FIRST LONDON HOME Barrister

MY FIRST LONDON HOME ALEX CHURCHILL

Barrister turned novelist Alex Churchill on her thriller, The Night Lawyer, and life at the bar in Temple

I love living in London. I can’t imagine living in any other city in

the world. I was born in Dulwich and grew up in a rambling house. Reading Anthropology at Cambridge was the only ti me I really lived outside of the city.

In Putney there is a lovely stretch

of the river where you can walk along the Thames. You’re only a stone’s throw from Putney Heath. Occasionally you can get to Temple by boat from Putney pier. It is the same journey made by Thomas Cromwell – who was born in Putney. He worked in the courts under Henry VIII and it’s details like that are exciti ng.

I have always wanted to write

and I think there is a similarity between barristers and novelists because we both tell stories. You have to understand psychology and the use of words. You have to get your listener to empathise with what you’re saying.

The book, The Night Lawyer is set in London’s courtrooms and

newspaper offi ces with fl ashbacks to Moscow in the 1980’s . It gives the reader a glimpse behind the scenes in a criminal trial.

The main character, Sophie Angel, is half Russian and a barrister, just

like me. That was really inspired by my mother because she was born in St Petersburg. Her enti re family apart from her mother were shot by the communists for being enemies of the state. My mother escaped and came to England. Sophie recalls fragments of memories throughout the book – a literary device where a story is nestled in another just like a Russian doll. Bailey, with a very dangerous defendant who was a serial rapist. I woke in the night to hear his voice coming from my sitti ng room. He’d managed to fi nd my number and was leaving a message on my answerphone. Those two minutes lying there were probably the longest of my life. He’s up for release soon, which is partly why I’m writi ng under a nom de plume.

I think a good crime novel

depends on plot, but also on a convincing sense of place. Temple is beauti ful and steeped in history. The fi rst performance of Shakespeare’s Twelft h Night was performed here and there is a ti mber-framed Jacobean townhouse which is the only survivor of the Great Fire of London. It is an extraordinary place that becomes a huge part of your life as a barrister.

I wanted to touch on what it is like being a woman in a male

dominated profession. I know women the generati on above me had a tough ti me but I think now it’s much easier for women coming to the bar. A generati on ago, they didn’t dare complain because that would be the end of their career. Another big challenge is having children, it’s not terribly child-friendly.

Another thing that inspired me to write was much more personal in that I was stalked

myself. I was living alone in a onebedroom fl at and involved in a rape case at the Old

Most of us go through life assuming that we’re never going to be involved in the criminal

justi ce system, but you may be wrongly accused of something, you may be wrongly identi fi ed, you may be a witness or a victi m. If you do fi nd yourself involved, you want to know that you’re being properly protected by a barrister who has had ti me to prepare your brief and to listen to your concerns. And you want your case to be tried but fairly and imparti ally by a judge and jury.

I wanted to start the conversati on about the cut backs in the

criminal justi ce system, which have been really savage. During Covid it just got worse. The backlog is now in the hundreds of thousands in magistrates’ courts and around 50,000 in the crown courts. This is hopefully smuggling what is a serious message into an entertaining story.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Top left : Alex Churchill writes under a nom de plume left : The Night Lawyer, (RedDoor, £8.99)