Reviewed by Joseph Matthews For those Guild members who know Paul Harris from his time as President of the NLG, the fact that he has written a book about characters with deep political convictions will come as no surprise. The same is true for those who know him as co-founder of the San Francisco Community Law Collective, or as the teacher of “guerrilla law” in his guise as Charles Garry Professor of Law at New College in San Francisco. That this novel presents a convincing and powerful historical account of the collision of radical politics and the “justice” system will also make perfect sense to anyone who has read his earlier non-fiction exposition of guerrilla law in action, Black Rage Confronts the Law (NYU Press, 1997). But the alchemy of novels is different. At their best, they confirm the old proverb “Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” And so it is with In the Midnight Hour. For it is his achievement as story-teller that makes Harris’s book such a vivid and captivating tale of ‘60s radical politics and the Underground, and of the courtroom struggles they spawned. In the Midnight Hour is a multi-layered novel played out with the straightforward language and page-turning pace of a great courtroom thriller. It is the story of a radical criminal defense lawyer but also of the people – the all-too-human individuals – whom the lawyer’s work brings into his life, and his life brings into his work. Told from alternating perspectives, the tale takes the reader not merely to the goings-on but to the minds and emotions of several fully-formed characters: the lawyer, engaged since childhood in struggles against the State but suddenly finding himself in deeper waters than he’s ever known; a politically dedicated yet in many ways naïve community clinic doctor falsely accused in a deadly draft board bombing; the lawyer’s sister, a woman drawn so far into the ‘60s Underground that she begins to lose contact with who she is; a raft of activists, including a black investigator and a Latina legal worker, spinning in the shoals of radical turbulence; and a COINTELPRO-type FBI agent rendered not just reprehensible but comprehensible. The novel’s story revolves around the lawyer David Shane, a red-diaper baby whose criminal defense work in San Francisco suddenly brings him face-to-face with the very same FBI agent – which is also to say, the very same State interests -- who had stalked his parents decades before. Working to penetrate a radical underground group, the agent turns an anti-war protester wanted for petty crimes into first an informant, and then a provocateur. This mole borrows a car belonging to one of his roommates, the community doctor, and with others from the Underground sets out to bomb a local draft board. The bombing mission goes awry, and when the doctor is arrested he turns to David for his defense. Only on the eve of trial does David realize that one of the others in the botched “revolutionary” action that night was his own sister, Molly. One of the novel’s strengths is that it offers up these and other characters with a dialectic worthy of both trenchant political criticism and fine literature -- the reader is drawn to the characters’ courage and commitment but also forced to recognize their follies and contradictions. Not surprisingly in the writing hands of this trial lawyer par excellence, the pressure-cooker twists and turns of the legal case, and David’s navigation of it, are gripping. Trial lawyers reading this part of the book will find an extraordinary primer on how to be not only a politically aware advocate but also an effective one. An equally impressive accomplishment is the novel’s atmospheric recreation of the hothouse that was ‘60s clandestine politics. Here is Molly, David’s sister, on the run underground: “At nine o’clock that night the bus would pull into the Albuquerque depot where she was to be picked up and would make the long drive to the safehouse. She bought a morning paper from the newsrack, passed an older couple, slid into a booth and ordered coffee and a hamburger. Opening the folded paper she saw the headline and felt like she had been hit by an awful blow to the stomach. The headline read, ‘Radicals Captured Near Santa Fe.’ The short article, obviously rushed into this edition, said that two women and an Army deserter were arrested at eight in the morning. The Santa Fe police had surrounded an old ranch house while federal agents broke in and caught the three people without any struggle. . . . ‘Here’s your coffee, ma’am,’ said the waitress. ‘Your burger is coming up.’” These were days when many people on the Left were mesmerized, some paralyzed, and all distracted by spectacular vanguards in thrall to a politics of the deed. Theirs was a world of secrecy, of loyalty and betrayal, of ownership of the Word, and their disconnection from larger Movement forces left them fatally vulnerable to a State apparatus with far too many tools – including the legal system -- at its disposal. To the author’s political and literary credit, the deep structural faults of these vanguards are exposed for the reader’s inspection and reflection. It is no accident that the novel leaves open whether the death of the cadre was not rigged by the police but was instead the unintended but inevitable consequence of a particular sort of romantic political violence. In all, this novel is multifaceted, compelling and above all forthright, much like its author. For anyone who was lucky enough to have seen Paul Harris in the courtroom (especially in front of a jury), or like myself even more fortunate to have worked there alongside him, In the Midnight Hour is a happy reminder that one of his great gifts is alive and well – the ability to tell a story that we not only can believe but want to believe. For anyone new to Paul Harris’s story-telling, it is a gift indeed. In the Midnight Hour is available for $16, postage included, at www.guerrillalaw.com Joseph Matthews is a former criminal defense lawyer and Guild member whose books include the story collection The Lawyer Who Blew Up His Desk, the novel Shades of Resistance and, collectively sub nom Retort, a political analysis of the post-September 11 imperial moment Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War.

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