An "in" joke that Beattie apparently missed is Leonard's giving his "totally corrupt lawyer" character the name Avern Cohn.
Having evoked the growled contradictions, raffishly engrossing, of his lawyer character, Begley has now, in "Shipwreck," done something equivalent, though more brittle, for the protagonist as writer.
Instead of Aminata reading out a court testimony detailing her rape, for example, Horin swapped roles, so Aminata became the lawyer character and a friend played her.
Crichton next raises the apparently unrecognised (by the lawyer character at least) fact that the interior of Antarctica is cooling (p196), an issue discussed in another post (Antarctica cooling, global warming?).
At one point, it even negotiated a placement on "Sex and the City", a popular television show, with the yuppie lawyer character (Miranda Hobbs) drafted in to make the case for TiVo.Till now, couch potatoes have remained unconvinced.
Lee's other main lawyer character, the suicidal associate Joy, from whom the book takes its ironic name, is even more ambivalent about her choice of career, eventually trying to take her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills.
I seem not to have mentioned the terrific Bob Odenkirk, who won't be back as Fargo's shifty police chief, but will be reprising his shifty lawyer character from Breaking Bad for a new spin-off comedy-drama on Netflix early next year – Better Call Saul.
Poole refers to Eli Gold as a "wartime consigliere", a reference to the Tom Hagen lawyer character in the 1972 Mafia film The Godfather, which is itself based on a Mario Puzo novel of the same name.
And he said that though he "never heard the N-word," whites called him Calhoun, after the shady lawyer character in the popular 1950s black sitcom "Amos 'n' Andy".
