Eleven sanctions. More research is indicated."

"Yes, sir," said Watson.

Arthur took a call. Watson gathered his papers and headed out, back to his office, a windowless cubicle one fourth the size of Arthur's spread. Arthur had the big office, the ancient measure of partner power, but he didn't have a 600 megahertz Pentium VI 3-D system with a subwoofer and a twenty-eight-inch flat-panel display, which the firm had installed in Watson's office to assist him in analyzing copyright litigation claims for the firm's software clientele. Arthur didn't 'do' computers, had no use for them. He was an example of that dying breed of lawyer who still pined for the days when former fraternity brothers and family friends paid dearly for sage advice and legal guidance. The old guy had barely
an inkling that modern corporate clients were no longer interested in sage advice (they could get that from the in-house lawyers they had on staff). They had all the family friends and wise men they needed; they came to Stern, Pale looking for armies of ruthless litigators and
information dominance, so they could massacre their opponents in court.

In the twilight of his august career, Arthur was still dispensing advice and memos to clients, but these days those memos and that advice consisted of information that had been winnowed, gathered, and compressed by associates using powerful computers and search
technologies. For young lawyers, like Joe,...

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Verlag
Random House USA Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0679452397
ISBN 13 
9780679452393
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
401
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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