‘Trial by Ambush: Murder, Injustice, and the Truth about the Case of Barbara Graham’
By Marcia Clark
Thomas & Mercer, 284 pages

In the heyday of film noir (the 1940s and 1950s), Hollywood created menacing and darkly urban settings and focused on a criminal class of characters, usually including a femme fatale. It was all very French in its corruption — as the French understood by giving the films their distinctive name, including that of the female in the story who involved men in nothing good.

No wonder the press and the public were titillated by Barbara Graham, one of those purportedly evil lowlifes. Convicted of perjury and check kiting, she had the glamorous good looks requisite for a film noir. She was on trial in 1953 for pistol-whipping and murdering an old woman as two male accomplices ransacked her home in the mistaken notion that a casino owner had stashed his dough there.

One of the prosecutors in the infamous O.J. Simpson trial, Marcia Clark, studied trial transcripts and the lurid press coverage and formed a special bond with Graham, whose hairstyle and dress, like Ms. Clark’s, became an obsession of sensation-seeking journalists, confecting prose that read like movie scenarios.

Ms. Clark, on a mission, demonstrates that Graham was railroaded — to use a cliché that does not appear in the book, which is surprising because Ms. Clark indulges in so many of them, including “insult to injury,” “clammed up,” “coughed up,” “throw them a bone,” “push had come to shove,” “powers that be,” and “the gloves really came off.”

At first, I thought Ms. Clark was simply a bad or lazy writer, but I got used to the colloquialisms and clichés and began to see her use of the demotic as a technique — as in, you guessed it, a film noir. As the hackneyed locutions pile up, they become a natural part of the time and place in which Graham was convicted of murder, along with her two accomplices. Ms. Clark, in this conceit, becomes the hard-boiled voiceover narrator who knows all the lingo and can go toe-to-toe with the criminals, making me just as prone to platitudes as she is.

The point about the Graham case is that an entire society joined in — looking for the femme fatale. Ms. Clark quotes a plethora of newspaper accounts that attribute all sorts of gestures and facial expressions that are demonstrably fictional when it comes to depicting the real Barbara Graham. While Ms. Clark is certain the diminutive Graham was at the crime scene, serving as a decoy at the victim’s front door so that the others could barge in, a murdering pistol-whipper she was not.

I don’t want to give away too many details and spoil the pleasure of watching an ex-prosecutor take apart another legendary prosecutor’s case, a prosecutor that Ms. Clark had idolized during her own tenure in the Los Angeles prosecutor’s office. Through the kind of diligent, obsessive research that any biographer will admire, Ms. Clark shows — step by step — how the prosecution withheld evidence, misled a judge and jury, and relied on a questionable witness who in all likelihood committed the murder that sent Graham to the gas chamber.

In so many instances, the prosecution ambushed the defendant and her lawyers in ways that would no longer be tolerated by the canon of criminal procedure that pertains today: the disrespect shown to the defense and the deprivation of resources, such as failing to hire an investigator to establish a record independent of the prosecution.

In 1958, Barbara Graham’s unjust prosecution became the subject of a movie starring Susan Hayward, “I Want To Live!” Shot in the shadowy style of a film noir, the film is as fictional as the case against Graham even though it is meant to exonerate her. By 1958, film noir had become, in most instances, a jejune genre — in this instance only remarkable because the presumed femme fatale becomes a heroine, Hollywood style.

If Barbara Graham is not exactly the heroine of “Trial by Ambush,” she is a good stand-in for what perhaps could still happen — notwithstanding the reforms in criminal procedure — in the unscrupulous employ of a zealous prosecutor.

Mr. Rollyson has written a biography of Rebecca West, a great crime reporter.