Henry Cecil Leon, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetHenry Cecil Leon
British barrister, judge and writer
Date of Birth: 19-Sep-1902
Place of Birth: London
Date of Death: 23-May-1976
Profession: judge
Nationality: United Kingdom
Zodiac Sign: Virgo 
About Henry Cecil Leon
- Henry Cecil Leon (19 September 1902 – 23 May 1976), who wrote under the pen-names Henry Cecil and Clifford Maxwell, was a judge and a writer of fiction about the British legal system.
- He was born near London in 1902 and was called to the Bar in 1923.
- Later in 1949 he was appointed a County Court Judge, a position he held until 1967.
- He used these experiences as inspiration for his work.
- His books typically feature educated and genteel fraudsters and blackmailers who lay ludicrously ingenious plots exploiting loopholes in the legal system.
- There are several recurring characters, such as the drunken solicitor Mr Tewkesbury and the convoluted and exasperating witness Colonel Brain.
- He writes well about the judicial process, usually through the eyes of a young barrister but sometimes from the viewpoint of the judge; Friends at Court contains a memorable snub from a County Court judge to a barrister who is trying to patronise him.
- Cecil did not believe that judges should be too remote from the public: in Sober as a Judge, a High Court judge, in a case where the ingredients of a martini are of some importance, states drily that he will ignore the convention by which he should inquire "what is a martini?" and instead gives the recipe for the cocktail himself. His 1955 novel Brothers in Law was made into a film in 1957 and, later, a television and radio series starring Richard Briers.
- While at Paramount Pictures, Alfred Hitchcock worked on adapting No Bail for the Judge for the screen several times between 1954 and 1960, and hoped to co-star Audrey Hepburn, Laurence Harvey, and John Williams, but the film was never produced. He also reviewed the Rowland case in the Celebrated Trials series published by David & Charles in 1975.
- The 1946 trial of Walter Rowland was for the murder of Olive Balchin, who had been found battered to death on a bomb site on Deansgate, Manchester.
- A hammer had been found near the body, and the police identified Rowland with three witnesses.
- He was found guilty and hanged at Strangeways Prison in 1947.
- He protested his innocence from the dock and afterwards.
- After the trial, another man confessed to the killing, but his evidence was ignored when the original judgment was reviewed by the Court of Criminal Appeal.
- Henry Cecil concludes in his book that Rowland was indeed guilty, although Cecil ignores the forensic evidence, or rather the absence of forensic evidence, linking Rowland to the crime scene.
- His book reveals the many prejudices of the judiciary in the 1970s, including the complete acceptance of police evidence at face value, for example.
Read more at Wikipedia