Arthur Cheney Train
Life and career
Arthur Cheney Train was born in Boston in 1875 and died in New York in 1945. A lawyer as well as a writer, he became especially associated with stories about the legal practitioner Ephraim Tutt. Much of his fiction first reached readers through magazines. He also collaborated on speculative novels, showing a wider range than the courtroom stories alone. By Advice of Counsel invites attention to the distance between knowing a legal rule and understanding its human consequences.
Professional knowledge and human judgment
Train's legal career gives a concrete background to fiction about practitioners who must negotiate rules, evidence and the circumstances of clients. A legal principle may be clear while its application remains ethically difficult. The Tutt stories make room for humour within that difficulty, often distinguishing professional authority from practical wisdom. Their historical settings and language should not be mistaken for advice about present law. They are narratives about how institutions behave when particular people enter them.
By Advice of Counsel
This collection presents adventures of the firm Tutt & Tutt across seven named stories. The Shyster begins with a mistaken identification following a broken shop window: a red sweater becomes an apparently sufficient reason to arrest the wrong boy. The reader knows more than the officials, making their confidence disturbing as well as revealing. Later titles, including Contempt of Court and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, signal different encounters between the language of law and the human situations it is expected to resolve.
Follow an assumption into the institution
In the opening story, notice how one uncertain observation becomes an official conclusion. Who can question it, and who is ignored? Compare the lawyer's formal tools with the imaginative work needed to understand a client's position. The stories reward attention to that distinction. A clever legal manoeuvre matters most when the reader can see both the rule it uses and the human consequence it seeks to change.