The younger member of the law firm of Tutt and Tutt, Samuel Tutt, and the old legal warhorse, Ephraim Tutt, are not related; Tutt applied to the older man for a job because, he says, “with you I should be associated with a good name.” Their first case, “The Human Element,” is an impossible one to defend: their client clearly killed the man who was demeaning his wife, and she bought him the pistol. The deciding factor is a scene recalling, with differences, Hamlet coming upon Claudius praying. These were the first of eventually eighty stories appearing in The Saturday Evening Post about the duo, always written tongue-in-cheek, and culminating with Mr. Tutt writing his own autobiography, Yankee Lawyer, in 1943, and Arthur Train reviewing it!
“Mock Hen and Mock Turtle” is a farce that plays on stereotypes of the Chinese (the non-Chinese characters call them “Chinks,” and there are more racist slurs, including the N word) and evokes the tong wars of the first decades of the century. Since he’s committed a brutal murder, the man Ephraim Tutt gets off can’t be allowed to get away with it; he is shot to death by a rival tong in the last lines of the story. The outrageous acquittals of people who shot or bludgeoned their victims are feebly justified by having the prosecutors and judges who oppose Mr. Tutt in cahoots, rigging the voir dire system to seat jurors they want, sustaining all the prosecutor’s objections and overruling all of Tutt’s.
Arthur Train had a career in law for twenty years, as an assistant in the New York County District Attorney’s office and in private practice, before he spent his last decades concentrating on writing. One of his early, non-Tutt books is McAllister’s Double (1905), in which a fat clubman discovers how the other half lives, develops a conscience, and helps a New York police detective in a number of cases.
In “Samuel and Delilah,” the younger Tutt is encouraged by a knowing blonde to play out his midlife crisis, and it costs him five thousand bucks. And it is the younger Tutt rather than Ephraim who defends the owner of “The Dog Andrew,” who resolves a feud between two neighboring fishermen on Long Island by biting one of them.
“The Hepplewhite Tramp” may have merely wandered into Hepplewhite’s house and slept in his guestroom bed, but the police reaction prompts some very populist, if not outright Bolshevist, philosophizing by the Tutts. The jury turns out to know better than Mr. Tutt here.
When a crooked trader cons one of Ephraim’s poor clients, a widow, into giving him her life savings, Tutt comes up with an ingenious plan to use worthless stock certificates, given him by an unsuccessful conman who is also a client, to fool the trader into paying the widow back, in “Wile Versus Guile.” The last story, “Lallapaloosa Limited,” brings back Doc Barrows, the unlucky conman who gave Ephraim Tutt all his worthless stock certificates in the previous story. Tutt takes a group of unscrupulous traders to court for trying to secretly revive a gold mine and defraud those who hold stock in it, thinking the stock worthless. Barrows had a hundred thousand shares of the gold mine stock. Though Tutt does not get the traders to pay Barrow for his stock, they will be prosecuted. With stories of the Tutts, “Chubby” McAllister, and others, Train entertained the readers of his books and of The Saturday Evening Post for forty years.
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