Reasonable doubts

This title of this post is deliberately simple. It’s the title of the book in question, the third of Gianrico Carofiglio’s novels about the Italian defense lawyer Guido Guerrieri. I chose it in part because of passages like this one:

“I broke off, but too late. I was about to say, even supposing your husband is telling the truth – and supposing doesn’t mean conceding – proving it, or at least creating a reasonable doubt, will be extremely difficult. I broke off because I didn’t want to reawaken her more than reasonable doubts.”

That’s Guerrieri talking to the wife of a client jailed and accused of smuggling forty kilograms of cocaine from Montenegro into Italy. Look how much Carofiglio tells us about Guerrieri in three simple sentences. He’s lawyerly, he’s good-hearted, he’s humorous, and he sends the narrative off in two directions: toward Guerrieri’s case, and toward his relationship with the client’s wife. Reasonable doubts (a literal translation of the Italian title) does double duty in its legal sense and its everyday sense.

The passage is ironical for a third reasonable doubt, unstated here: Guerrieri’s own doubts about the case. Or perhaps those doubts are implied in that second sentence, with its stops, starts, hedges and changes of direction that contain a humorous hint of Dickens. In any case, it helps make Guerrieri an enormously appealing protagonist, more so than he would be if he were just another good-guy lawyer fighting for the downtrodden. (I'll guess that the smoothly delivered multiple meanings are a tribute to the translator, Howard Curtis.)

Before I stop typing and resume reading, I'll ask you to think about titles. Reasonable Doubts applies to the novel's action in least three senses. That makes it a hell of an appropriate title. What titles can you think of that work similarly, surprisingly well?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Gianrico Carofiglio
Italian crime fiction
Bitter Lemon Press
legal thrillers
Howard Curtis
translated crime fiction