Repeat Performance

THE JURY RETURNS by Louis Nizer. 438 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

After 42 years at the bar. Attorney Louis Nizer is sitting pretty atop his own private treasury. In 1962, he hauled out half a dozen of his favorite cases, compressed them into a bestseller, My Life in Court. This new book contains four more from the overflowing vaults, and it also is a gilt-edged bestseller.

Once again Nizer casts himself as a zealous crusader. Almost at the last minute, with the sheer eloquence of his arguments, he persuaded Illinois authorities to spare the life of a convicted murderer, Paul Crump. By marshaling overwhelming evidence, he won an acquittal in a bribery case against Industrialist Roy Fruehauf. After all legal remedies seemed exhausted, he found a way to get compensation for a long-suffering wife whose philandering husband had left her penniless in an involved divorce suit. And he won a record $3,500,000 libel judgment for Radio-TV Personality John Henry Faulk, who had been blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer.

There may be some interest here for readers who like to relive court trials through the transcripts of actual cases, but Nizer's homilies and histrionics smack much too much of Perry Mason. It is all there except for the repeated scene showing the hero flipping the intercom switch and barking: "Delia, get me Paul Drake right away!"

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