In many respects, Presumed Innocent falls squarely within the ranks of many murder mysteries. Turow is frequently compared to a number of writers in this genre, particularly Agatha Christie whose Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) set the standard for unreliable narrators in murder mysteries. It has also been compared to other big trial books such as Robert Traver's Anatomy of a Murder (1958).

Turow, however, seeks to move beyond the constraints of that genre, and to look at the fate of a man trapped firmly in the coils of a system that may fail to deliver justice. The labyrinthine convolutions of the legal system in Presumed Innocent are reminiscent of the complexities of the case presented in Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852).

Caught in a situation that he cannot control, Rusty even describes his situation as Kafkian. In particular, he shares affinities with Joseph K...