The Case of Luscious Laura

ANATOMY OF A MURDER (437 pp.) --Robert Trover -- St. Martin's Press ($4.50).

Crime does pay, especially when--as in this novel--it is 1) skillfully packaged as fiction, 2) taken by the Book-of-the-Month Club, 3) sold to the movies before publication, and 4) optioned by a Broadway producer. The payoff in this case goes to John D. Voelker, 54, a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Using the pseudonym of Robert Traver, he writes out of 23 years' experience as a trial lawyer and county prosecutor in Ishpeming (pop. 9,400), a mining center set amid the rocks, swamps and forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

The crime of the book takes place in the glacier-gouged peninsula, at a tiny resort village called Thunder Bay. One midnight beautiful Laura Manion--who is described as vaguely resembling Marilyn Monroe--comes staggering up to the trailer she shares with her Army husband and mumbles through bruised lips that she has been raped and beaten by Saloon Keeper Barney Quill. Her husband, Lieut. Frederic Manion, stuffs a Luger in his pocket, marches into the saloon and coolly shoots Quill dead.

The thinly fictionalized, essentially documentary book tells, in the words of Defense Attorney Paul Biegler, of the investigation and trial that follow. Biegler gets a series of rude shocks: luscious Laura's husband has a nasty disposition and a tendency to attack any man who admires his wife. There is some doubt that Laura was raped at all (in examining this problem, Author Voelker is even more clinical than James Gould Cozzens was in By Love Possessed). To make things still tougher for Defense Attorney Biegler, the prosecuting attorney--who is also Biegler's rival in an imminent congressional election--brings in a crack assistant from the attorney general's staff at the state capital. To save his client, Biegler has only his own wits, the assistance of an able but often drunk colleague, and a secretary given depressingly to imitating the wisecracks in an Erie Stanley Gardner mystery.

Justice Voelker knows the law and loves it, but his writing is as limp as a watch by Dali. All vigils are "lonely," vistas are always "sylvan." time "slips by on leaden wings." Yet, despite the leaden feet of the cliches, the book does move. Author Voelker's characters come most alive in the courtroom, in the thrust and parry of cross-examination and in the springing of tactical ambushes and legal traps by opposing counsel. It is quite ordinary writing but good entertainment, and few readers will turn aside until the fate of Lieut. Frederic Manion is finally decided.

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