Book Description

American lawyer and writer of courtroom intrigues Arthur Train serves up the novel "Yankee Lawyer: the Autobiography of Ephraim Tutt". Tutt was the main character of numerous of Train's novels. The cunning and witty lawyer would be presented with a case so seemingly against his clients that it would at first seem impossible to win. And yet Tutt would somehow manage to get his client off the hook. Train describes him thus, "Not inaptly described as a combination of Robin Hood, Abraham Lincoln, Puck and Uncle Sam, he was beloved by a multitude of his fellow countrymen who knew him as a homespun but distinguished member of the bar, erudite and resourceful, a terror alike to judges and professional opponents, generous, warm of heart, intolerant of sham and of privilege, a doughty champion of the weak, with an impish humor which enabled him to laugh cases out of court and a fertility of invention that often turned what appeared almost certain defeat into victory. The reports of the celebrated trials in which he had taken part had been compiled into many volumes and were widely read. His ramshackly figure in his rusty frock coat and stove-pipe hat, the fringe of white hair overlapping his collar, his corrugated features with their long nose and jimber jaw, his faded but keen old eyes and quizzical glance were familiar in illustration and cartoon, while the antique flavor of his costume had long rendered him as conspicuous upon the streets of the metropolis as did Mark Twain's white Panama suit. Yet to us of his generation it was but the natural continuance of the regulation dress of every lawyer at the turn of the century; he was used to it and it merely did not occur to him to change..."