The Old Devil: Clarence Darrow: The World’s Greatest Trial Lawyer
By Donald McRae
Simon and Schuster, £18.99, 432 pages
FT Bookshop price £15.19

“Trials of the century” don’t come along all that often. In the 1920s American lawyer Clarence Darrow fought three of them. In the Loeb-Leopold case, Darrow defended two privileged young men who gratuitously killed a 14-year-old boy as part of a sexual pact (the crime that inspired Hitchcock’s Rope).

In the Scopes Monkey Trial, he defended a Tennessee schoolteacher accused of teaching evolutionary theory. Finally, he defended Ossian and Henry White after a member of a racist mob who tried to drive them out of their home in a white neighbourhood was killed.

Darrow was a superlative orator, and the recreation of his speeches form the core of McRae’s book, which is a detailed portrait rather than a full biography. The author’s treatment of events can seem cloyingly novelistic but it’s backed up by solid research. This is a riveting throwback to the golden age of courtroom dramas.