Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 21, 1999

Page: C1

Section: Books

Janet Malcolm's splendid curiosity, enlivened by her own self-scrutiny, makes her a formidable reporter. (I, for one, would never let her in the door.) Amassing the quotidian details of her subjects' lives -- their patterns of speech, what they hang on their walls and serve in their kitchens -- she interprets the data to flush out the inscrutable character within. In her two books on psychoanalysis, poor Dr. Green (a pseudonym) and Jeffrey Masson (alas, the real McCoy) bore the brunt of her intelligence; in ``The Journalist and the Murderer,'' she managed to make her own profession seem as suspect as the crimes it sought to cover. Even her study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, ``The Silent Woman,'' which carved a sure-footed path through that literary minefield, had a particularly courteous but deadly way of delivering its cast. It was the lasagna that served up the fatal blow. When biographer Jacqueline Rose had Malcolm to dinner, she left out a crucial white sauce from her main dish and then worried about it all through the meal. You couldn't help rethinking your opinion a little of this scholarly authority: Now Rose seemed scattered and a bit ineffectual; if she'd forgotten the sauce, who knew what she'd omitted from her book on Plath?

In ``The Crime of Sheila McGough,'' a tuna casserole is the lethal weapon -- one of several crystalline moments that explain Sheila McGough in a way no court transcript could ever accomplish. A central theme in Malcolm's work is the way in which narratives compete to form a dominant version of the truth, which is partly what drew her to the legal and he-said/she-said swampland of this woman's case. A Virginia attorney who was found guilty in 1990 of 14 felony counts for assisting her client with his fraudulent schemes, McGough was disbarred and went to jail for three years. When Malcolm met her, she was 54 and just out of prison; the mastermind con artist behind her conviction, Bob Bailes, had died the year before, so that McGough felt free to speak out about her trial. She was wearing pearls and a navy blue suit -- Barbara Stanwyck could have played her in the movie -- and seemed as guileless as she was oblivious to her own mind-glazing recitations of fact. So began a collusion with Malcolm that produced this story, which underscores McGough's probable innocence but also elucidates her fall.

Intent upon protecting Bailes from prosecution for his infinite scams (among them, selling nonexistent real estate and insurance companies), McGough made a couple of near-idiotic moves as Bailes's lawyer that put her directly in the line of fire. (She allowed him to use her trust account for a $75,000 deposit from his dupe investors with no questions asked.) The prosecutors who went after her were unwilling or unable to see her as anything other than Bailes's passionate accomplice; McGough, who refused to implicate Bailes by testifying in her own defense, made matters worse with what Malcolm calls her ``legal fundamentalism'' -- ``she was like a trailer truck jackknifed across a highway.'' From the moment she appears in this narrative, McGough comes across as a zealot with a hatpin: a good-hearted, naive woman who put her faith in a pathologically charming crook. Ingenuousness alone might have saved her. But she is also maddeningly literal -- Malcolm, trapped on the phone with her for hours, wrote little notes to herself: ``Help, help! I'm trapped talking to Sheila.'' She seems to have had a similar effect on every player in the legal system, from the team for the prosecution to her own attorneys. ``Have you ever eaten with Sheila?'' her appeal lawyer asked Malcolm. ``She sent back the coffee three times.''

``The Crime of Sheila McGough'' is a labyrinthine, occasionally funny and finally sad story, not least because Malcolm understands the courtroom of emotional interaction, where truth is relative and the worst (and most puzzling) motivations are unconscious. Her Bailes is a swindler with a golden tongue who could turn Scripture out of a Xerox machine; even one of his several federal prosecutors, whom he called ``the meanest woman in Charlotte,'' remembers him fondly. Bailes's detractors and sidekicks each have a story to tell that explains utterly how such a mess -- McGough's near-certain miscarriage of justice -- could have come out of such a bigger mess (the legal and psychic quagmire she helped create). With its endless loops and deceits posing as recriminations, the story seems custom-made for Malcolm's breed of intelligence, which relishes the enigmas of the human drama and seems undeterred by its crossfire.

Therein lies the real force of this somewhat slight, ordinary-con-game story: that Malcolm turned it into a fascinating narrative, peopled by half-saints and blackguards who all believe their own game. The first sentence of the book reminded me of M. F. K. Fisher's great line about an oyster leading a thrilling life: ``The transcripts of trials at law,'' writes Malcolm, ``-- even of routine prosecutions and tiresome civil disputes -- are exciting to read.'' Now, nothing could be further from the truth: Most legal transcripts are duller than K Mart on a Saturday night. But not to Malcolm, who is insatiably meddlesome, frightfully smart, and can make a three-card-monte hustle seem like a medieval mystery play.

Most of all, of course, there is Sheila McGough and that tuna casserole, which her octogenarian mother served one night when Malcolm stayed for dinner. The protagonist of this tale is a fiercely determined woman who went to jail to protect her rapscallion client, but who has lived most of her life with her parents in a quiet Virginia suburb. The casserole was ``incomparable,'' Malcolm tells us, ``and I fell easily into my role of the nice friend Sheila had brought home from school to meet her mom and dad.'' No portrait of innocence was ever more damning, revealing, and compassionate at once.