Miller, Jeffrey 1950-

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Miller, Jeffrey 1950-

PERSONAL:

Born 1950. Education: University of Colorado, B.A.; University of Toronto, M.A. and certification in French-English translation; Osgoode Hall Law School, law degree. Hobbies and other interests: Traditional music (especially Irish and klezmer).

ADDRESSES:

Home—Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Agent—Anne McDermid & Associates, Ltd., 83 Willcocks St., Toronto, Ontario M5S 1C9, Canada.

CAREER:

Writer, journalist, and lawyer. Columnist, Lawyers Weekly, 1983—. Also worked for advertising agencies, as a freelance copyeditor, as a French-English translator, and in marketing for Buttersworth Canada.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Arthur Ellis Award nomination, Crime Writers of Canada, 2004, for Where There's Life, There's Lawsuits: Not Altogether Serious Ruminations on Law and Life.

WRITINGS:

(Compiler) Street Talk: The Language of Coronation Street, edited by Graham Nown, CBC Enterprises (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1986.

Naked Promises: A Chronicle of Everyday Wheeling & Dealing, Random House (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1989.

The Law of Contempt in Canada, Carswell (Scarborough, Ontario, Canada), 1997.

Ardor in the Court! Sex and the Law, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

Where There's Life, There's Lawsuits: Not Altogether Serious Ruminations on Law and Life, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

(Translator) The Psychology of Criminal Investigation: The Search for the Truth, edited by Michel St-Yves and Michel Tanguay, Thomson Carswell (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2008.

"AMICUS CURIOUS" MYSTERY SERIES

Murder at Osgoode Hall, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2004.

Murder's Out of Tune, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2005.

Murder on the Rebound, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2007.

ADAPTATIONS:

Where There's Life, There's Lawsuits: Not Altogether Serious Ruminations on Law and Life has been optioned for film.

SIDELIGHTS:

Canadian lawyer and writer Jeffrey Miller is the author of an eclectic collection of books, ranging from the legally themed Naked Promises: A Chronicle of Everyday Wheeling & Dealing (a humorous history of business and contract law) and Ardor in the Court! Sex and the Law, to Where There's Life, There's Lawsuits: Not Altogether Serious Ruminations on Law and Life. Miller is also the author of the best-seller Street Talk: The Language of Coronation Street, about the northern English dialect as presented and glamorized on the long-running British television series Coronation Street. "I come to law as a writer, more interested in the problem of justice in The Merchant of Venice than the rule in Shelley's Case," Miller wrote in the introduction to Where There's Life, There's Lawsuits. "I have always read the case law as literature, a cultural artifact with its own mythic foundations—the legislature as the godhead; legal fictions such as ‘the reasonable person’ one rung below, taking the role of Adam or Eve in a crimeless, lawsuit-free Eden; the plaintiffs and defendants … who … relinquish a part of their souls in the law courts—heroically or antagonistically inhabiting the Fallen World; and final judgment representing Final Judgment."

Miller is perhaps even better known for his courtroom comedies narrated by the inquisitive Amicus, a cat belonging (somewhat reluctantly) to Judge Ted Mariner. Together the pair become involved in some of the most curious courtroom antics ever described on paper, including Murder at Osgoode Hall, Murder's Out of Tune, and Murder on the Rebound. In Murder at Osgoode Hall, Justice Ted Mariner takes a stray cat into custody after seeing it kill a bird on the lawn of Osgoode Hall, the center of legal life in Toronto. Charging the cat with the "murder" of the bird, the judge remands the animal into the custody of the Hall's librarians, where he is provided with food, shelter, and a name: Amicus Curious, Q.C. (for "questing cat"). Soon Amicus, in his capacity of "questing cat," uncovers the body of Jeremiah "The Splinter" Debeers, a prickly old barrister who had apparently been researching some irregularities in the accounts of the Hall's wine cellar. Soon Judge Mariner and Amicus have to join forces in order to solve the riddle.

Amicus and Judge Mariner return in Murder's Out of Tune, in which they are caught up in the investigation of a jazz musician's murder. Alto sax player Des Cheshire (known as the "Cheshire cat") has been playing backup for keyboardist Billy Wonder for decades. When Billy is strangled at his bench shortly before curtain time, Des is held as the chief suspect. In the meantime, both Amicus and Ted have been thrown out of their home—Amicus because of allergies, and Judge Mariner because his wife suspects him of having an improper interest in his nubile new clerk. The two have to solve the murder of the jazz musician and reinsinuate themselves into the affections of Mrs. Mariner.

In Amicus's third outing, Murder on the Rebound, the two are still embroiled in the consequences of their previous two investigations. Although Ted has been readmitted to his home, Amicus is still persona non grata and has been exiled to the garden shed. For his part, Ted has been exiled from the bench to teach classes at Scarborough University. There he encounters the formidable Professor Mack Herskowitz, whose loudest critic, freshman Tony Albinoni, comes down with a case of poisoning. Ted lands the job of defending Herskowitz from the charges leveled against him. "Amicus, wily feline that he is," declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor, "manages to conceal himself in court and narrate an often hilarious drama worthy of Rumpole."

Miller told CA: "The cat's actual name is simply Amicus (not Amicus Curious, which is used in the books as a pun on amicus curiae, the legal term, ‘friend of the court’), although the cat (as narrator) sometimes adds Q.C. (for Questing Cat and several other sardonic things, such as Quixotic Customer—yet more puns, this time on the legal designation Queen's Counsel) to his own name. (I'm often at pains to advise prospective readers that there is nothing cutesie-pie about this particular cat: he's quite sardonic and ‘Falstaffian,’ his entire function being to provide colorful narration and bring an original, literate voice to crime writing. I'm not interested in writing yet another police procedural.)

"By way of tribute, details in Murder's Out of Tune are loosely based on the life and career of Paul Desmond (the composer of Take Five and saxophonist for Dave Brubeck), although of course he was never charged with murder.

"I suppose that, insofar as Amicus is a cat, he's not really ‘persona non grata’ but perhaps ‘felis non grata,’ a phrase which I believe appears in the novels. (Sounds like something I'd have written ….)

"I have always been especially interested in literary humor, on its own and in ironic or tragic-comic contexts. Even my nonfiction bears this stamp, I think. I became an enthusiastic reader of James Thurber and The New Yorker at age twelve, or even earlier, and have always read American and British comic novelists and essayists. In addition to Thurber, my influences include Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker, Booth Tarkington, Peter De Vries, Evelyn Waugh, John Mortimer, Kingsley Amis, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick. More viscerally, I am influenced by music and musicians, particularly the more ‘self-contained’ ones such as Paul Desmond and the English guitarist, John Renbourn."