Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Violent Ward
    Unavailable
    Violent Ward
    Unavailable
    Violent Ward
    Ebook335 pages5 hours

    Violent Ward

    By Len Deighton

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    If America is a lunatic asylum, then California is the Violent Ward.

    Mickey Murphy is a criminal lawyer with an office in LA’s downtown low-rent district, an ex-wife who bleeds him for money, clients who would plead the Fifth Amendment if they could count that high, and an unrequited passion for his wealthiest client’s wife. To make matters worse, Mickey finds himself embroiled against his wishes in an elaborate and clever scam that’s going askew, and being interrogated by the LAPD about a brutal murder.

    With an observant eye and ear for the California ‘scene’, Deighton once again uses his brilliant storytelling skills to propel an exciting and suspenseful narrative at breakneck speed to a dramatic climax in a riot-torn city.

    This reissue includes a foreword from the cover designer, Oscar-winning filmmaker Arnold Schwartzman, and an introduction by Len Deighton, which offers a fascinating insight into the writing of the story.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateSep 29, 2011
    ISBN9780007450879
    Unavailable
    Violent Ward

    Read more from Len Deighton

    Related to Violent Ward

    Related ebooks

    Hard-boiled Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Sensory Overload: The Millions Interviews Liska Jacobs

      Jul 22, 2022

      "When you’re in the thick of writing a novel, nothing else matters." The post Sensory Overload: The Millions Interviews Liska Jacobs appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Chasing Your Heroes

      Apr 5, 2022

      Chasing Your Heroes
      4 min read

    • Article

      My Neighborhood, Part 2

      Jul 2, 2019

      My Neighborhood, Part 2
      9 min read

    • Article

      ‘A Job For An Angry Loner’: Frankie Boyle And Denise Mina On Writing Crime Fiction

      Jul 31, 2022

      The heat is murderous in a sweltering photography studio just off north London’s Caledonian Road, a fitting locale for the meeting of two Scots: the bestselling crime writer Denise Mina and the comedian and now fellow crime novelist Frankie Boyle. Wh

      9 min read

    • Article

      Dominick Donald

      Aug 6, 2020

      Dominick Donald
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Picture Of Dear Raymond

      Aug 24, 2022

      One of the great joys of Raymond Briggs’s column in The Oldie was that we got two geniuses for the price of one. As well as receiving his charming sideways look at life in the column, we got one of his peerless drawings every month. A compilation was

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Next Great American Crime Writer May Be Living in Norway

      Apr 5, 2018

      Derek B. Miller caught the eye of readers of The Millions with his 2013 debut novel, Norwegian by Night, lauded by Richard Russo in his Year in Reading and staying atop our Top Ten for months. The novel featured an octogenarian ex-Marine, Sheldon Hor

      7 min read

    • Article

      Stacking The Deck

      Jul 10, 2022

      Stacking The Deck
      4 min read

    • Article

      Craig Sisterson

      Jul 17, 2022

      My lifelong love of mystery and thrills began with the Hardy Boys when I was about eight or nine. But before then, the books my mates and I were obsessed with – when we weren’t kicking a ball around or pretending to be Richard Hadlee and Martin Crowe

      2 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 Cops In Fiction

      May 24, 2023

      Cops. Good ones, bad ones, corrupt ones, ones with hunches, ones that fight the system, ones that drink, ones that have unhappy home lives, ones that have an unsolved case haunting them. They come in all varieties in crime fiction – though sadly for

      4 min read

    • Article

      Partners In Crime

      Aug 12, 2022

      Partners In Crime
      8 min read

    • Article

      Writing Noir Fiction

      Oct 5, 2023

      Writing Noir Fiction
      6 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Oct 7, 2021

      Shelf Life
      3 min read

    • Article

      An Infrastructure of Innocence

      Jun 25, 2019

      An Infrastructure of Innocence
      14 min read

    • Article

      Telling Secrets: The Millions Interviews Steve Almond

      May 5, 2022

      "Obviously, there are real risks to writing about the disenfranchised from a position of privilege.... So if I get anything wrong, I’ll deserve whatever criticism comes my way." The post Telling Secrets: The Millions Interviews Steve Almond appeared

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: David Heska Wanbli Weiden

      Dec 9, 2020

      Little did I know that, in September, just two weeks after the release of my novel, I’d be sitting in my home office in Colorado giving a reading in front of a computer, and that a completely naked eighty-year-old man would appear on the screen. The

      5 min read

    • Article

      What We Loved This Week

      Aug 24, 2018

      What We Loved This Week
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne

      Dec 16, 2017

      When I was growing up in suburban California, whenever my high school baseball team had an away game in farm country north of San Francisco, as soon as we passed the first cow pasture some wiseass in the back of the bus would break out an imaginary b

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne

      Dec 18, 2021

      I became a Whitehead evangelist, reading all his books and pressing them on friends. The post A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

      Dec 3, 2017

      One thing you could always say for me: I was a finisher. I may not have been a great reader, but by God I was dogged, and if I made it through the opening 10th of a book, then I was going all the way to the end. Though this started as merely an incli

      7 min read

    • Article

      The 31 GREATEST BOOKS FOR MEN

      May 1, 2019

      Meet Rob. He’s the manager of a London record shop in which he and his sad friends make top-five lists, talk about mix tapes and obsess over albums by dead blues musicians. Then Rob decides to get in touch with five of his ex-girlfriends to find out

      8 min read

    Reviews for Violent Ward

    3/5

    40 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I'm mainly familiar with Deighton as the author of British espionage novels. This story is about LA attorney Micky Murphy as he tries to balance work for his somewhat dicey clients, his murderous ex-wife, and estranged son. Into this mix comes the old girlfriend who he never really got over. She's got trouble and needs Micky's help. The book is written in a semi-comedic style, very unlike his spy novels.
    • 3/5
      Fun little mystery that takes place in the early 90's. The author can write and the main character Micky, is a sarcastic, cynical lawyer, perfectly suited to working wth psychopaths in the entertainment industry and other assorted rich people in Southern California.
    • 4/5
      To my way of thinking, the whole of this book is built around a single idea, a neat legal finesse which allows everything to turn out all right in the end. Maybe it was too good to abandon without wrapping it into a story. It also gives Deighton the opportunity to write about the 1992 LA South Central riots which he witnessed when visiting the city. The book doesn't grab you immediately because nothing much happens. You gradually get to know the hero, Mickey Murphy, a LA lawyer who is more Philip Marlowe than Perry Mason - he moves down pretty mean streets - and his clients. The story develops as Murphy gets mixed up with several old school chums including Zach and Ingrid Petrovich, who are extremely rich and working away, by hook or by crook, at getting richer. Murphy's professional relationship with Zach, who is buying his law firm, is made tricky by the fact that Ingrid was Murphy's high-school sweetheart. There appear to be significant cracks in her marriage to Zach but, fortunately, Murphy seems to be more devoted to his classic red Cadillac than women.Deighton writes well about Los Angeles, waxing lyrical about the views across the city from the hills around Laurel Canyon as the setting sun burnishes the smog. His descriptions of the riots after the acquittal of the police who beat up Rodney King are effective and convincing. An entertaining book after a slow start - Deighton's last work of fiction.
    • 3/5
      Unually for Deighton, I found this book a little difficult to get into and to stay with. It has the usual excellent one-liners and well painted characters, but there was just something missing to keep my attention. Set in early 90s LA and revolves around a lawyer and his clients.