CANR
WORK TITLE: Framed
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WEBSITE: http://www.jgrisham.com/
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC Nov 2020
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PERSONAL
Born February 8, 1955, in Jonesboro, AR; son of John and Wanda Grisham; married Renee Jones, May 8, 1981; children: Ty (son), Shea (daughter).
EDUCATION:Attended Northwest Mississippi Community College and Delta State University; Mississippi State University, B.S., 1977; University of Mississippi, J.D., 1981.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and lawyer. Admitted to the Bar of the State of Mississippi, 1981; lawyer in private practice in Southaven, MS, 1981-90. Served in Mississippi House of Representatives, 1983-90. Innocence Project, member of board of directors; Centurion Ministries, member of board of directors. Has also taught pottery classes and worked as a gardener, contractor, and sales clerk.
AWARDS:Inducted into Academy of Achievement, 1993; Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, Tulsa Library Trust, 2005; Lifetime Achievement Prize, Galaxy British Book Awards, 2007.
POLITICS: Democrat. RELIGION: Baptist.WRITINGS
Also author of screenplays The Gingerbread Man (under pseudonym Al Hayes), and Mickey. Author of forewords of books, including When Truth Is All You Have: A Memoir of Faith, Justice, and Freedom for the Wrongfully Convicted; contributor to the collaborative novel, Fourteen Days, 2024.
The Partner was adapted as a film by Tom Holland in 2025.
SIDELIGHTS
The author of more than fifty best-selling novels, many of which have been turned into blockbuster movies, John Grisham has sold more than 300 million books and has had twenty-eight consecutive number one fiction bestsellers. With his works translated into more than forty languages, Grisham is one of the major success stories in publishing since the 1990s. As Malcolm Jones noted in Newsweek, Grisham was “the bestselling author” of the decade with his formula of “David and Goliath go to court,” and the success of his books has helped to make legal thrillers one of the most popular genres among U.S. readers. Jones further commented: “As part of an elite handful of mega-selling authors that includes Stephen King, Danielle Steele, Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, Grisham has literally taken bookselling to places it’s never been before—not just to airport kiosks but to price clubs and … online bookselling.” Grisham’s best-sellerdom even extends to countries with a legal system completely different from that in the United States. “He sells to everyone,” Jones continued, “from teens to senior citizens, from lawyers in Biloxi to housewives in Hong Kong.”
When Grisham began writing his first novel, he never dreamed he would become one of America’s best-selling novelists. Yet the appeal of his legal thrillers such as The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Rainmaker, and The Summons, among others, has been so great that initial hardcover print runs number in the hundreds of thousands and the reading public regularly buys millions of copies. The one-time lawyer now enjoys a celebrity status that few writers will ever know. “We think of ourselves as regular people, I swear we do,” Grisham was quoted as saying of himself and his family by Keli Pryor in Entertainment Weekly. “But then someone will drive 200 miles and show up on my front porch with books for me to sign. Or an old friend will stop by and want to drink coffee for an hour. It drives me crazy.” He mused to Jones: “I’m a famous writer in a country where nobody reads.”
As a youth, Grisham had no dreams of becoming a writer, although he did like to read. Born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1955, he was the son of a construction-worker father and a homemaker mother. His father traveled extensively in his job, and the Grisham family moved many times. Each time the family took up residence in a new town, Grisham would immediately go to the public library to get a library card. “I was never a bookworm,” he maintained in an interview in Bookreporter.com. “I remember reading Dr. Seuss, the ‘Hardy Boys,’ Emil and the Detectives, Chip Hilton, and lots of Mark Twain and Dickens.” Another constant for Grisham was his love of baseball, something he has retained in adulthood. One way he and his brothers gauged the quality of each new hometown was by inspecting its Little League ballpark.
In 1967 the family moved to a permanent home in Southaven, Mississippi, where Grisham enjoyed greater success in high school athletics than he did in English composition, a subject in which he earned a D grade. After graduation, he enrolled at Northwest Junior College in Senatobia, Mississippi, where he remained for a year, playing baseball for the school team. Transferring to Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, he continued with his baseball career until he realized that he was not going to make it to the big leagues. Transferring to Mississippi State University, Grisham studied accounting with the ambition of eventually becoming a tax attorney. By the time he earned his law degree from the University of Mississippi, however, his interest had shifted to criminal law, and he returned to Southaven to establish a practice in that field.
Although his law practice was successful, Grisham grew restless in his new career. He switched to the more lucrative field of civil law and won many cases, but the sense of personal dissatisfaction remained. Hoping to somehow make a difference in the world, he entered politics with the aim of reforming his state’s educational system. Running as a Democrat, he won a post in the state legislature; four years later, he was reelected. After a total of seven years in public office, Grisham became convinced that he would never be able to cut through the red tape of government bureaucracy in his effort to improve Mississippi’s educational system, and he resigned his post in 1990.
While working in the legislature, Grisham continued to run his law office. His first book, A Time to Kill, was inspired by a scene he saw one day in court when a preadolescent girl testified against her rapist. “I felt everything in those moments,” Grisham recalled to Pryor. “Revulsion, total love for that child, hate for that defendant. Everyone in that courtroom wanted a gun to shoot him.” Unable to get the story out of his mind, be began to wonder what would happen if the girl’s father had killed his daughter’s assailant. Grisham disclosed to an interviewer with People: “I became obsessed wondering what it would be like if the girl’s father killed that rapist and was put on trial. I had to write it down.” Soon he had the core of a book dealing with a black father who shoots the white man who raped his daughter. “I never felt such emotion and human drama in my life,” he said in the interview.
Writing his first novel, let alone publishing it, was no easy task for Grisham. “Because I have this problem of starting projects and not completing them, my goal for this book was simply to finish it,” he revealed to Publishers Weekly interviewer Michelle Bearden. “Then I started thinking that it would be nice to have a novel sitting on my desk, something I could point to and say, ‘Yeah, I wrote that.’ But it didn’t consume me. I had way too much going on to make it a top priority. If it happened, it happened.” Working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks between his law practice and political duties, Grisham rose at five in the morning to write an hour a day on his first novel, thinking of the activity as a hobby rather than a serious effort at publication.
After finishing the manuscript in 1987, Grisham next had to look for an agent. He was turned down by several before finally receiving a positive response from Jay Garon. Agent and author encountered a similarly difficult time trying to find a publisher; 5,000 copies of the book were finally published by Wynwood Press, and Grisham received a check for 15,000 dollars. He purchased 1,000 copies of the book himself, peddling them at garden-club meetings and libraries and giving many of them away to family and friends. Ironically, A Time to Kill is now rated by some commentators as the finest of Grisham’s novels. Furthermore, according to Pryor, “those first editions are now worth 3,900 dollars each,” and after being republished, “the novel Grisham … couldn’t give away has 8.6 million copies in print and has spent eighty weeks on the best-seller lists.”
Despite the limited initial success of A Time to Kill, Grisham was not discouraged from trying his hand at another novel. The second time around, he decided to follow guidelines set forth in a Writer’s Digest article for plotting a suspense novel. The result was The Firm, the story of a corrupt Memphis-based law firm established by organized crime for purposes of shielding and falsifying crime-family earnings. Recruited to the practice is Mitchell McDeere, a promising Harvard law school graduate who is overwhelmed by the company’s apparent extravagance. When his criminal bosses discover that McDeere has been indulging his curiosity, he becomes an instant target of both the firm and the authorities monitoring the firm’s activities. When he runs afoul of the ostensible good guys, McDeere finds himself in seemingly endless danger.
Grisham was not as motivated when writing The Firm as he had been when composing A Time to Kill, but with his wife’s encouragement he finished the book. Before he even began trying to sell the manuscript, he learned that someone had acquired a bootlegged copy of it and was willing to give him 600,000 dollars to turn it into a movie script. Within two weeks, Doubleday, one of the many publishers that had previously rejected A Time to Kill, offered Grisham a contract.
Upon The Firm ‘s publication, several reviewers argued that Grisham had not attained a high art form, although it was generally conceded that he had put together a compelling thriller. Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Charles Champlin wrote that the “character penetration is not deep, but the accelerating tempo of paranoia-driven events is wonderful.” Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Bill Brashler offered similar praise, proclaiming that The Firm reads “like a whirlwind.” The novel was listed on the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year and sold approximately ten times as many copies as its predecessor. By the time the film version was released, there were more than seven million copies of The Firm in print. This amazing success gave Grisham the means he needed to build his dream house, quit his law practice, and devote himself entirely to writing.
In a mere one hundred days, Grisham wrote another legal thriller, The Pelican Brief, which introduces readers to the brilliant, beautiful female law student Darby Shaw. When two U.S. Supreme Court justices are murdered, Shaw postulates a theory as to why the crimes were committed. Just telling people about her idea makes her gravely vulnerable to the corrupt law firm responsible for the killings.
Some critics complained that Grisham follows the premise of The Firm too closely, with John Skow writing in his review in Time that The Pelican Brief “is as close to its predecessor as you can get without running The Firm through the office copier.” However, Grisham also received praise for creating another exciting story. Frank J. Prial, writing in the New York Times Book Review, observed that, despite some flaws in The Pelican Brief, Grisham “has an ear for dialogue and is a skillful craftsman.” The book enjoyed success comparable to The Firm, selling millions of copies.
In just six months, Grisham put together yet another best seller, titled The Client. This legal thriller focuses on a young boy who, after learning a sinister secret, turns to a motherly lawyer for protection from both the mob and the FBI. Like The Firm and The Pelican Brief, the book drew lukewarm reviews but became a best seller and a major motion picture. During the spring of 1993, after The Client came out and A Time to Kill was republished, Grisham was in the rare and enviable position of having a book at the top of the hardcover best-seller list and books in the first, second, and third spots on the paperback best-seller list as well.
Grisham acknowledged to an Entertainment Weekly interviewer that his second, third, and fourth books are formula-driven. He described his recipe for a best seller in the following way: “You throw an innocent person in there and get ‘em caught up in a conspiracy and you get ‘em out.” He also admitted to rushing through the writing of The Pelican Brief and The Client, resulting in “some damage” to the books’ quality. Yet he also complained that the critical community treats popular writers harshly. “I’ve sold too many books to get good reviews anymore,” he told Pryor. “There’s a lot of jealousy, because [reviewers] think they can write a good novel or a best seller and get frustrated when they can’t. As a group, I’ve learned to despise them.”
With his fifth novel, Grisham departs from his proven formula and proceeds at a more leisurely pace. Not only did he take a full nine months to write The Chamber, a book in which the “good guys” and “bad guys” are not as clearly defined as in his previous efforts, but the book itself, at almost 500 pages, takes time to unravel its story line. The novel is a detailed study of a family’s history, an examination of the relationship between lawyer and client, and a description of life on death row.
The Chamber is “a curiously rich milieu for a Grisham novel,” according to Entertainment Weekly critic Mark Harris, “and it allows the author to do some of his best writing since [ A Time to Kill ].” Skow credited Grisham with producing a thought-provoking treatise on the death penalty and noted in Time that The Chamber “has the pace and characters of a thriller, but little else to suggest that it was written by the glib and cheeky author of Grisham’s legal entertainments. … Grisham may not change opinions with this sane, civil book, and he may not even be trying to. What he does ask, very plainly, is an important question: Is this what you want?” A reviewer in the London Sunday Times stated that “Grisham may do without poetry, wit and style, and offer only the simplest characterisation. The young liberal lawyer may be colourless and the spooky old prisoner one-dimensional; but there is no doubt that this ex-lawyer knows how to tell a story.” While The Chamber was less obviously commercial than his previous three books, Grisham had little trouble selling the movie rights for a record fee.
The Rainmaker features a young lawyer, Rudy Baylor, recently graduated from law school, who finds himself desperate for a job when the small firm he had planned to work for is bought out by a large, prestigious Memphis firm that has no use for him. After going to work for Bruiser Stone, a shady lawyer with underworld clients, Baylor finds himself averting an FBI raid on Stone’s firm while also trying to pursue a lawsuit brought by a terminally ill leukemia patient against an insurance company that has refused to pay for her treatment. While some reviewers again directed harsh criticism at Grisham for his “pedestrian prose” and “ridiculously implausible” plot—in the words of New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani—others praised the novel. Garry Abrams, for instance, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, commended the author’s “complex plotting,” noting: “In his loping, plain prose, Grisham handles all his themes with admirable dexterity and clarity.”
Grisham also garnered warm critical comments for The Runaway Jury, a novel that details the ability of a few individuals to manipulate a jury in the direction that will bring them the greatest financial reward. Writing in the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt remarked that Grisham’s “prose continues to be clunky, the dialogue merely adequate and the characters as unsubtle as pushpins.” But the critic also felt that “the plot’s eventual outcome is far more entertainingly unpredictable” than Grisham’s previous novels, and he declared that Grisham “for once … is telling a story of genuine significance.”
Grisham continued his streak of phenomenally popular novels with The Partner, about a law-firm partner who fakes his own death and absconds with ninety million dollars. Discussing his less-than-virtuous protagonist, Grisham told Mel Gussow in the New York Times: “I wanted to show that with money you can really manipulate the system. You can buy your way out of trouble.” Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer Robert Drake called The Partner “a fine book, wholly satisfying, and a superb example of a masterful storyteller’s prowess captured at its peak.”
With The Street Lawyer, Grisham once again presents a young lawyer on the fast track who has a life-altering experience. The fast pace and moral stance of the novel attracted a chorus of praise. Reviewing the book in Entertainment Weekly, Tom De Haven noted that “success hasn’t spoiled John Grisham. Instead of churning out rote legal thrillers, his court reporting keeps getting better.” De Haven further noted that Grisham, while lacking the “literary genius” of John Steinbeck, “does share with him the conscience of a social critic and the soul of a preacher.”
People reviewer Cynthia Sanz similarly reported that Grisham “has forsaken some of his usual suspense and fireworks in favor of an unabashedly heart-tugging portrait of homelessness.” However, Sanz further noted that the author does not sacrifice his “zippy pacing” to do so. Praise not only appeared in the popular press: “In a powerful story,” wrote Jacalyn N. Kolk in the Florida Bar Journal, “John Grisham tells it like it is on both sides of the street.” Kolk felt that this “entertaining” novel “may stir some of us [lawyers] to pay more attention to the world around us.”
The Testament provides another departure from the usual Grisham formula. As a reviewer in Publishers Weekly noted, “Grisham confounds expectations by sweeping readers into adventure in the Brazilian wetlands and, more urgently, into a man’s search for spiritual renewal.” Grisham has firsthand experience of Brazil, having traveled there often and once even helping to build houses there for the poor. His novel eschews the legal wrangling and courtroom suspense his readers have come to expect. Instead, in this tale he proves he “can spin an adventure yarn every bit as well as he can craft a legal thriller,” according to Newsweek reviewer Jones. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly felt that while the storytelling is not “subtle,” Grisham’s use of the suspense novel format to “explore questions of being and faith puts him squarely in the footsteps of Dickens and Graham Greene.” The same reviewer concluded that The Testament is “sincere, exciting, and tinged with wonder.” Speaking with Jones, Grisham remarked: “The point I was trying to make … was that if you spend your life pursuing money and power, you’re going to have a pretty sad life.”
Lawyers and judges of a much different ilk populate Grisham’s eleventh novel, The Brethren. Noting that Grisham veers away from his usual David-and-Goliath scenario, a reviewer in Publishers Weekly still felt that “all will be captivated by this clever thriller that presents as crisp a cast as he’s yet devised, and as grippingly sardonic yet bitingly moral a scenario as he’s ever imagined.” Writing in Entertainment Weekly, De Haven also commented on the novel’s cast of ne’er do wells, noting that “if you can get past [Grisham’s] creepy misanthropy, he’s written a terrifically entertaining story.”
With A Painted House, initially serialized in The Oxford American—a small literary magazine Grisham co-owns—the author does the unpredictable: he presents readers with a book with no lawyers. “It’s a highly fictionalized childhood memoir of a month in the life of a seven-year-old kid, who is basically me,” Grisham explained to Entertainment Weekly writer Benjamin Svetkey. Book contributor Liz Seymour called the novel “genre-busting” and “the unsentimental story of a single harvest season in the Arkansas Delta as seen through the eyes of the seven-year-old son and grandson of cotton farmers.” Though the tale may be without lawyers, it is not without conflict and incident, including trouble between the migrant workers young Luke Chandler’s family brings in for the cotton harvest and a tornado that threatens to destroy the Chandler livelihood. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly noted that Grisham’s “writing has evolved with nearly every book,” and though the “mechanics” might still be visible in A Painted House, there are “characters that no reader will forget, prose as clean and strong as any Grisham has yet laid down and a drop-dead evocation of a time and place that mark this novel as a classic slice of Americana.”
Some critics differed with these opinions, however. Writing in Booklist, Stephanie Zvirin called into question the merits of Grisham’s coming-of-age novel: “The measured, descriptive prose is readable … and there are some truly tender moments, but this is surface without substance, simply an inadequate effort in a genre that has exploded with quality over the last several years.” As usual with a Grisham novel, however, there was a divergence among critical voices. What Zvirin found “inadequate,” Entertainment Weekly contributor Bruce Fretts described as a “gem of an autobiographical novel.” Fretts further commented: “Never let it be said this man doesn’t know how to spin a good yarn.” In Time, Jess Cagle criticized the book’s slow pace but concluded that Grisham’s “compassion for his characters is infectious, and the book is finally rewarding—a Sunday sermon from a Friday-night storyteller.”
With The Summons, Grisham returns to his lawyer roots, to thrillers, and also to Ford County, Mississippi, which was the setting for A Time to Kill. Reviewing the book in Entertainment Weekly, Svetkey found The Summons “not all that tough to put down,” and with “few shocking surprises.” Nonetheless, shortly after publication, The Summons topped the list of hardcover best sellers, selling well over 100,000 copies in its first week of publication alone.
Grisham’s next three books— The King of Torts, The Bleachers, and The Last Juror —all attained best-seller status despite mixed reviews. Of the first, a reviewer in the Yale Law Journal commented that, while Grisham’s approach is “badly hobbled … by a cliche-driven plot … [and] failure to support his argument with substantive, realistic criticisms,” the author’s talent for powerful storytelling and a simple thesis “may yet move millions of casual readers to support serious reform of American tort law.” Jennifer Reese in Entertainment Weekly was highly critical of The Bleachers, describing the story as “a sloppy gridiron mess, a thin and flimsy meditation on football and the dubious role it can play in the lives of young men.” “Never a terrific stylist,” Reese continued, “Grisham doesn’t show any flair for character here.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer called The Bleachers a “slight but likable novel,” stating: “Many readers will come away having enjoyed the time spent, but wishing there had been a more sympathetic lead character, more originality, more pages, more story and more depth.”
The Last Juror became Grisham’s seventeenth book and seventeenth best seller. Despite its popularity among readers, Rosemary Herbert of the Boston Herald warned: “If you expect to be on the edge of your seat while reading John Grisham’s latest, think again. The experience is bound to be more like sitting in a jury box. Occasionally, the presentation you’ll witness will be riveting. Then again, you’ve got to listen to a good deal of background material.” The story is set in Canton, Mississippi, in the 1970s, and follows the aftermath of the rape and murder of a widow that is witnessed by her two young children. Herbert called Grisham “the consummate legal eagle who knows how to pull heartstrings even when the suspense is not thrill-a-minute.” Praising The Last Juror as Grisham’s “best book in years,” Sean Daly noted in People that the novel quickly bounded to best-seller status.
In 2005, Grisham published The Broker, a novel about Joel Blackman, a former power broker who has been incarcerated for six years for his role in a billion-dollar deal involving software that controls spy satellite. The CIA sends Joel to Italy as bait to see who tries to kill him, thus making the determination as to which country has the greatest investment in the software.
Bob Minzesheimer, writing for USA Today, noted that the novel contains “a fresh approach and strong sense of place.” Minzesheimer further commented: “It’s Grisham living up to his reputation as a great storyteller.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer stated that “the novel reads like a contented afterthought to a memorable Italian vacation, with little action or tension.” However, Alan M. Dershowitz, writing in New York Times Book Review, concluded: “The spy-versus-spy intrigue is well constructed and fast-paced.”
Grisham again broke readers’ expectations when he began writing the middle-grade series “Theodore Boone.” The first installment, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, introduces the eponymous hero, a thirteen-year-old boy who is the son of two lawyers. His mother is a divorce attorney, and his father specializes in real estate. Theo is drawn to criminal law, and he plans to follow in his parents’ footsteps. He already knows so much about the law that he gives his classmates legal advice. A boy he is tutoring wants to protect his cousin, the star witness against accused murderer Peter Duffy, leading Theo to inadvertently become embroiled in the trial.
“The moral dilemma Grisham poses is interesting, but when Theo (logically) calls in the adults, it loses tension,” Ilene Cooper observed in her Booklist assessment. A Publishers Weekly reviewer found Theo “less a real kid than an adult’s projection of what an ideal kid might be.” According to School Librarian contributor Susan Elkin, “the very straightforward story rolls along although it isn’t exactly action-packed.” She went on to state that the book is “well enough written and not boring, but in places it feels like a thinly disguised law lesson.” However, Horn Book correspondent Betty Carter remarked: “Without intruding on the trajectory of the story, Grisham gives plenty of background about the legal process.” Stacey Hayman in Voice of Youth Advocates lauded the story as well, asserting that is offers “a pretty clever premise for creating a potentially long and beloved series.” As John Peters advised in his School Library Journal critique, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer features “the lapidary prose and frank insider’s view of this country’s legal system that makes [Grisham’s] adult best sellers so absorbing.”
Sycamore Row, like A Time to Kill, is set in Clanton, Mississippi, and the novel features the same protagonist as well. Although Sycamore Row was written twenty-four years after A Time to Kill was published, it takes place only three years later. Lawyer Jake Brigance finds himself at the center of another town scandal when terminally ill timber tycoon Seth Huston hangs himself. Huston’s suicide note consists of a handwritten will that supersedes a prior, more official version. In the new will he leaves most of his fortune to his black maid, Lettie Lang. His children contest the will in court, and the story, which takes place in 1988, reignites racial tensions throughout Clanton. Commending the novel in USA Today, Dennis Moore commented: “Those who recall A Time to Kill will meet new characters. They also will become reacquainted with the endearing, infuriating and intriguing people they met twenty-four years ago.”
Another positive review of Sycamore Row was offered by London Guardian contributor John O’Connell. He announced that “Grisham’s decision to revive Brigance after almost twenty-five years and write what amounts to a historical novel is intriguing. He has produced a solid courtroom thriller with plenty to say about the long half-life of prejudice in the deep south.” In the New York Times Book Review, Janet Maslin declared: “As Sycamore Row finally reaches its trial phase, the author hits his full stride. He knows the courtroom inside out, and he helpfully describes each little step of these proceedings. Even if sharp-eyed readers already know how the book’s surprises may arise—has there ever been a long-lost relative who did not show up in a work of legal fiction?—they will still miss the final whammy that Mr. Grisham has in store.” Maslin also acknowledged the possibility that Brigance will return in future books, asserting: “Mr. Grisham leaves Jake ready and waiting to be seen again.” Patrick Anderson, writing in Washington Post Book World, remarked: “It has long been clear that the prolific Grisham is a great storyteller, but much depends on what story he comes up with. The novels I’ve read have always been entertaining, but their stories have often been fanciful and slight. This time Grisham has found a story that permits the full use of his powers. For all the novel’s humor and satire, its ending reflects the writer’s absolute understanding of Mississippi’s unspeakable history of racial violence.”
Gray Mountain, features young Ivy League graduate Samantha, who is furloughed from her job at Lehman Brothers in the wake of the recession. Her employers tell her to take a pro bono job in the interim, and Samantha heads to coal country to help local citizens fight the companies that have been poisoning their air and water, and killing anyone who protests. When she arrives in Brady, Virginia, a small town with little more than 2,000 residents, Samantha does her best to help, she falls in love and makes more enemies than friends. Her first case leads to an unwieldy body count as she faces off against the coal companies that have split Brady down the middle and turned the once idyllic town into a war zone.
Critiques of Gray Mountain were predominantly positive, though a Kirkus Reviews contributor stated that Grisham “has long proved himself to be a trustworthy provider of legal thrillers—formulaic, to be sure, and tossed-off, yes, but delivering the goods.” Moore, writing again in USA Today, was far more positive, asserting that the novel “is less a traditional Grisham legal thriller and more a defense of social advocacy.” He added: “Yes, Gray Mountain is fiction. But after reading the book, you’ll believe heroic action must be taken to save the real people of Appalachia and their homeland.” Washington Post correspondent Patrick Anderson offered similar applause, and he noted that “Grisham makes his characters all too real, but the heart of his story is his relentless case against Big Coal. We all know something about the plight of miners, but we are unlikely to have encountered the realities of their lives in the depth provided here. This is muckraking of a high order. If it’s possible for a major novelist to shame our increasingly shameless society, Gray Mountain might do it.” Based on this observation, Anderson went on to comment that the novel “shows Grisham’s work—always superior entertainment—evolving into something more serious, more powerful, more worthy of his exceptional talent.”
The following year, Grisham wrote Rogue Lawyer, a series of vignettes centered on defense attorney Sebastian Rudd. The idiosyncratic protagonist runs his own practice out of a converted van, and he travels the country searching for sensational cases. As such, he’s no stranger to television news reporter, or “creative” legal maneuvers. The novel portrays Rudd as he defends a man who shot a police officer during a raid on his home; he also takes on a case involving the murder of two girls, a prison break case, and another case involving the kidnapping of a pregnant woman. As the tale progresses, connections between each case are revealed, offering insight into Rudd’s life and career.
While reviews of Rogue Lawyer were predominantly positive, a Publishers Weekly critic warned that “some later plot developments, including the climactic jury trial, strain credibility.” A Kirkus Reviews columnist was also negative, advising that “the reader can see most of the mystery coming from a long way off, making the yarn less effective than most.” On the other hand, Booklist writer David Pitt felt that “Rudd is a complex, compelling character, who, we hope, will appear again and again.” New York Times Online contributor Maslin was equally laudatory, and she announced that “ Rogue Lawyer ushers in Rudd as a potential series star for Mr. Grisham. The man has a son he loves but barely knows; an ex-wife who left him for another woman; a shockingly good way of assailing important targets, like badly written laws; and a few wild-guy qualities that are balanced by his love of golf. Roguewise, he’s right up there with Robin Hood.” In the words of Library Journal contributor Jerry P. Miller, “Grisham devotees will enjoy a compelling and convincing plot propelled by a memorable protagonist.” As Charles Finch opined in USA Today, “each of Rudd’s clients, from the victim of a raid by an absurdly militarized police team to a death row inmate trying to beat the needle, showcases the author’s magical trait, which is his ability to find intense drama in the little skirmishes that play out across our legal system every day.” Offering further applause in her Washington Post assessment, Maureen Corrigan remarked: “Thirty novels into his nearly three-decade career, John Grisham still makes it look easy.” She added: “The biggest mystery that Rogue Lawyer poses is how Grisham, at this stage in his long writing career, can still devise all these distinctive characters, tricky legal predicaments and roguishly cheating ways to worm out of them. It’s one mystery we Grisham fans just want to appreciate, rather than solve.”
In Theodore Boone: The Fugitive, Theodore travels to Washington, DC, with a group from his school. There, he happens upon Pete Duffy, a man wanted for a murder committed in Theodore’s hometown of Strattenburg. Theodore helps his Uncle Ike with the investigation and the court case against Duffy.
“Unrealistic, insufferable, precocious, weirdly law-abiding Theo is the crux of why this book quite wildly misses the mark,” suggested Annalise Murray on the Cuckoo Review website. Conversely, Pamela Kramer, a critic on Examiner.com, remarked: “The narrative … effectively captures a kid’s way of thinking about school, parents, and other important matters.” A reviewer on the Common Sense Media website commented: “This one is hard to put down. The suspense will keep all ages engaged. As is typical of the ‘Theodore Boone’ series, there are a lot of good insights about the law in The Fugitive. ” “The courtroom drama, which is played out dramatically and with intelligence, feels very realistic,” asserted Vincent Ripley on the Mr. Ripley’s Enchanted Books website. Ripley added: “This is a great book to get young people engaged in reading and to inspire them in becoming a lawyer.”
In an interview with Michael S. Rosenwald on the Washington Post Book World website, Grisham discussed The Tumor: A Non-Legal Thriller, which was published by the Focused Ultrasound Foundation. He told Rosenwald: “I write escapist popular fiction that entertains. … It’s entertainment. It doesn’t pretend to be literature or anything else. But The Tumor has the potential to one day save or prolong millions of lives.” The volume is available online for free. It tells the story of a thirty-something husband and father named Paul, who discovers he has a brain tumor. He dies nine months after having surgery on the mass. Grisham later offers an alternative ending to the story. Paul received focused ultrasound treatment and is about to live for many years.
Grisham has realized greater success than most writers enjoy in a lifetime. Despite such success, the former lawyer and politician has remained realistic about his limitations and maintained that a time might come when he would walk away from writing just as he previously abandoned both law and politics. In his interview with Bearden in Publishers Weekly, he compared writers to athletes and concluded: “There’s nothing sadder than a sports figure who continues to play past his prime.” However, Grisham seems far from that point. Book ideas “drop in from all directions,” he told Svetkey in Entertainment Weekly. “Some gestate for years and some happen in a split second. They’ll rattle around in my head for a while, and I’ll catch myself mentally piecing it together. How do I suck the reader in, how do I maintain the narrative tension, how do I build up to some kind of exciting end? … Some of those will work, some won’t.”
Set in Florida, The Whistler follows judicial investigator Lacy Stoltz. The protagonist is assigned to investigate a well-respected judge when a disgraced lawyer accuses the judge of racketeering. Stoltz would normally disregard the accusation given its source, but the case encompasses much of the Gulf Coast, all of Tallahassee, and parts of the Catfish Mafia. As Stoltz falls deeper and deeper into her investigation, she discovers that the Catfish Mafia has disbanded and been reborn as the Coast Mafia. The judge under Stoltz’s scrutiny may be behind the change; if not, Stoltz nevertheless has enough damning evidence to remove him from office.
Reviews of The Whistler were largely positive, and Florida Bar Journal correspondent David Mandell announced: “Grisham has been writing legal thrillers for more than a quarter century and still manages to come up with stories that are difficult to put down. … The book only takes a few hours to read and is well worth the trip.” As a Kirkus Reviews critic noted, “yes, it’s formula. … But, like eating a junk burger, even though you probably shouldn’t, it’s plenty satisfying.” Maslin, writing in the New York Times Online, was also mostly positive, and she advised: “Despite the bits of leaden language, Lacy does manage to come to life on the page. The Whistler also has a strong and frightening sense of place, painting part of the Panhandle as a lawless region where terrible things might happen, and do. And Mr. Grisham deserves credit for dependability: He is at heart an optimist who believes that wrongs can be ferreted out and righted. We could use a little of that these days.”
With Camino Island, Grisham eschews legal themes in favor of a literary thriller. The protagonist, Mercer Mann, is a novelist who is hired to track down a crooked rare-books book dealer. The dealer in question is suspected of trying to sell F. Scott Fitzgerald’s handwritten manuscripts, which were stolen from the library at Princeton University. Mercer’s search takes her to Camino Island, a resort-town with a growing literary community. When she finally finds book dealer Bruce Cable, Mercer is so attracted to him that she struggles to keep her focus.
What follows is a steamy affair and suspenseful caper that was well-received by critics, and Booklist correspondent Pitt stated that the novel “offers a fascinating take on people who write novels for a living. And it has a genuinely suspenseful plot, too.” Commending the plot’s many ins and outs in Kirkus Reviews, a contributor commented: “How all these little threads join up is a pleasure for Grisham fans to behold: there’s nothing particularly surprising about it, but he’s a skillful spinner of mayhem and payback.”
In his 2017 novel, The Rooster Bar, Grisham once again takes readers into exploits of the legal profession. Mark Frazier, Todd Lucero, and Zola Maal are classmates at Washington DC’s for profit Foggy Bottom Law School. Just months away from graduation, they discover what a scam the school is, accepting all students regardless of their LSAT scores and providing a less than stellar education, graduating students with little chance of succeeding as lawyers. They are also burdened with huge personal debt in student loans, as are other students at the school. When one of their classmates commits suicide because of his debt, these three vow to take vengeance on the hedge-fund owner of the school, Hinds Rackley, who they also discover owns the finance company to which they owe their student debt. Mark, Todd, and Zola drop out of school and set up shop in an office about the Rooster Bar, a favorite local hangout for students. They hustle legal work with DUIs and other misdemeanor charges despite not having law licenses. And finally they take on Rackley face-to-face.
Writing in the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, Aine Norris had praise for The Rooster Bar, commenting: “Like a carefully constructed courtroom closing argument, Grisham ties together the novel’s climactic scenes with his trademark of suspense, careful research, and surprise. Readers may find themselves torn between the importance of rules and ethics versus wanting the students to prevail over Rackley and an educational system that failed them so profoundly.” Similarly, writing in the Florida Bar Journal, Robert M. Jarvis felt that “readers get a good sense of some of the problems facing legal education and a reminder that despite the reforms enacted after the Great Recession (many of which now are being undone), Wall Street continues to make money by preying on average Americans.” Booklist contributor Pitt also commended the novel, noting that it “has some strikingly well-drawn characters and a plot that edges tantalizingly close to a full-on caper story, but it also boasts some shrewd commentary on the scourge of fraudulent for-profit universities and the disastrous impact they can have on people’s lives.” Pitt added: “It feels like this is a subject close to Grisham’s heart, and he makes the most of it.”
Grisham sets his 2018 novel, The Reckoning, in the year following the conclusion of World War II. Pete Banning returns to his Mississippi home as a decorated war hero fighting in the Philippines. Shortly after his return, he walks into the local church and shoots his old friend, the pastor Dexter Bell. Even facing the electric chair, he refuses to tell why he killed Bell. There are those who think it might be because Pete’s wife, Liza, was seen with Bell. And there is reason for this assumption, as Liza had been told her husband was killed in action; however, she cannot provide much information, as Pete has had her committed to a mental institution. Much of the ensuing novel takes place in the courtroom as Pete’s murder trial takes place, followed by a wrongful death suit by Bell’s widow. A Kirkus Reviews critic offered a varied assessment of The Reckoning, noting, “As usual, Grisham does a solid job of portraying a Southern town at a particular moment in time, touching upon social issues as he goes.” However, the critic went on to conclude, “Grisham’ entertaining wartime novel is not lacking in ambition or scope, but the spark of imagination that would grease its pages is largely missing.” Others had a higher assessment. Writing on the USA Today website, Jocelyn McClurg commented: “A murder mystery, a courtroom drama, a family saga, a coming-of-age story, a war narrative, a period piece: The Reckoning is Grisham’s argument that he’s not just a boilerplate thriller writer. Most jurors will think the counselor has made his case.” Similarly, Washington Post website reviewer Neely Tucker observed, “Grisham continues the rich literary tradition of Southern authors confronting a culture of white supremacy and its offspring: corruption, violence and a general cultural miasma.”
The Guardians posits a nonprofit dedicated to taking on the cases of those found guilty of crimes but who are innocent. Guardian Ministries is run by Cullen Post, a lawyer as well as an Episcopal minister. He takes on the case of Quincy Miller, a black man who has been in prison for more than two decades for the murder of a Florida lawyer, Keith Russo, who once represented Miller. Quincy has proclaimed his innocence over and over, and now finally attracts the attention of Post. But this is no simple case, for powerful people are responsible for the murder of Russo and they will kill anyone who tries to reopen the case. Reviewing The Guardians on Theartsdesk.com, Marina Vaizey termed the novel “one of Grisham’s most quietly ferocious depictions of America’s dysfunction.” Vaizey went on to note: “He brings home the scale of the resulting human suffering and hones in on the hypocrisy of the richest country in the world which enshrines the highest aspirations for the human being in its founding constitution.” Associated Press contributor Jeff Ayers was also impressed, writing: “Grisham again delivers a suspenseful thriller mixed with powerful themes such as false incarceration, the death penalty and how the legal system shows prejudice.” Writing in the Washington Post website, Maureen Corrigan added further praise, commenting: “Post is a driven and likable loner whom, I hope, Grisham will bring back in future novels. After all, as The Guardians makes clear, there’s plenty of work left for an innocence lawyer to do.”
With his 2020 novel, Camino Winds, Grisham takes readers back to Florida’s Camino Island, featured in his earlier novel, Camino Island. As in the earlier novel, Bruce Cable and his bookshop are once again at the center of action, but here a deadly hurricane heads for the island. Though the governor issues evacuation orders, Bruce decides to stay put and ride out the storm. Afterward, the devastation is vast and lives have been lost. One of the dead is Nelson Kerr, a friend of Bruce’s and also the author of thrillers. However, Nelson’s injuries do not look as if they were caused by the storm. Instead, Bruce believes someone killed Nelson with savage blows to the head. The local police have their hands full with the after effects of the hurricane, and so Bruce begins to investigate, wondering if the characters in Nelson’s novels might not be fictional after all. A Kirkus Reviews critic lauded this novel, noting that it “unfolds at a leisurely pace, never breaking into a sweat, and if the bad guys seem a touch too familiar, the rest of the cast make a varied and believable lot, and some might even be fun to ride out a storm with, at least if they’re unarmed.” The critic concluded: “A pleasure for Grisham fans and an undemanding addition to the beach bag.” Writing on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website, Robert Croan offered a similar assessment: “The plot is light, and thin, and often obvious, despite some unexpected twists, but Mr. Grisham is an irresistible writer. His prose is fluent and gorgeous, and he has an ability to end each segment with a terse sentence than makes it all but impossible not to turn the page.”
A Time for Mercy also takes readers back to an earlier character from Grisham’s novels. The protagonist of A Time to Kill, Jack Brigance returns in a courtroom drama. It is 1990 in Clanton, Mississippi, and Jack is appointed the attorney for Drew Gamble, a sixteen-year-old accused of killing a Clanton deputy. The locals want a fast trial and the death penalty, but Jack soon learns that there is much more to this case than seems apparent. Soon, Jack’s pursuit of justice puts his family and financial life in jeopardy. “A small-town Mississippi courtroom becomes the setting for a trademark Grisham legal tussle,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor who added, “Grisham fans will be pleased, graphic details of evil behavior and all.” Similarly, Sarah Lyall, writing in the New York Times Book Review website, had a positive assessment of the novel, commenting: “The trial is riveting, but don’t expect anyone to burst into the courtroom at the last minute waving a piece of paper that upends the proceedings. The jurors aren’t secretly sleeping with the lawyers; the judge is not being paid off by the local crime boss. But it’s striking how suspenseful the story is anyway, how much we’re gripped by the small details.”
(open new)With Sooley, seventeen-year-old Sudanese Samuel Sooleymon achieves his dream of playing basketball in the United States. However, after civil war erupts in his hometown, he pushes himself to be even better so he can help save his family. He falls in with a crowd that lets him gain access to quick money but with serious consequences. Booklist contributor Pitt found the novel to be “skillfully written, with a deeply compelling central character and a story that is full of raw emotion.”
In The Judge’s List, Lacy Stoltz is an investigator with Florida’s Board on Judicial Conduct. She takes on the case of a woman who claims her father was killed by a judge. When her own life is threatened, she knows she is on to something despite her initial skepticism. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it “a shiny bauble of mayhem sure to please Grisham’s many fans.” Booklist contributor Pitt suggested that readers should “expect this one to hang around best-seller lists for quite a while.”
Sparring Partners is comprised of three novellas. In the first, small-town Mississippi lawyer Jake Brigance receives a message from attorney Mack Stafford, who left town for Costa Rica with his clients’ money and without his family. He wants to return but needs help. The second story features twenty-nine-year-old death row inmate, Cody Wallace, who has run out of time on his execution day despite his lawyers attempts to get him off the hook since he didn’t actually pull the trigger. The final novella features a family of lawyers, where the father killed his wife, and his sons are trapped in the family law firm due to an expensive clause. A Kirkus Reviews contributor insisted that “Grisham’s fans will enjoy these tales of betrayal, hope, and dysfunction.”
With The Boys from Biloxi, Keith owns a private practice law firm in Mississippi. When he makes a run for district attorney, he comes up against his childhood friend, Hugh, who is a regular in the state’s underground vice crime network. A Kirkus Reviews contributor opined that this novel is “not vintage Grisham but still a worthy yarn,” adding that “the author is always an engaging storyteller even when he could add another twist or two.” Booklist contributor Pitt claimed that “readers will very quickly find themselves completely invested in the story and the lives of everyone who inhabits it.”
The Exchange: After the Firm is a sequel to Grisham’s hugely popular novel, The Firm. It follows Mitch McDeere, who now is a partner at Scully & Pershing law firm in Manhattan. He helps a Rome-based partner’s case as she loses her battle with pancreatic cancer but accepts from her daughter, Giovanna. The case features Turkish construction company Lannak, who is suing the Libyan government for $400 million in unpaid debt. Giovanna is kidnapped in Libya, and her entourage is murdered. A $100-million ransom is delivered to Mitch’s wife, Abby, leaving the firm in a tight situation as they do not know who is even responsible. A contributor to Publishers Weekly called the sequel “a letdown.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor pointed out that it is “a tense legal thriller with nary a courtroom scene.”
In Camino Ghosts, the Tidal Breeze developer is petitioning the state of Florida for the right to develop the unpopulated Dark Isle, which is close enough to Camino Island to build a bridge there. The descendants of the island’s longtime inhabitants are upset that their ancestors’ burial places won’t be respected. The descendants refuse to be bought out, so the developer goes to court to challenge ownership claims. A Kirkus Reviews contributor found it to be “fine Grisham storytelling that his fans will enjoy.”
Grisham wrote the true crime, Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions, with Centurion founder Jim McCloskey. The account considers ten different instances of miscarriages of justice for twenty-one defendants. The focus is less on how the defendants were freed and more on how police corruption or incompetence resulted in these wrongful convictions. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it “a powerful and infuriating must-read about ineptitude and injustice in America’s legal system.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 84, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995, pp. 189-201.
PERIODICALS
Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, March 15, 2004, Ruel S. De Vera, review of The Last Juror.
Book, January 1, 2001, Liz Seymour, “Grisham Gets Serious,” pp. 34-36.
Booklist, February 1, 2001, Stephanie Zvirin, review of A Painted House, p. 1020; June 1, 2010, Ilene Cooper, review of Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, p. 80; March 15, 2012, Wes Lukowsky, review of Calico Joe, p. 18; September 15, 2015, David Pitt, review of Rogue Lawyer, p. 34; June 1, 2017, David Pitt, review of Camino Island; October 27, David Pitt, review of The Rooster Bar, pg. 24; March 15, 2021, David Pitt, review of Sooley, p. 32; October 15, 2021, David Pitt, review of The Judge’s List, p. 27; May 15, 2022, David Pitt, review of Sparring Partners, p. 21; October 15, 2022, David Pitt, review of The Boys from Biloxi, p. 24; September 15, 2023, David Pitt, review of The Exchange: After The Firm, p. 18; September 1, 2024, David Pitt, review of Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions, p. 6.
Boston Herald, March 2, 2004, Rosemary Herbert, review of The Last Juror, p. 40.
Entertainment Weekly, April 1, 1994, Keli Pryor, interview with Grisham, pp. 15-20; June 3, 1994, Mark Harris, “Southern Discomfort,” p. 48; February 13, 1998, Tom De Haven, review of The Street Lawyer, pp. 64-65; February 4, 2000, Tom De Haven, “Law of Desire,” p 63; February 11, 2000, Benjamin Svetkey, “Making His Case,” interview, pp. 63-64; February 9, 2001, Bruce Fretts, “Above the Law,” pp. 68-69; February 15, 2002, Benjamin Svetkey, “Trial and Errors,” pp. 60-61; September 12, 2003, Jennifer Reese, review of The Bleachers p. 155.
Florida Bar Journal, June 1, 1998, Jacalyn N. Kolk, review of The Street Lawyer, p. 115; November 1, 2008, David Mandell, review of The Appeal, p. 64; April 1, 2017, David Mandell, review of The Whistler; April 1, 2018, Robert M. Jarvis, review of The Rooster Bar, p. 60.
Guardian (London, England), October 30, 2013, John O’Connell, review of Sycamore Row.
Horn Book, September 1, 2010, Betty Carter, review of Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, p. 78.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2012, review of The Litigators; April 1, 2012, review of Calico Joe; December 15, 2012, review of The Racketeer; November 15, 2013, review of Sycamore Row; October 1, 2014, review of Gray Mountain; August 15, 2015, review of Rogue Lawyer; November 1, 2016, review of The Whistler; June 1, 2017, review of Camino Island; October 1, 2018, review of The Reckoning; April 15, 2020, review of Camino Winds; October 1, 2020, review of A Time for Mercy; March 15, 2021, review of Sooley; October 15, 2021, review of The Judge’s List; May 15, 2022, review of Sparring Partners; October 1, 2022, review of The Boys from Biloxi; September 1, 2023, review of The Exchange; April 15, 2024, review of Camino Ghosts; August 15, 2024, review of Framed.
Library Journal, August 1, 2000, p. 179; March 1, 2001, p. 131; September 1, 2001, p. 258; December 1, 2001, Samantha J. Gust, review of Skipping Christmas, pp. 170-171; September 1, 2015, Jerry P. Miller, “Legal Thrills,” p. 96.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 10, 1991, Charles Champlin, “Criminal Pursuits,” p. 7; April 5, 1992, p. 6; April 4, 1993, p. 6; May 14, 1995, Garry Abrams, review of The Rainmaker, p. 8.
Mississippi Business Journal, November 2, 2012, Lynn Lofton, “Grisham Does It Again with Tale of Disbarred Lawyer,” p. 25.
Newsweek, February 19, 1999, Malcolm Jones, “Grisham’s Gospel,” p. 65.
New York Times, April 19, 1995, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Rainmaker, pp. B1, B9; April 28, 1995, p. C33; May 23, 1996, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Runaway Jury, p. C20; March 31, 1997, Mel Gussow, review of The Partner, p. B1; February 4, 2002, p. B1; February 5, 2002, p. B7.
New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1992, Frank J. Prial, “Too Liberal to Live,” p. 9; October 18, 1992, p. 33; March 7, 1993, p. 18; December 23, 2001, p. 17; February 24, 2002, p. 13; January 9, 2005, Alan M. Dershowitz, “Pardon Me,” p. 18; October 30, 2013, Janet Maslin, review of Sycamore Row.
New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2022, David Marchese, “John Grisham Still Struggles to Overcome His Upbringing,” p. 11.
People, March 2, 1998, Cynthia Sanz, review of The Street Lawyer, p. 37; February 12, 2001, p. 41; February 18, 2002, p. 41; February 23, 2004, Sean Daly, review of The Last Juror, p. 45.
Phi Kappa Phi Forum, vol. 98, no. 2, 2018, Aine Norris, review of The Rooster Bar, p. 28.
Philadelphia Inquirer, March 23, 1997, Robert Drake, review of The Partner.
Publishers Weekly, February 22, 1993, Michelle Bearden, “PW Interviews: John Grisham,” pp. 70-71; May 30, 1994, p. 37; May 6, 1996, p. 71; February 10, 1997; February 1, 1999, review of The Testament, p. 78; January 10, 2000, p. 18; January 31, 2000, review of The Brethren, p. 84; January 22, 2001, review of A Painted House, p. 302; October 29, 2001, p. 20; November 5, 2001, review of Skipping Christmas, p. 43; February 18, 2002, p. 22; August 18, 2003, review of The Bleachers, p. 56; January 10, 2005, review of The Broker, p. 39; May 31, 2010, review of Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, p. 48; August 17, 2015, review of Rogue Lawyer, p. 52; August 21, 2023, review of The Exchange, p. 36; September 2, 2024, review of Framed, p. 58.
School Librarian, September 22, 2010, Susan Elkin, review of Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, p. 176; December 22, 2011, Sophie Smiley, review of Theodore Boone: The Abduction, p. 244; December 22, 2012, Elizabeth Finlayson and George Balfour, review of Theodore Boone: The Accused, p. 226.
School Library Journal, June 1, 2010, John Peters, review of Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, p. 102.
Sunday Times (London, England), June 12, 1994, review of The Chamber, p. 1.
Time, March 9, 1992, John Skow, “Legal Eagle,” p. 70; March 8, 1993, p. 73; June 20, 1994, John Skow, review of The Chamber, p. 67; August 1, 1994; February 26, 2001, Jess Cagle, review of A Painted House, p. 72; October 2, 2023, Molly Ball, “The Enduring Charm of John Grisham.”
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), February 24, 1991, Bill Brashler, review of The Firm, p. 6.
USA Today, January 13, 2005, Bob Minzesheimer, “Grisham Takes a Detour to Italy,” p. 7D; October 21, 2013, Dennis Moore, review of Sycamore Row; October 20, 2014, Dennis Moore, review of Gray Mountain; October 19, 2015, Charles Finch, review of Rogue Lawyer.
Voice of Youth Advocates, October 1, 2010, Stacey Hayman, review of Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, p. 348; December 1, 2013, Stacey Hayman, review of Theodore Boone: The Activist, p. 60.
Washington Post, October 19, 2014, Patrick Anderson, review of Gray Mountain; October 18, 2015, Maureen Corrigan, review of Rogue Lawyer.
Washington Post Book World, October 20, 2013, Patrick Anderson, review of Sycamore Row.
Yale Law Journal, June 1, 2003, review of The King of Torts, p. 2600.
ONLINE
American Academy of Achievement website, https://achievement.org/ May 25, 2025), author profile.
Associated Press, https://apnews.com/, Jeff Ayers, review of The Guardians.
Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (April 8, 2004), “Author Profile: John Grisham.”
CBC website, https://www.cbc.ca/ (March 22, 2019), “How John Grisham Turned His Passion for Justice into Bestselling Legal Thrillers.”
Common Sense Media, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ (August 4, 2016), review of Theodore Boone: The Fugitive.
Cuckoo Review, http://review.cuckoowriters.com/ (April 9, 2016), Annalise Murray, review of Theodore Boone: The Fugitive.
Esquire, https://www.esquire.com/ (November 7, 2022), Brian O’Keefe, “What I’ve Learned: John Grisham.”
Evening Standard, https://www.standard.co.uk/ (October 29, 2020), Vicky Frost, review of A Time for Mercy.
Examiner.com, http://www.examiner.com/ (May 31, 2015), Pamela Kramer, review of Theodore Boone: The Fugitive.
Garden and Gun, https://gardenandgun.com/ (November 16, 2023), CJ Lotz Diego, “John Grisham Talks Hit Storylines, Morning Writing, and His First Reaction to Matthew.”
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (June 18, 2015), review of Theodore Boone: The Fugitive.
John Grisham website, https://jgrisham.com (May 25, 2025).
Mr. Ripley’s Enchanted Books, http:// www.mrripleysenchantedbooks.com/ (June 9, 2015), Vincent Ripley, review of Theodore Boone: The Fugitive.
New York Times Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (October 27, 2015), Janet Maslin, review of Rogue Lawyer;(September 13, 2017), Janet Maslin, review of The Whistler.
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com/ (October 13, 2020), Sarah Lyall, review of A Time for Mercy.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, https://www.post-gazette.com/ (April 28, 2020), Robert Croan, review of Camino Winds.
Theartsdesk.com, https://theartsdesk.com/ (November 24, 2019), Marina Vaizey, review of The Guardians; (May 24, 2020), Marina Vaizey, review of Camino Winds.
USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/ (October 22, 2018), Jocelyn McClurg, review of The Reckoning.
University of Mississippi website, http://www.olemiss.edu/ (April 8, 2004), “John Grisham.”
Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (October 18, 2018), Neely Tucker, review of The Reckoning; (October 22, 2019), Maureen Corrigan, review of The Guardians.
Washington Post Book World, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/ (February 22, 2016), Michael S. Rosenwald, author interview.
John Grisham
USA flag (b.1955)
John Grisham graduated from Law School in 1981 and for nine years ran his own law firm. Following the extraordinary success of The Firm, John Grisham gave up his practice to write full time. He lives with his wife Renee and their two children Ty and Shea. The family splits their time between their Victorian home on a farm in Mississippi and a plantation near Charlottesville, VA.
Awards: Theakston (2018), Harper Lee (2014), Nibbies (2007) see all
Genres: Mystery, Children's Fiction, Thriller, General Fiction, Literary Fiction
New and upcoming books
September 2025
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The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2025
(Best Mystery Stories of the Year)October 2025
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The Widow
Series
Jake Brigance
1. A Time to Kill (1989)
2. Sycamore Row (2013)
3. A Time for Mercy (2020)
3.5. Homecoming (2022) (in Sparring Partners)
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Firm
1. The Firm (1991)
2. The Exchange (2023)
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Theodore Boone
1. Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer (2010)
2. The Abduction (2010)
3. The Accused (2012)
4. The Activist (2013)
5. The Fugitive (2015)
6. The Scandal (2016)
7. The Accomplice (2019)
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Lacy Stoltz
0.5. Witness to a Trial (2016)
1. The Whistler (2016)
2. The Judge's List (2021)
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Camino Island
1. Camino Island (2017)
2. Camino Winds (2020)
3. Camino Ghosts (2024)
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Novels
The Pelican Brief (1992)
The Client (1993)
The Chamber (1994)
The Rainmaker (1995)
The Runaway Jury (1996)
The Partner (1997)
The Street Lawyer (1998)
The Testament (1999)
The Brethren (2000)
A Painted House (2000)
Skipping Christmas (2001)
The Summons (2002)
The King of Torts (2003)
Bleachers (2003)
The Last Juror (2004)
The Broker (2005)
Playing for Pizza (2007)
The Appeal (2007)
The Associate (2008)
The Confession (2010)
The Litigators (2011)
The Racketeer (2012)
Calico Joe (2012)
Gray Mountain (2014)
Rogue Lawyer (2015)
The Rooster Bar (2017)
The Reckoning (2018)
The Guardians (2019)
Sooley (2021)
The Boys from Biloxi (2022)
Fourteen Days (2023) (with others)
The Widow (2025)
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Collections
Ford County (2009)
Sparring Partners (2022)
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Novellas and Short Stories
Blood Drive (2011)
Casino (2011)
Fetching Raymond (2011)
Fish Files (2011)
Funny Boy (2011)
Michael's Room (2011)
Quiet Haven (2011)
The Tumor (2015)
Partners (2016)
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Series contributed to
Best Mystery Stories of the Year
The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2025 (2025) (with Otto Penzler)
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Non fiction hide
The WaveDancer Benefit (2002) (with others)
The Innocent Man (2006)
Don't Quit Your Day Job (2010) (with others)
Framed (2024) (with Jim McCloskey)
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Omnibus editions hide
The Testament / A Time to Kill (1988)
Three Classic Thrillers (2012)
About John Grisham
John Grisham is an expert storyteller, whose unforgettable characters fight for justice in a world that isn’t always fair.
John Grisham is the author of more than fifty consecutive #1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include Framed, Camino Ghosts, and The Exchange: After the Firm.
Grisham is a two-time winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was honored with the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction.
When he’s not writing, Grisham serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project and of Centurion Ministries, two national organizations dedicated to exonerating those who have been wrongfully convicted. Much of his fiction explores deep-seated problems in our criminal justice system.
John lives on a farm in central Virginia.
John Grisham
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Grisham" redirects here. For other people with the name, see Grisham (surname). For other uses, see Grisham (disambiguation).
John Grisham
John Grisham in 2016
John Grisham in 2016
Born John Ray Grisham Jr.
February 8, 1955 (age 70)
Jonesboro, Arkansas, U.S.
Education Mississippi State University (BS)
University of Mississippi (JD)
Period 1989–present
Genres Legal thriller
Mystery
Crime fiction
Southern Gothic
Baseball
Football
Basketball
Young Adult Fiction
Spouse Renee Grisham (m. 1981)
Children 2
Member of the Mississippi House of Representatives
from the 7th district
In office
1983–1990
Preceded by Don Chambliss
Succeeded by Greg Davis
Personal details
Political party Democratic
Website
jgrisham.com
John Ray Grisham Jr. (/ˈɡrɪʃəm/; born February 8, 1955)[1][2] is an American novelist, lawyer, and former member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, known for his best-selling legal thrillers. According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 37 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide.[3] Along with Tom Clancy and J. K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three anglophone authors to have sold two million copies on the first printing.[4][5]
Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University and earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981. He practiced criminal law for about a decade and served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990.[6] Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in June 1989, four years after he began writing it. It was later adapted into the 1996 feature film of the same name. Grisham's first bestseller, The Firm,[7] sold more than seven million copies,[1] and was also adapted into a 1993 feature film of the same name, starring Tom Cruise, and a 2012 TV series that continues the story ten years after the events of the film and novel.[8] Seven of his other novels have also been adapted into films: The Chamber, The Client, A Painted House, The Pelican Brief, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas.[9]
Early life
Grisham, the second of five children, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda (née Skidmore) and John Ray Grisham.[6] His father was a construction worker and a cotton farmer, and his mother was a homemaker.[10] When Grisham was four years old, his family settled in Southaven, Mississippi, near Memphis, Tennessee.[6] As a child, he wanted to be a baseball player.[9] As noted in the foreword to Calico Joe, Grisham gave up playing baseball at the age of 18, after a game in which a pitcher aimed a beanball at him and narrowly missed doing the young Grisham grave harm.
Although Grisham's parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and prepare for college.[1] He drew on his childhood experiences for his novel A Painted House.[6] Grisham started working for a plant nursery as a teenager, watering bushes for $1.00 an hour. He was soon promoted to a fence crew for $1.50 an hour. He wrote about the job: "there was no future in it". At 16, Grisham took a job with a plumbing contractor but says he "never drew inspiration from that miserable work".[11]
Initially, Grisham attended Horn Lake High School, a school that was so overcrowded some classes met in a church or a gymnasium.[12] In 1971, he transferred to Southaven High School, where he played football, basketball, and baseball.[12] He credits his 12th grade English teacher, Frances McGuffey, for inspiring his love for reading and for introducing him to the works of John Steinbeck in particular.[13]
Through one of his father's contacts, Grisham managed to find work on a highway asphalt crew in Mississippi at age 17. It was during this time that an unfortunate incident got him "serious" about college. A fight with gunfire broke out among the crew, causing Grisham to run to a nearby restroom to find safety. He did not come out until after the police had detained the perpetrators. He hitchhiked home and started thinking about college. His next work was in retail, as a sales clerk in a department store men's underwear section, which he described as "humiliating". By this time, Grisham was halfway through college. Planning to become a tax lawyer, he was soon overcome by "the complexity and lunacy" of it, deciding instead to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer.[14]
Grisham attended the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi, where he hoped to launch his baseball career but was benched instead.[12] He and two close friends, Bubba Logan and Parker Pickle, transferred to Delta State University in Cleveland where Grisham hoped to revive his baseball career as a walk on player, but he was cut from the team and he left school after one semester.[6][12][15][16] Ultimately, Grisham changed colleges three times before completing a degree.[1] Although he started there as an economics major, he eventually graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977 with a Bachelor of Science in accounting after being inspired by a fellow student, a Vietnam veteran, who planned to go to law school.[12][15] He later enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law intending to become a tax lawyer, but his interest shifted to general civil litigation. He graduated in 1981 with a J.D. degree.[6]
Career
Law and politics
Grisham practiced law for about a decade and won election as a Democrat to the Mississippi House of Representatives, serving from 1983 to 1990.[6][17] He challenged the incumbent after becoming embarrassed by Mississippi's national reputation and inspired by the passage of the Education Reform Act of 1982.[18] Grisham represented the 7th District, which included DeSoto County, Mississippi.[19] By his second term in the state legislature, he was the vice-chairman of the Apportionment and Elections Committee and a member of several other committees.[1] He supported Representative Ed Perry's unsuccessful bid for the House speakership in 1987. With a different speaker elected at the beginning of the 1988 legislative session, Grisham was out of favor with the new legislative leaders and assigned to more minor committee roles. Not as busy with political affairs, he devoted more time to his novel, The Firm. Grisham later reflected that if Perry had become speaker he might have been given more committee responsibilities and thus unable to write.[20]
Grisham's writing career blossomed with the success of his second book, The Firm, and he gave up practicing law, except for returning briefly in 1996 to represent the family of a railroad worker who was killed on the job.[1] His official website states: "He was honoring a commitment made before he had retired from the law to become a full-time writer. Grisham successfully argued his clients' case, earning them a jury award of $683,500 — the biggest verdict of his career."[10]
Writing career
This house in Lepanto, Arkansas, was the house used in the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie A Painted House.
Although he failed English in community college, Grisham received praise for his writing while taking a business correspondence course during law school.[12] Grisham said a case that inspired his first novel came in 1984, but it was not his case. He heard a 12-year-old girl telling a jury what had happened to her. Her story intrigued Grisham. He saw how the members of the jury cried as she told them about having been raped and beaten. "I remember staring at the defendant and wishing I had a gun." It was then, Grisham later wrote in The New York Times, that a story was born.[14] Over the next three years, he wrote his first book, A Time to Kill. The book was rejected by 28 publishers before Wynwood Press, an unknown publisher, agreed to give it a modest 5,000 copy printing. It was published in June 1988.[6][1]
The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on his second novel, The Firm.[10] The Firm remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 47 weeks,[1] and became the seventh bestselling novel of 1991.[21] This would begin a streak of having one of the top 10 best selling novels of the year for nearly the next two decades. In 1992 and 1993 he had the second-bestselling book of the year with The Pelican Brief and The Client, and from 1994 to 2000 he had the number one bestselling book every year. In 2001 Grisham did not have the bestselling book of the year, but had both the second and third books on the list with Skipping Christmas and A Painted House.
In 1992, The Firm was made into a film starring Tom Cruise and Ed Harris and was released in June 1993, grossing $270 million.[22] A feature film version of The Pelican Brief starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington was released later that year and grossed $195 million.[23] Following their success, Regency Enterprises paid Grisham $2.25 million for the rights to The Client which was released in 1994 starring Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones. Universal Pictures then commissioned Grisham with the highest amount ever for an unpublished novel, paying $3.75 million for the rights to The Chamber. In August 1994, New Regency paid a record $6 million for the rights to A Time to Kill, with Grisham asking for a guarantee that Joel Schumacher, the director of The Client, would direct.[24]
Beginning with A Painted House, Grisham broadened his focus from law to the more general rural South but continued to write legal thrillers at the rate of one per year. In 2002 he once again claimed the number one book of the year with The Summons. In 2003 and 2004 he missed the number one bestseller of the year due to the success of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, but he once again produced two novels which ended the year in the top 5. In 2004, The Last Juror ended the year at number four, and in 2005 he overtook The Da Vinci Code and returned to number one for the year with The Broker. The year 2006 marked the first time since 1990 that he did not have one of the top-selling books of the year, but he returned to number two in 2007, number one in 2008, and number two in 2009. Grisham has also written sports fiction and comedy fiction. He wrote the original screenplay for and produced the 2004 baseball movie Mickey, which starred Harry Connick Jr.[25]
In 2005, Grisham received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, which is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.[26] In 2010, Grisham started writing a series of legal thrillers for children. They feature Theodore Boone, a 13-year-old who gives his classmates legal advice on a multitude of scenarios, ranging from rescuing impounded dogs to helping their parents prevent their house from being repossessed. He said, "I'm hoping primarily to entertain and interest kids, but at the same time I'm quietly hoping that the books will inform them, in a subtle way, about law."[27] He also stated that it was his daughter, Shea, who inspired him to write the Theodore Boone series. "My daughter Shea is a teacher in North Carolina and when she got her fifth grade students to read the book, three or four of them came up afterwards and said they'd like to go into the legal profession."[27]
In an October 2006 interview on the Charlie Rose show, Grisham stated that he usually takes only six months to write a book, and his favorite author is John le Carré.[28] In 2011 and 2012, his novels The Litigators and The Racketeer claimed the top spot in The New York Times best seller list.[29][30] The novels were among the best selling books of those years, spending several weeks atop various best seller lists.[31][32][33] In 2013, he again reached the top five in the US best-seller list.[34] In November 2015, his novel Rogue Lawyer was at the top of the New York Times Fiction Best Seller for two weeks.[35]
In 2017, Grisham released two legal thrillers. Camino Island was published on June 6, 2017.[36] The book appeared at the top of several best seller lists including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. The Rooster Bar, published on October 24, 2017, was called "his most original work yet", in The News Herald,[37] and a “buoyant, mischievous thriller” in The New York Times.[38]
Southern settings
Several of Grisham's legal thrillers are set in the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi, in the equally fictional Ford County, a northwest Mississippi town still deeply divided by racism. The first novel set in Clanton was A Time to Kill. Other stories set there include The Last Juror, The Summons, The Chamber, The Reckoning, A Time for Mercy and Sycamore Row. The stories in the collection Ford County are also set in and around Clanton. Other Grisham novels have non-fictional Southern settings, for example The Partner, The Runaway Jury, and The Boys from Biloxi are set in Biloxi, and large portions of The Pelican Brief in New Orleans. A Painted House is set in and around the town of Black Oak, Arkansas, where Grisham spent some of his childhood.
Personal life
Marriage
Grisham married Renee Jones on May 8, 1981. The couple have two children.[6]
Real estate holdings
The family splits their time among their home in Charlottesville, Virginia, a home in Destin, Florida,[39] and a condominium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.[40] Their former and longtime Victorian home on a farm outside Oxford, Mississippi,[10] was given to the University of Mississippi after 2011. Grisham owns a beachfront home on Amelia Island in Florida.
Religion
Grisham is a member of the University Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, itself a constituent of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.[41] Grisham opposes a literalist understanding of the Bible, and endorses the American separation of church and state.[42] In 1993, he created with his wife a foundation, entirely financed by his royalties, which contributes to Baptist missionaries in Brazil for the purchase of medicines and the construction of chapels, clinics and schools.[41] He also participated in some missionary work in Brazil, under the First Baptist Church of Oxford.[43]
Baseball
Grisham has a lifelong passion for baseball, demonstrated partly by his support of Little League activities in both Oxford, Mississippi, and in Charlottesville. In 1996, Grisham built a $3.8 million youth baseball complex.[44] In A Painted House, a novel with strong autobiographical elements, the protagonist, a seven-year-old farmer boy, manifests a strong wish to become a baseball player. He remains a fan of Mississippi State University's baseball team and wrote about his ties to the university and the Left Field Lounge in the introduction for the book Dudy Noble Field: A Celebration of MSU Baseball.[45] Since moving to the Charlottesville area, Grisham has become a supporter of Virginia Cavaliers athletics and is regularly seen sitting courtside at basketball games.[46] Grisham also contributed to a $1.2 million donation to the Cavalier baseball team in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was used in the 2002 renovation of Davenport Field.[47] His son Ty played college baseball for the University of Virginia.[48]
Political activism
Grisham is a member of the board of directors of the Innocence Project, which campaigns to free and exonerate unjustly convicted people on the basis of DNA evidence.[49] The Innocence Project contends that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects. Grisham has testified before Congress on behalf of the Innocence Project.[50]
Grisham has appeared on Dateline NBC,[51] Bill Moyers Journal on PBS,[52] and other programs. He wrote for The New York Times in 2013 about an unjustly held prisoner at Guantanamo.[53] Grisham opposes capital punishment, a position very strongly manifested in the plot of The Confession.[54][55][56][57] He believes that prison rates in the United States are excessive, and the justice system is "locking up far too many people". Citing examples including "black teenagers on minor drugs charges" to "those who had viewed child porn online", he controversially added that he believed not all viewers of child pornography are necessarily pedophiles. After hearing from numerous people against this position, he later recanted this statement in a Facebook post.[58][59] He went on to clarify that he was defending a former friend from law school who was caught in a sting thinking he was looking at adult porn but it was in reality sixteen- and seventeen-year-old minors and went on to add, "I have no sympathy for real pedophiles. God, please lock those people up. Anyone who harms a child for profit or pleasure ... Should be punished to the fullest extent of the law."[60]
The Mississippi State University Libraries, Manuscript Division, maintains the John Grisham Room,[61] an archive containing materials generated during the author's tenure as Mississippi State Representative and relating to his writings.[62] In 2012, the Law Library at the University of Mississippi School of Law was renamed in his honor. It had been named for more than a decade after the late Senator James Eastland. In 2015, Grisham, along with about 60 others, signed a letter published in the Clarion-Ledger urging that an inset within the flag of Mississippi containing a Confederate flag be removed.[63] He co-authored the letter with author Greg Iles; the pair contacted various public figures from Mississippi for support.[64] Grisham supported Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2016.[65] In his 2018 Fall Convocation address to new students, Grisham described Mississippi State University as a place where he felt at home, noting, "I loved the big lecture halls, and I came to enjoy the professors. For the first time, after being at several schools, I was on a real campus with a diverse student body, different professors from around the world, big time sports, all of the activities that a big college can bring, and I really fell in love with State."[66]
Awards and honors
1993 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement[67]
2005 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
2007 Galaxy British Lifetime Achievement Award
2009 Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction
2011 The inaugural Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for The Confession[68]
2014 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for Sycamore Row[69]
Bibliography
A complete listing of works by John Grisham:[70]
† Denotes novels not in the legal genre
Novels
Jake Brigance series:
A Time to Kill (1989)
Sycamore Row (2013)
A Time for Mercy (2020)
"Homecoming" (2022), novella
Rogue Lawyer series:
0.5. "Partners" (2016), short story
Rogue Lawyer (2015)
The Whistler series:
0.5. "Witness to a Trial" (2016), short story
The Whistler (2016)
The Judge's List (2021)
Camino Island series:
Camino Island† (2017)
Camino Winds† (2020)
Camino Ghosts'† (2024)
Mitch McDeere series:
The Firm (1991)
The Exchange (2023)
Stand-alones:
The Pelican Brief (1992)
The Client (1993)
The Chamber (1994)
The Rainmaker (1995)
The Runaway Jury (1996)
The Partner (1997)
The Street Lawyer (1998)
The Testament (1999)
The Brethren (2000)
A Painted House† (2001)
Skipping Christmas† (2001)
The Summons (2002)
The King of Torts (2003)
Bleachers† (2003)
The Last Juror (2004)
The Broker (2005)
Playing for Pizza† (2007)
The Appeal (2008)
The Associate (2009)
The Confession (2010)
The Litigators (2011)
Calico Joe† (2012)
The Racketeer (2012)
Gray Mountain (2014)
The Rooster Bar (2017)
The Reckoning (2018)
The Guardians (2019)
Sooley† (2021)
The Boys from Biloxi (2022)
The Widow (2025)
Young adult novels
Theodore Boone series:
Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer (2010)
Theodore Boone: The Abduction (2011)
Theodore Boone: The Accused (2012)
Theodore Boone: The Activist (2013)
Theodore Boone: The Fugitive (2015)
Theodore Boone: The Scandal (2016)
Theodore Boone: The Accomplice (2019)
Short stories
Collections:
Ford County (2009), collection of seven short stories:
"Blood Drive", "Fetching Raymond", "Fish Files", "Casino", "Michael's Room", "Quiet Haven", and "Funny Boy"
Sparring Partners (2022), collection of three novellas:
"Homecoming", "Strawberry Moon", and "Sparring Partners"
Uncollected short stories:
"The Tumor"† (2016)
Non-fiction
The Wavedancer Benefit: A Tribute to Frank Muller (2002) — with Pat Conroy, Stephen King, and Peter Straub
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (2006) — story of Ronald "Ron" Keith Williamson
Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs they Quit (2010) — with various authors
Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions (2024) - with Jim McCloskey
Adaptations
Feature films
The Firm (1993)[71]
The Pelican Brief (1993)[71]
The Client (1994)[71]
A Time to Kill (1996)[71]
The Chamber (1996)[71]
The Rainmaker (1997)[71]
The Gingerbread Man (1998)
Runaway Jury (2003)[71]
Mickey (2004)
Christmas with the Kranks (2004)[71]
Television
The Client (1995–1996) 1 season, 20 episodes
A Painted House (2003) television film
The Street Lawyer (2003) TV pilot
The Firm (2011–2012) 1 season, 22 episodes
The Innocent Man (2018) miniseries, 6 episodes
The Enduring Charm of John Grisham
Molly Ball/Memphis
John Grisham photographed at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.Whitten Sabbatini for TIME
20 minute read
October 2, 2023 7:00 AM EDT
On a rack at the front of Burke’s Book Store in Memphis is a postcard showing the store in an earlier era, overhung by a billboard that’s no longer there. “Grisham is coming,” the billboard says in big red letters, next to a photo of the youthful lawyer-turned-author. His brow is knitted, mouth pursed in a half-smirk. Below him, you can see the line of people waiting for the store to open. John Grisham picks up the postcard and looks at it appreciatively. “Oh, yeah, I remember those days,” he says in his honey-thick drawl.
The picture on the postcard is from a book signing for The Chamber, in 1994. It’s a memento of the heady days of Grisham’s early success, when he released a succession of best-selling novels that became hit movies. People camped out in line for his book signings, Hollywood studios got in bidding wars for his film rights, and stores could barely keep his novels in stock. Many things have changed in the intervening decades. The book business has fragmented and fallen on hard times, while the legal arena Grisham writes about has never seemed more tormented, with everyone from liberal reformers to an indicted former President calling the criminal-justice system’s legitimacy into question.
What hasn’t changed is Grisham’s steady commitment to giving readers what they want. At 68, he may no longer be publishing’s fresh young hotshot; his books sell a fraction of the copies that they used to, and it’s been 19 years since he had a feature film made. Yet every fall, like clockwork, Grisham publishes a new legal thriller, and every fall it shoots to the top of the bestseller list.
Since breaking out with The Firm in 1991, Grisham has released 48 consecutive New York Times No. 1 bestsellers, a feat no other writer has matched. On Facebook, where he has more than a million followers, fans gush with anticipation. (“Can’t wait!” “I always get excited when October comes around so I can get the new one!” “I’m so ready!”) “He doesn’t get enough attention, he’s taken for granted by practically everybody, but he’s had a steady output of books that people always read,” says the longtime film and literary critic Janet Maslin. “He’s very disciplined, very serious, and really careful to be able to reach everybody. He never shows off. His books aren’t polarizing. They’re just dependably good.”
This month, Grisham looks to extend his winning streak by going back to the beginning. His new thriller, The Exchange, is a sequel to The Firm, the legal thriller set in Memphis that established him as a force in publishing and Hollywood alike. The movie version released 30 years ago, starring Tom Cruise as lawyer Mitch McDeere, remains his highest-grossing adaptation. His publisher says the new book was inspired in part by Cruise’s comeback turn in Top Gun: Maverick last year. Its release is a milestone that has Grisham feeling reflective. “When I started writing the book in January of this year, I really got nostalgic,” he tells me.
More From TIME
He’s not the only one. For a mix of commercial and cultural reasons, a late-career Grisham renaissance may be in the offing. A wave of movie-critic thinkpieces have heralded a turn back to the type of adult dramas that made him one of his era’s defining genre writers. “It’s Time to Bring Back the ‘90s Legal Thriller,” a writer for GQ recently argued, while the New York Times ran a nostalgic reflection on the era “When John Grisham Movies Were King.” The youngest Gen Xers are reaching the peak of their consumer power, sparking a wave of 90s nostalgia. And after decades where Hollywood turned away from adult dramatic fare, the studios are turning back. Feature films of Grisham’s novels Calico Joe, The Confession, The Partner and The Racketeer are all in development, while several others are being turned into TV series, according to his agent, David Gernert, who says there’s more studio interest in Grisham's work than ever before. “The business changed and the studios were not making ‘John Grisham movies’ for a while,” Gernert says. “Now everything’s come full circle.”
John Grisham with Samuel L. Jackson and director Joel Schumacher on the set of A Time to Kill
John Grisham with Samuel L. Jackson and director Joel Schumacher on the set of A Time to Kill.Alamy
With over 400 million copies sold, Grisham’s books have shaped the way millions see the law and its discontents, tackling themes like racial violence, corporate greed, environmental destruction and capital punishment. By his own account, he is obsessed with injustice, and often takes a novel as an opportunity to explore an issue. But he never wants readers to feel they’re being lectured to, he tells me. “I don’t spend a lot of time delivering messages,” he says. “People take the stories in different ways. It’s often fun to watch people read themes into the stories, about loyalty and forgiveness and greed or whatever. I just want to tell a story. I want to tell a story in such a way that the reader is caught up in it, and the pages turn.”
Grisham’s high forehead is wrinkled now, his once-dark hair gone white, but he still has that sardonic gaze, the lawyerly stare, that graced his book jackets at the beginning of his rise. He is a man of strong habits and intense loyalties. He’s had the same agent and publisher for decades, and he still comes back to the same handful of Southern independent bookstores that supported him when he was a struggling lawyer and politician with no novels to his name. On this late August morning, he’s come to Burke’s to see the owners, his old friends Corey and Cheryl Mesler, who—like every bookstore, chain store, and Walmart in the country—are preparing for his next book to drop.
“Mitch is back!” Grisham tells Corey Mesler, an aging hipster in a fedora and Hawaiian shirt.
“Is Mitch in Memphis at all in this book?” Mesler asks.
“He’s in Memphis briefly. Just to say hello.”
“Okay.”
“And then the story moves elsewhere. He’s based in New York now. It’s 15 years later, so he’s 41 years old now, living the good life in New York City, a big international lawyer.”
“And something happens,” Mesler prompts.
“Something happens,” Grisham chuckles. “There might be some dead bodies.”
“Is Tom Cruise too old to play it?” Mesler asks.
“He’s about 60, right? But he looks 40. He looks great. The rumor is that he’s reading the book now.”
Memphis, Grisham says, is functionally his hometown. He grew up in several small towns in Arkansas and Mississippi, all within an hour or two. “We did everything in Memphis—we shopped in Memphis, we came to restaurants in Memphis, we came to Memphis for parties,” he says. Grisham was born on a cotton farm, his father a sharecropper. He remembers picking cotton as a young child, his fingers bleeding. He put himself through college and law school and scraped by for a time in private practice in northwest Mississippi, hustling for clients. (Grisham has said that Jake Brigance, the small-town lawyer of his first novel A Time to Kill, who was played in the movie adaptation by Matthew McConaughey, is largely autobiographical.)
A couple of years out of law school, Grisham got himself elected as a Democrat to the Mississippi House of Representatives. As he tells it, he ran for office because he wanted to end the state’s shameful status as the only one in the union not to offer public kindergarten. In his spare time—starting at 5:30 each morning—he drafted a novel in longhand, inspired by a court scene he’d witnessed, about a Black man who takes the law into his own hands after his daughter is brutally raped by racist rednecks, and the lawyer who defends him.
A Time to Kill was barely published. An imprint of an obscure Christian press printed 5,000 copies, and Grisham implored local bookstores to stock it. The book attracted little notice, but Grisham was already at work on another he hoped would be more commercial: the tale of a Harvard-educated tax lawyer from a humble background who moves to Memphis to work for a mysterious firm, only to find himself caught between the Chicago Mob and the FBI. “I set the book in Memphis because I hadn’t been anywhere else,” Grisham tells me. “I was 33 years old. I’d never traveled anywhere.” (His only trip out of the country had been to the Cayman Islands, another locale that figures prominently in The Firm.) Locating the story in a sleepy Southern city also made it more plausible that a law firm whose attorneys have a habit of turning up dead could sidestep scrutiny. “People have always said, ‘Why’d you put the book in Memphis?’ Well, that’s kind of the story.”
The Firm still didn’t have a publisher when a Hollywood scout smuggled the manuscript to Los Angeles, sparking an improbable bidding war and a $600,000 contract with Paramount Pictures. By the time the book was published by Doubleday in 1991, it was hotly anticipated. Still, no one was prepared for what came next. “The book just started to sell immediately,” says Gernert, who was an editor at Doubleday before becoming Grisham’s agent. “I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. The very first day it hit the marketplace, I got back from lunch and I had all these messages saying it was flying out of the stores.” Gernert recalls walking down Fifth Avenue with Grisham, passing by multiple bookstores, and at each one, watching a customer pick the book up off the front table and take it to the register. “John turned to me and said, ‘Is this normal?’ And I said, ‘No!’” The book stayed on the bestseller list for nearly a year and sold more than seven million copies.
From To Kill a Mockingbird to The Merchant of Venice, there have always been dramas about the legal system, points out Scott Turow, whose smash hit Presumed Innocent came out in 1987, helping to create the market for legal thrillers that Grisham cashed in on. Books like theirs were different partly in the way they focused on the personal lives of lawyers. The Firm had a separate publicity campaign dedicated to the legal profession, and many of Grisham’s readers are attorneys. (While reporting this story, I learned for the first time that my own brother, a lawyer in Denver, entered the field in part because of a Grisham book he read in high school.) Turow believes such books struck a nerve in an era when authority was no longer unquestionable, and issues once considered unspeakable were being put up for debate. “In the world I grew up in, in the 1950s, father knew best and you didn’t talk about religion or politics at the dinner table,” Turow tells me. Once that changed, “for better or worse, the courts emerged as the arbiter of values.”
It was on the publicity tour for The Firm, Grisham tells me, that he picked up a bit of wisdom that would define his career: he overheard a publishing executive mention that the biggest authors—Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Sidney Sheldon—tended to release a book every year. “It should be obvious to someone like me, who’s a big reader, somebody who wants to write bestsellers, but I’d never thought about that,” Grisham says. “And I thought, that makes a lot of sense. I want to be a big writer. So I hustled back to the farm in Oxford and finished The Pelican Brief in no time.”
Grisham tells the story with charming humility, as a series of lucky breaks for which he’s everlastingly grateful. But it is also a story of the purest type of publishing success: a book by a nobody that succeeded almost entirely on its own merits. The Firm changed everything for Grisham. He left the law and never looked back. A Time to Kill was reprinted and became another hit. For years, he and his wife, Renee, would refer to “BF” and “AF”—before The Firm and after The Firm. But it was his discipline and consistency in the subsequent years that made him enduringly rich and famous.
John Grisham in an interview during the 2005 Virginia Film Fest
John Grisham in an interview with Hollywood reporter and critic Duane Byrge about the film-adaptations of his novels, during the 2005 Virginia Film Fest on Oct. 28, 2005.Andrew Shurtleff—The Daily Progress/AP
In the wake of his meteoric success, Grisham was determined to guard his privacy. After a few years in Oxford, Miss., he moved his family to a large plot of land outside Charlottesville, Va., and has been there ever since. (He and Renee also split their time between several other properties. Writing has made Grisham very rich.) Due to the solitary nature of the profession, even the world’s most famous writer rarely gets recognized in public. Grisham likes it that way. “It’s the perfect degree of fame,” he tells me as we walk down the street in Memphis. “I tell people I’m a famous writer in a country where nobody reads.”
Grisham’s routine hasn’t changed in many years. Starting on Jan. 1, he holes up in an outbuilding on his property to begin writing that year’s legal thriller. Beginning around 7 a.m., he types on a computer disconnected from the internet, typically writing about 1,000 words per day. He begins by going over the previous day’s work, and he is usually done by noon. He works from an extensive outline. “When I write the first scene in January, I know what the last scene is going to be,” he says. “That takes some work to get there. But if you know that, it’s really hard to get lost.” In addition to the annual legal thriller, he sometimes puts out a second book he was moved to write that year.
All he ever wanted, Grisham says, was to make a living. Had writing not proved a path to that goal, as is the case for most aspiring writers, he doubts he would have continued in legislative politics, but he imagines he would have run for judge. “A judgeship was financial security,” he says. “I had a nice base politically in my home county, and I had served as a city judge in my hometown and liked that.” Under a Democratic President, Clinton or more likely Obama, he thinks he could have then successfully lobbied for a federal judgeship.
Politics, Grisham says, separated him from his conservative Southern Baptist upbringing, as white Southern churches in the Moral Majority era became increasingly affiliated with right-wing Republicanism. Today he is a loyal Democrat—Renee was a Hillary Clinton superdelegate in 2008—who is getting more liberal as he ages, particularly when it comes to issues of race. For years, he tells me, he resisted the idea of taking down Confederate statues, but lately he’s had a change of heart. “Over time I’ve come to realize how offensive that would be to a Black person, to have to drive by Robert E. Lee’s statues,” he says. “Growing up in the South, the war is so horribly romanticized. It’s taken a while to realize how bad that was.” Grisham was in high school when his Mississippi district became the last one in the state to integrate, 16 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
In 2016, Grisham assumed Donald Trump would never appeal to the moralistic Christian conservatives he grew up with. “Boy, was I wrong.“ He worries that the constant drama that keeps the former President on the front page is bad for America and the Democratic Party alike. A passionate advocate for the wrongfully convicted and opponent of the death penalty, he sits on the board of the Innocence Project and speaks frequently about criminal-justice issues. But he doesn’t tweet or otherwise wade into the public discourse. “He’s your basic good guy, low-key, relaxed, but with a strong social conscience and equally strong opinions,” his longtime friend Stephen King tells me in an email. “We both get sent books for blurbs. About one—I won’t say which one—he cried indignantly, ‘It’s a train wreck!’ And he was right.”
Grisham walks down Memphis’s Union Avenue and turns the corner onto Front Street, past the Cotton Exchange, where Mitch, in The Firm, meets his accomplice Tammy as they’re planning his turn against his mob-front law firm. There’s a plaque on the wall of the stately old stone building: JOHN GRISHAM, it reads in raised bronze letters, accompanied by several lines of text about his smash success and connection to the city.
“I had nothing to do with it!” Grisham says of the plaque. The mayor at the time showed up at one of his marathon book signings with a proclamation, eager to grab a piece of Grisham’s exploding fame for the city. (Was this the book signing where he had to put his arm in an ice bucket every few hours? Or the one where, meeting a man who called himself Memphis’s first Black chiropractor, Grisham had the fan accompany him backstage to crack his back so he could go on signing? Or the one where he learned a woman several hours from the front of the line had gone into labor and dashed back to sign her book so she could go to the hospital, or the one the following year where the same woman came back with her baby? Eventually, he had to stop doing signings altogether.)
Many scenes in The Firm are set at the Peabody hotel, a Memphis landmark that pops up in other Grisham novels as well. Grisham had his senior prom here, in 1973, and his sister-in-law was married here. The hotel is known for the ducks that spend the day swimming in its lobby fountain, a tradition that stems from a manager’s drunken stashing of his live decoys in the 1930s. Today the ducks are trained to walk a red carpet to the fountain from the elevator in an elaborate, twice-daily “ceremony,” attended by a full time “duckmaster” and a large crowd of tourists. The whole hotel is duck-themed, from the logo to the duck-shaped soaps in the guest rooms. Nothing could be more Southern, it seems to me, than to take a drunken prank and sacralize it into a hallowed tradition.
In The Exchange, Mitch returns to Memphis on a legal errand and stays at the Peabody, sending the 41-year-old on a trip down memory lane that serves as a flashback summary of the first novel’s plot. Mitch seeks out the building that housed his old firm, only to find that it has “been renovated, renamed, and was now packed with condos advertising views of the river.” Rounding the corner, Grisham and I come upon the building. This one boasts no commemorative plaque. Sure enough, a sign on the first story boasts, “All New Luxury Apartments!”
Other than the brief trip to Memphis, the sequel has little connection to the plot of The Firm. The early pilgrimage to Memphis turns out to be a red herring; Mitch never returns. “It was a big issue in the story,” Grisham says of the Memphis detour. He wrote the scene there intending to take it out, he says, but his inner circle of first readers—Renee, Gernert, his publisher Suzanne Herz—enjoyed it too much to let it go.
The Exchange takes place largely in New York City, where Mitch is a partner at a massive international law firm, and Gaddafi’s Libya, where he goes on behalf of a client, only for things to go awry. The backstory that lent tension to the young striver of the first book has been ironed flat: Mitch’s outlaw brother and mentally ill mother are offstage, living peacefully in Florida; the in-laws who once tormented him now help out with the kids. Though Mitch gets entangled in high-stakes international intrigue, nobody sees fit to even mention that his unusual past might have something to do with it, and indeed it does not. We even learn that Mitch lived for several years in Italy, yet the Mafia whose grasp he barely escaped in the first book is nowhere to be found. There are enough undropped shoes to fill a closet. I kept turning pages, expecting a twist that never came. This version of Mitch seems less like the character from The Firm and more like a generic action hero—a Tom Cruise character. And the ending feels less like a resolution than a cliffhanger, a cheap setup for the next sequel. Publisher’s Weekly called The Exchange “disappointing” and “a letdown.”
I tell Grisham I found the book perplexing. “I kept thinking the Mob was going to come back,” I say. He and I are talking in the Peabody’s History Room, a memorabilia-lined chamber down the hall from the ballroom where he had his senior prom.
Grisham, in his disarming way, agrees with me. “That’s the biggest problem with the book,” he says, with more zeal than distress, as if congratulating me for solving a puzzle. “Fifteen years later, where’s the Mafia? That’s a huge problem.” Here he is, arguably the most famous writer in America, basically admitting that his new book makes no sense, yet he does so merrily—with the good humor, perhaps, of an author who knows he’s essentially review-proof. It’s a Grisham book; people will buy it; people will enjoy it, flaws and all; who am I to take that from them?
“The Mob never forgets,” Grisham continues, making my critique for me. “I mean, he stole a bunch of money from them!” The Exchange does a decent job of explaining what happened to Mitch’s old partners at Bendini, Lambert and Locke, but they were only the Mob’s lawyers, he continues. “The Chicago Mob’s still there. And I lost sleep over that, and talked to David, my agent, a lot about, you know, is this plausible? [Mitch is] walking down the streets of Manhattan like he doesn’t have a care in the world. He’s at a big law firm. Is his life really that safe? I decided to let it slide and see how many people comment on it. I think it works as is. But you do have that nagging question.”
Grisham says he cannot bear to read his old books, which may account for some of the puzzling discontinuity in The Exchange. In his young-adult series, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, he was constantly having mistakes spotted by 10-year-olds, he tells me. Embarrassed, he hired someone to read the books for him. Even his staunchest supporters don’t try to claim he’s a great writer. John Evans, the proprietor of Lemuria Books in Jackson, Miss., another of the independent bookstores Grisham has helped keep in business since the 1990s, tells me that Grisham’s charm is his unpretentiousness. “He doesn’t make any pretense that it’s a literary novel, and that has a charm to it,” Evans tells me. “He wants them to be read and enjoyed, and he’s not trying to do anything other than that.”
For Grisham, who owes his career to The Firm, returning to the material was a daunting prospect. “I was afraid to bring Mitch back because, you know, he’ll always be the guy in my first big book,” he says. “At the same time, you can’t take this stuff too serious. Let’s bring him back and have some fun. I like the story, now that it’s done. And there’s a possibility of doing it again."—With reporting by Julia Zorthian
Master of the Legal Thriller
Date of Birth
February 8, 1955
John Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas. His father, a cotton farmer and itinerant construction worker, moved the family frequently, from town to town throughout the Deep South, settling in Southaven, Mississippi in 1967. Although his parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged him to read and insisted that he prepare himself for college.
John Grisham
John Grisham has sold more than 300 million books and has had 28 consecutive number one fiction bestsellers.
By his own account, John Grisham had no interest in writing until after he embarked on his professional career. For his first two years in college, he drifted. He attended three different colleges before earning a degree. After abandoning a youthful dream of a professional baseball career, he settled down to study accounting and prepare for a career as a tax lawyer. While in law school, his interest shifted from tax law to criminal law and litigation. After graduating from the University of Mississippi law school, he returned to Southaven and established a small private legal practice. He was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1983. By his second term he held the vice chairmanship of the Apportionment and Elections Committee, as well as memberships on the Insurance, Judiciary “A” and Military Affairs Committee.
1989: John Grisham's first novel, "A Time to Kill," is a legal suspense thriller that was adapted into a film of the same name in 1996.
1989: John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill, is a legal suspense thriller that was adapted into hit motion picture.
In Mississippi, attorneys in private practice are sometimes called upon to appear as public defenders for indigent clients. In this way, Grisham received invaluable experience of the criminal justice system. Inspired by a case he observed in a Mississippi courthouse, Grisham decided to write a novel. For years, he arrived at his office at five o’clock in the morning, six days a week, to work on his first book, A Time To Kill. His manuscript was rejected by 28 publishers before he found an unknown publisher who was willing to print a short run. Without the benefit of a major publisher’s marketing apparatus, the novice author went directly to booksellers, encouraging them to stock his book.
The Firm is a 1991 legal thriller and the second novel by John Grisham. It was his first widely recognized book, and in 1993, after it sold 1.5 million copies, was made into a film starring Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman.
Although A Time to Kill only sold a disappointing 5,000 copies, Grisham had already begun work on a second novel, The Firm. At the same time, bored with the routine of the state capital and eager to spend more time with his family, he decided not to seek re-election to the state legislature. He closed his office in Southaven and moved his family to Oxford, Mississippi, hoping to concentrate on his writing.
John Grisham, at home in Oxford, Mississippi with his wife, Renee.
John Grisham, at home in Oxford, Mississippi with his wife, Renee. After graduating from law school and passing the bar exam in 1981, Grisham married Renee Jones, a childhood friend from Southaven, and they returned to their hometown where he became a litigator. His practice thrived and soon he was inspired to write his first novel.
At age 36, his career as a novelist bloomed when movie rights to The Firm were sold for a hefty price, even before the book had found a publisher. The Firm sold more than seven million copies and spent 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. With the success of The Firm, John Grisham finally gave up his law practice to write full-time. He has returned to the practice of law on only one occasion since, in 1996, to win a settlement for the family of a railroad worker killed on the job. Meanwhile, he has continued to write enormously successful legal thrillers at the rate of nearly one a year. As of this writing, seven of his books —The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, The Summons and The Broker — were the bestselling novels of their respective years.
2009: John Grisham, 20 years after he published his first novel, "A Time to Kill," at the DeSoto County Courthouse in Hernando, Mississippi, where he tried cases for about ten years. (Lisa Buser)
2009: John Grisham, 20 years after he published his first novel, A Time to Kill, at the DeSoto County Courthouse in Hernando, Mississippi, where he tried cases for about ten years. Nine of his books have been made into movies.
Beginning in 2001, Grisham has occasionally departed from the format of the legal thriller to write works of fiction on other subjects, particularly baseball and life in the rural South. The first of these was A Painted House, followed by Skipping Christmas, Bleachers and Playing for Pizza. His 2009 book of short stories, Ford County, returned to the setting of his first novel. Nine of Grisham’s tales have been adapted for film and television, including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Rainmaker, along with his original screenplay The Gingerbread Man. The film version of Skipping Christmas was re-titled Christmas with the Kranks.
2013: Author John Grisham, wife Renee Joes and guest attend the Broadway opening night of "A Time To Kill" at The Golden Theatre in New York City. (J. Countess/WireImage)
2013: John Grisham with wife Renee and family at the Broadway opening night performance of A Time To Kill.
Today, John Grisham and his wife, Renee Jones, keep homes in Oxford, Mississippi and near Charlottesville, Virginia. Apart from his writing, Grisham is a generous supporter of Little League teams in Oxford and Charlottesville and has endowed a writing scholarship at the University of Mississippi.
2012: When he’s not writing, Grisham devotes time to charitable causes, including, most recently, his Rebuild the Coast Fund, which raised 8.8 million dollars for Gulf Coast relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He also keeps up with his greatest passion: baseball. The man who dreamed of being a professional baseball player now serves as the local Little League commissioner. The six ballfields he built on his property have played host to over 350 kids on 26 Little League teams. (Jonas Karlsson/trunkarchive.com)
2012: When he’s not writing, Grisham devotes time to charitable causes, including his Rebuild the Coast Fund, which raised 8.8 million dollars for Gulf Coast relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He also keeps up with his greatest passion: baseball. The man who dreamed of being a professional baseball player now serves as the local Little League commissioner. The ballfields he built on his property have played host to over 350 kids on 26 teams.
Grisham’s nonfiction book, The Innocent Man (2006), recounted the real-life case of Ron Williamson, a former professional baseball player sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. Williamson was eventually released; his case exposed glaring inadequacies in the criminal justice system. John Grisham is also a board member of the Innocence Project, an organization that promotes the use of DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongly convicted. He has spoken and written publicly against America’s high rates of incarceration and is an outspoken opponent of capital punishment.
2018: The Reckoning by John Grisham. In a major novel unlike anything he has written before, Grisham takes us on an incredible journey, from the Jim Crow South to the Philippine jungles during World War II; from an insane asylum filled with secrets to the Clanton courtroom where Pete’s defense attorney tries desperately to save him.
Despite these interests and activities, Grisham has not stopped producing bestselling novels, such as The Associate and The Confession, or his 2011 comic novel, The Litigators. In 2010, he initiated a continuing series of novels for younger readers with Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer. In addition to the baseball-themed 2012 novel, Calico Joe, he has continued to craft highly successful thrillers, including The Racketeer, Sycamore Row, Gray Mountain, Rogue Lawyer and The Whistler. Camino Island, published in 2017, introduced a new type of hero in Grisham’s fiction. Bookseller Bruce Cable, a dealer in rare books, is drawn into a web of intrigue following the theft of treasured manuscripts from Princeton University.
October 18, 2022: The Boys from Biloxi: A Legal Thriller. John Grisham returns to Mississippi with the story of two sons of immigrant families who grow up as friends, but ultimately find themselves on opposite sides of the law.
His 2018 novel The Reckoning — a combination of courtroom drama and Gothic family saga — immediately landed in the number one position on The New York Times bestseller lists for both hardcover fiction and in the combined print and e-book category. Grisham published his 40th novel, The Guardians in October 2019, introducing a new protagonist: Cullen Post, an attorney who is also an Episcopal priest, seeking justice for the wrongly convicted. The Guardians, too, debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list.
2023 – John Grisham at Cove Creek Park, a multimillion-dollar youth baseball complex outside Charlottesville, Virginia. In October, he will publish The Exchange, his sequel to the book The Firm. (Photo by Whitten Sabbatini)
Grisham returned to the imaginary setting of Camino Island in the 2020 novel Camino Winds, in which his bookseller hero Bruce Cable is called upon to solve the murder of a crime novelist, a crime committed under cover of a tropical storm. Not surprisingly, the book debuted in first place on The New York Times bestseller list. Later that year, Grisham published A Time For Mercy, in which he revives the hero of his first novel, small-town lawyer Jake Brigance, who is called to defend a minor accused of killing a sheriff’s deputy. In October 2023, John Grisham is set to captivate readers with his highly anticipated novel, The Exchange, a sequel to the book that catapulted him to literary stardom over 30 years ago, The Firm. Grisham’s storytelling prowess shines in this new installment, where he revisits the character Mitch McDeere, now wealthy and living as an international lawyer in New York City.
2024: Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey reveals ten gripping, real-life tales of wrongful convictions in America. This #1 New York Times bestseller is a powerful exploration of courage, resilience, and the hard-fought battles to exonerate innocent people against great odds.
In October 2024, Grisham released Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions, a powerful nonfiction collaboration with Jim McCloskey that uncovers ten real cases of wrongful convictions in the U.S. Through these harrowing stories, Grisham and McCloskey expose systemic flaws in the justice system, from corruption to racial bias, calling for much-needed reform.
Inducted in 1993
Career
Writer
Author
Novelist
Date of Birth
February 8, 1955
“I find myself taking long walks on my farm with my wife, Renee, wondering what in the world happened,” says Grisham.
Today he one of the world’s bestselling authors, but John Grisham showed no early interest in writing. One day in 1984, three years after Grisham began practicing law in Southaven, Mississippi, he dropped by the courthouse to observe a trial. “This ten-year-old girl was testifying against a man who had raped her and left her for dead,” he says. “I never felt such emotion and human drama in my life. I became obsessed wondering what it would be like if the girl’s father killed that rapist and was put on trial. I had to write it down.”
Grisham has hardly stopped writing since then. Grisham’s first novel, A Time To Kill, was published in 1989 and sold a mere 5,000 copies. But his second, The Firm, the story of a law school grad recruited by a firm with mob connections, spent a spectacular 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Once Grisham started writing, he never stopped. Every year brings a new bestseller from the master of the legal thriller. Many of his works, including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client and The Rainmaker have been made into successful motion pictures. Read all over the world, his books have sold more that 300 million copies.
Williamsburg, Virginia
June 2, 1995
When did you decide to start writing?
The writing has come fairly late in life. I never dreamed of being a writer when I was a kid, even a student, even in college. In fact, I’d been practicing law for about three or four years in the early ’80s, when I decided to make a stab at writing a story that I’d been thinking about. And the story eventually became A Time to Kill.
John Grisham
A University of Mississippi School of Law graduate, John Grisham’s books have been translated into 42 languages.
What inspired you to begin with?
Keys to success — Vision
John Grisham: When I started all this, my motives were pure. I was not driven by greed or money. I had a story. It was a courtroom drama. I was doing a lot of courtroom work; I was a very young lawyer. But I was handling a lot of court-appointed criminal cases, in trial a lot. And I knew the criminal system, and I knew a lot about it. So I came up with a story about a murder trial, and some of it was based on personal experience, most of it was not. And I kept telling myself, I would like to be the lawyer who defended a father who murdered the two guys who raped his daughter. I think that would be a fascinating case. One thing led to another, and I was sort of consumed with this story. And one night I just said, “Okay. I’m going to try to capture it, see what I can do with words.” And that’s what happened.
It took three years to write it, and I was very disciplined about doing it. It was very much a hobby. By the time I finished it, I had developed a routine of writing every day. When I finished it, I went to the next book, which was The Firm. Once that was written, everything started changing. I wouldn’t use the word “accident,” but it certainly wasn’t planned. I never dreamed of it.
January 27, 2009: John Grisham attends Barnes & Noble Union Square to signs copies of "The Associate" in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)
January 27, 2009: John Grisham attends Barnes & Noble Union Square to sign copies of The Associate in New York.
You found the time to write, so you must have been pretty motivated.
Keys to success — Perseverance
John Grisham: The bulk of the first two books, A Time to Kill and The Firm, those books were written over a five-year period, back-to-back, from about 1984 to about 1989. The bulk was written at five o’clock in the morning, from five ’til seven in the morning. I’d get up and go to the office that early. And again, it wasn’t any fun, but it was a habit. It got to be part of the daily routine. And I remember several times being in court at nine o’clock in the morning, really tired, because writing takes a lot out of you. It’s draining. And I would do it for an hour or two in the morning, and get ready for court, and go to court. Be standing, waiting for the judge, and be really tired.
February 2, 2002: Stephen King, John Grisham, Peter Straub and Pat Conroy attend a benefit reading for actor and audiobook narrator Frank Muller at Town Hall in New York City. (Getty)
February 2, 2002: Stephen King, John Grisham, Peter Straub and Pat Conroy attend a benefit reading in New York.
Was there a moment in your career that really stands out as a turning point?
John Grisham: There have been some wonderful phone calls from New York. The biggest phone call yet was the first time, a truly magical moment. After a year of being turned down, my agent called one day in April of ’88 and said, “We have a publisher for A Time to Kill. It’s going to be a book.” At that point it had been turned down by 30-something publishers. Everybody had said no to it. He found a very small press in New York, and they wanted to buy it. That was a huge moment.
Another time, he called and said, “We’ve sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount.” It was totally unexpected, because at that time there was no book deal, it was just in manuscript form. Those are big moments. I don’t know if you sort of get jaded, or callous to success, but it’s still terribly exciting. It’s still hard to believe.
The Firm was published four years ago, so it’s been awfully quick. The Firm was not the first book, but it was the first book anybody read. My career is still in its infancy and it still feels brand new. Something happens every day that makes me stop and try to remember where I am and what’s happening.
2010: John Grisham in Munich, Germany.
2010: John Grisham opposes the death penalty — an opposition strongly manifested in the plot of The Confession.
Tell us about your family and your friends.
John Grisham: It’s easy to remember friends.
Keys to success — Integrity
When A Time to Kill was published, it was an unknown author, unknown book, unknown publisher. There was no money for promotion, so I tried to sell the book myself. And I went to a lot of book stores in the Memphis, mid-South area, and a lot of them had no time, you know? They didn’t want a new author, especially one with a publisher they’d never heard of. But there were a handful who opened their doors and said, “Sure, come in. We’ll try to sell some books, and we’ll have a party, and we’ll invite all of our customers.”
And, you know, it’s hard to forget people like that. And it’s fun now. I go back every time. I’ve gone back with every book. There are five stores. I call them — they’re my home stores. These are friends of mine, and I can’t imagine publishing a book and not going back to their stores. I mean, now the book signings last for, you know, ten or 12 hours, but you know, it’s still fun. It’s tiring, but it’s only once a year. I don’t do it every day. And there are worse things in life than signing lots of copies of your own books. I’m still gratified that people show up and wait in line to get a book signed.
May 2014: Eric Blehm, Barbara Bush, John Grisham, Maria and Neil Bush at "A Celebration of Reading," the 20th annual fundraiser benefiting the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.
May 2014: Bestselling author Eric Blehm, former First Lady Barbara Bush, John Grisham, Maria and Neil Bush at “A Celebration of Reading,” the 20th annual fundraiser benefiting the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.
And, you know…
Keys to success — Integrity
The pressure of really sudden notoriety and success, it’s good and bad. I mean, it’s something you think you’d like to have, and it’s something that’s nice. There are a lot of rewards. The good far outweighs the bad. But you catch yourself trying to remember what’s important to you, your friends and families and what you enjoyed doing years before. We have two small children, and we had a life before all this happened. And even then — we call it BF, before The Firm, that’s how we judge time — everything we did revolved around the kids, and it’s still that way. We’ve sort of regrouped as a family, and we kind of stick to ourselves, with a few friends. It makes you appreciate the friends you had, because now everybody wants to be friends. It makes you deeply appreciative of the people who are truly friends. We’ve stayed away from the success. We live in Mississippi, and in Virginia. We live in both places, but it’s country living. We try to keep it simple, and we stay away from Hollywood, New York and all those places where the attention really is.
2015: John Grisham, backed by Governor Phil Bryant, Lt. Governor Tate Reeves and U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, welcomes the crowd at the opening ceremony for the Mississippi Book Festival. (Mississippi Book Festival)
2015: John Grisham, backed by Governor Phil Bryant, Lt. Governor Tate Reeves and U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, welcomes the crowd at the opening ceremony for the Mississippi Book Festival. (Mississippi Book Festival)
Did you have any conception of the kind of success that you’ve come to?
John Grisham: It’s been one book at a time. A Time to Kill was published, but nobody bought it. About the time it was published, I was finished with The Firm. The Firm slowly became a bestseller when it was published. While it was getting this attention, I was writing the next book, which was The Pelican Brief.
Each book has built on the other. Then the movies came along and added a much heavier layer of fame and notoriety, and pressure. It’s just snowballed, but there’s no way I could have predicted that, because I can’t predict what’s going to happen next year with the movies and the books. I don’t have a feel for everything that’s coming.
February 9, 2016: Writer John Grisham and his wife, Renee, look on during a college basketball game between the Virginia Cavaliers and the Virginia Tech Hokies at John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)
February 9, 2016: Writer John Grisham and his wife, Renee, look on during a college basketball game between the Virginia Cavaliers and the Virginia Tech Hokies at John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Layton/Getty)
Keys to success — The American Dream
My parents did not have the benefit of college. They didn’t get to go to college. They were from a very rural part of the Deep South, where most of my relatives were from. College to them was always a dream. For us, it was always a requirement. We knew — because they told us — we’d go to college. And they worked very hard to pay for it, and to provide it for all of five kids. And I was the first member of my family to finish college, and to get a graduate degree in law, and to start practicing law. And for the family, that was a source of immense pride. To me, that’s the American Dream, for one generation to keep building the dream for later generations.
John Grisham, at home in Oxford, Mississippi. (© Ann States/Saba)
John Grisham at home in Oxford, Mississippi. He practiced criminal law for a decade and served in the House of Representatives in Mississippi. He describes his conversion to Christianity “the most important event in his life.”
What does the phrase, “the American Dream” mean to you?
John Grisham: It’s hard to define, but I guess I’m living it. At times I feel like I’m living a dream. My parents did not have the benefit of college. They didn’t get to go to college. They were from a very rural part of the Deep South, where most of my relatives were from. College to them was always a dream. For us, it was always a requirement. We knew — because they told us — we’d go to college. And they worked very hard to pay for it, and to provide it for all of five kids. And I was the first member of my family to finish college, and to get a graduate degree in law, and to start practicing law. And for the family, that was a source of immense pride. To me, that’s the American Dream, for one generation to keep building the dream for later generations.
My success was not planned, but it could only happen in America. We entertain the world. There are very few foreign authors that sell here. There are a lot of American authors who sell well around the world. There are very few foreign movies that anybody will watch here. Yet our movies and our music are watched and listened to around the world.
Did you have any experiences when you were a kid that inspired you?
John Grisham: There were a couple of things that were very important in my childhood. Number one, my mother did not believe in television. We just didn’t watch much of it. She just thought it was bad, and that was 30 years ago. She believed in books, and we were taught to read early. We were encouraged to read, throughout childhood and adolescence, by my mother.
We moved a lot when I was a kid, throughout the Deep South. We would always go to a new town and go to the library, get our library cards and load up with books. And we spent our time reading, reading to each other. And my mother spent a lot of time reading to us. I’ve always had a love for books and a love for literature and a love for reading. Oddly, I never thought about writing until late in life.
Was there a person who inspired you?
John Grisham: I had the benefit of some very good high school English teachers. One in particular when I was a senior in high school. I was a jock, okay. I was not a student. Although I enjoyed reading, that was about it as far as academics.
But she forced us to read good books and good writers, particularly good American writers. We weren’t too thrilled to do it initially, but she taught us how to do it. Through that, I discovered some of my favorite authors, particularly John Steinbeck. Once I had gone through all of Steinbeck’s books, I realized that I had had a wonderful experience.
I remember reading a lot of Steinbeck in high school and thinking, “I’d love to be able to write this clearly.” At the same time we were having to read Faulkner. So we had Faulkner on one hand, and Steinbeck on the other, and Steinbeck looked remarkably clear, compared to Faulkner. I can’t say that when I’m in Mississippi, but I can say it here.
What was the teacher’s name?
John Grisham: Francis McGuffey. She’s still teaching, and we still correspond. She comes to my book signings in Memphis when I’m there. I send her an autographed copy of every book. We’re still friends, still buddies.
What particular books meant a lot to you when you were young?
John Grisham: I read a lot of books when I was a kid, just for the sheer fun of reading. All the series of mysteries and books like that.
The first book I remember that really grabbed me was a book that Miss McGuffey made us read, a book called Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck. And when I read it, I really enjoyed the book. And so I went to her and said, “This is really — I like this.” And she was shocked that I would show any interest in what she was making us do. So she said, okay, read this. And the next one was Of Mice and Men. So she sort of fed the Steinbeck books to me. When I read The Grapes of Wrath — we saved that for last — I knew that was a very powerful book. And I don’t know if it had anything to do with my writing style, or me as a writer, because I wasn’t thinking about it back then. It had a lot to do with the way I viewed humanity and the struggles of little people against big people. It was a very important book for me.
What was your ambition when you were growing up?
John Grisham: To play professional baseball, like every kid, from the time I was six years old until I was 20. It took a long time for the dream to die. It took a long time to realize I didn’t have the talent to play, which is always difficult to accept.
At what point did you decide to become a lawyer, and how did you go on to become a writer?
John Grisham: There was a pivotal moment. I grew up in a very small, close-knit, Southern Baptist family, where everything was off-limits. So I couldn’t wait to get to college and have some fun. And I did for the first two years. And I regret a lot of it, because my grades were in terrible shape. I never got in serious trouble, except for my grades.
For two years of college, I was going nowhere. And before my junior year in college I said to myself, “Enough of the partying, it’s time to get busy and get serious.” And I decided to study accounting, which was a tough degree to get, and to take that and go to law school and become a tax lawyer. I had sort of a business background, or mentality, I guess. That’s what I enjoyed. And I did. At that point I just said, “Okay, it’s time to get serious.” And I was 20 years old. And at about the same time I said, “Okay, it’s time to forget about playing baseball.” I’d played baseball in junior college, and so it was time for that boyhood dream to go away. And at that point I was no longer a kid.
Sometimes giving up a dream can lead to other dreams.
John Grisham: Yeah. I had to give that up before I could really be happy pursuing something else. It had been with me so long and the talent simply was not there. I can’t tell you what made it happen, but it was a very real, definite moment, when I said, “Okay, it’s time to grow up.”
Are there personal characteristics that you think are important for success in every field?
John Grisham: I love to talk to kids and ask them where they’re going to college, and what they want to study. And so often it’s all planned. They know exactly where they’re going, what they’re going to do and where they’re going to be ten years from now. I don’t want to dampen their enthusiasm, but I want to say, “You can’t plan everything.” I never planned to write books, it was not something I ever thought about. I thought I’d be a lawyer for the rest of my life. It’s important to have goals and to work hard for them, but life has a way of presenting opportunities that you don’t really notice at first. Success a lot of times depends on whether you make a change and try something that you hadn’t planned, something new.
I give commencement speeches occasionally to colleges and high schools, and I usually dwell on that, tell the students, “Get your education and work hard, but don’t race toward the age of 22 or 23 when you’re out of college, and you’ve got the credit card, and you’ve got the BMW, and you want everything right then at the age of 23, because you’re not going to enjoy your education.” I tell kids to stay in school until they’re 30 years old. Their parents hate me for it, but nobody really takes you very seriously until you’re 30 anyway. You need to spend a lot of time in school.
What advice would you give to one of these kids if they wanted to write a novel?
John Grisham: There are certain things you can do now. I don’t know how much of it is talent. There has to be some talent there, the ability to tell stories, the ability to handle language. There are certain things you cannot do now, but there are certain things you can do now to prepare for it.
The basics of grammar and vocabulary are very important. And you tend to take it for granted, until you start trying to write. It is terribly important to read extensively. Virtually all writers I know are voracious readers still, and that is preparation. The more you read, the more you know. The more your imagination works, the more you read. And that’s — those are the tools of a good writer. You have to live. Nobody wants to hear — the world does not want to hear — a great novel from a 21 year-old. You’ve got to get a real job and get a real career, and you’ve got to go to work. And you’ve got to live and you’ve got to succeed and fail, and suffer, a little bit, or see suffering, heartache and heartbreak and all that before you really have anything to write.
If you’ve got the money, it’s nice to travel. Keep journals. Take notes about what you’re doing. You can practice writing. You can start writing now, writing stories and books, or whatever you want to write. The discipline of it is important. All those things are important. Now, can you piece them all together and tell a wonderful story? You won’t know until you try.
Thanks for talking with us. It’s been great.
You’re welcome.
This page last revised on November 11, 2024
How John Grisham turned his passion for justice into bestselling legal thrillers
CBC Radio · Posted: Mar 22, 2019 4:37 PM EDT | Last Updated: October 20, 2023
American author, attorney and activist John Grisham spoke with CBC host Eleanor Wachtel in 2019. (Stephen Myers, Doubleday)
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Writers and Company52:21
How John Grisham turned his passion for justice into bestselling legal thrillers
This fall, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. This interview originally aired on March 24, 2019.
John Grisham's books have sold 300 million copies around the world and topped the bestseller list 28 consecutive times. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages and made into hit movies, including The Firm, The Pelican Brief and A Time to Kill, which starred Matthew McConaughey in his breakout role. In 2018, Netflix adapted Grisham's only work of nonfiction, The Innocent Man, into a six-part docuseries of the same name.
30 interesting facts about legal thriller master John Grisham
In his novel, The Reckoning, Grisham re-imagines a story he encountered more than 30 years ago about a murder in small-town Mississippi. His fictionalized version centres on Pete, a cotton farmer returning from the Second World War, and the mystery surrounding his motive for the crime.
His latest title is The Exchange (After the Firm), the sequel to his 1991 bestseller, The Firm. It revisits characters Mitch and Abby McDeere more than fifteen years after they exposed the crimes of a Memphis law firm, when they once again find themselves at the center of a sinister plot.
When he's not writing legal thrillers, Grisham is active as a director of The Innocence Project, dedicated to helping the wrongly convicted. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in Toronto.
A man wearing a suit and holding a briefcase against an upside sunset and old city skyline.
Life in America's Deep South
"I was born on a cotton farm. My dad was a cotton farmer. He rented the land, as did his father before him. Those days are still vivid. I'll never forget the first few years of life — riding on the tractor with my dad to plant, plow and pick cotton. I'll also never forget my mother and grandmother working long hours to grow food. It was a rough life.
"We were lucky enough to get away from that life and go on to something better. But I know a little bit about that world of the South — the social and class structure — because of my family history. If we had not escaped the farm, when we were lucky enough to do so, I don't know where I would be today. But I wouldn't be here."
Big-time lawyer
"I initially became a lawyer to make a lot of money. In college, I came up with this goofy notion to become a tax lawyer and that got me into law school. Halfway through law school I studied tax law and realized it was the last thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
If a good lawyer was in town to try on a big case, I would cut class and go watch the trial and the lawyer.
- John Grisham
"But I'd also become enamoured with courtrooms. I really enjoyed the mock trial competitions in law school. In my last year in law school I would watch the docket at the federal court down the street.
"If a good lawyer was in town to try on a big case, I would cut class and go watch the trial and the lawyer. So I had this dream of becoming a big-time courtroom lawyer."
Righting (and writing) wrongs
"After just a few years, I was growing disenchanted with the law practice. In a small town, there are too many lawyers and it's hard to make a buck. Most of my clients were working people who couldn't pay, so most of my work was for free or for reduced fees. I then became a politician, which I hoped was going to be a big advantage.
"It turned into a disadvantage because I had to play politics with the law office to keep people happy. It just bled me dry. It just really took up so much time and energy. Even at the age of 30, I didn't see much future in the law.
"The first chapter of A Time to Kill is based on a true story that happened an hour from where I lived at the time. Back in the late 1970s, a horrible attack occurred when two white guys picked up and assaulted a little black girl. I heard about the case when I was in law school. The case became somewhat noteworthy because they sentenced the two boys to prison but not for very long. The whole community was upset, both blacks and whites.
"This gave me the inspiration for the book's first chapter. In the book, the father, of course, is the one who gets revenge."
A seed of an idea
"The Reckoning comes from a story I heard 30 years ago about a murder in a small town. I was in the state legislature in Mississippi as a 30-year-old elected official. There was a lot of downtime, and I would kill time drinking coffee and listening to stories told by my colleagues, who were tremendous storytellers.
"I heard this story about a murder in a small town in 1930s Mississippi where a prominent farmer named Pete drove into town one day and parked in front of the hardware store. He walked inside, said hello to the owner and then shot him dead. He drove back home, sat on the porch and waited for the sheriff to come get him.
That's a heck of a story. I didn't create it but I remembered it.
- John Grisham
"The sheriff questioned him, but the farmer had nothing to say so they took him to jail. There was speculation there was something going on between the victim and the man's wife, but to protect her honour and her reputation, the farmer would never say. He took it to his grave.
"That's a heck of a story. I didn't create it but I remembered it."
Writing cleanly and clearly
"Becoming a writer was not a childhood dream. I didn't study it in college. But I do recall reading Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and remember thinking I should write that clearly. And so I have always been driven to write clearly, even as a lawyer. I cut through all the extra words and verbiage and tried to make my briefs and pleadings as a lawyer read smoothly and cleanly.
"I was somewhat successful. I got compliments from judges that my writing was easy to read and told a story. And when I started writing A Time to Kill, which was the first thing I'd ever tried to write, it just kind of flowed. I told myself I wanted to write that book clearly.
"I've done that now for so many books and so many years."
John Grisham's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
What I’ve Learned: John Grisham
"If you know the final scene, it’s hard to get lost."
Interview by Brian O’KeefePublished: Nov 07, 2022 8:00 AM EST
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RYAN PFLUGER
John Grisham went from being a small-town Mississippi lawyer to a literary sensation in 1991 when his second novel, The Firm, was published, sold well millions of copies, and was later adapted into a movie. He has since written dozens of No. 1 bestsellers. Today, Grisham, 67, lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, and, in addition to his writing, serves on the board of the Innocence Project. He published his forty-eighth book, The Boys from Biloxi, in October.
Idon’t wear socks except in January.
My first real job was in a nursery, watering rosebushes for a dollar an hour. It was the most boring job in the world. But I was taught to be there promptly on time. Take the lunch break properly on time for thirty minutes. Work eight hours. Those are great lessons for a twelve-year-old kid.
Whenever we moved to a new town, our first stop was the local First Baptist Church to join. But the second stop was the local library to see how many books we could check out.
What to Read Next
My father was all for the Vietnam War. Gotta go fight the commies wherever you find them, you know? Well, as I got older and I approached the age of eighteen, the war was not over. And he got quieter.
I played one year of junior college baseball. And I sat the bench. So I went to a bigger school down the road and tried out. In the fall of 1974, I walked on at Delta State University. And I got cut. It was time to give that dream up.
You know how boys are. We’re stupid. Looking back, I wish I had gone to a school as a freshman and stayed in one place for four years and got the full dose of college life. Didn’t work out that way. No regrets—especially, you know, fifty years later.
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You can’t make any money as a small-town lawyer. Because you’re dealing with people who have problems that are enormous for them but they can’t pay your fees for their divorce or bankruptcy or whatever the problem is. You’ve got to help them, but you don’t always get paid.
The greatest trial lawyers I’ve ever met spend hours and hours writing their opening statement. That’s the first story they tell the jury. They will go over and over and over telling the story. They’ve got it memorized. And that’s something I still do.
I’ve yet to sit down in thirty-five years with nothing to say.
Don’t write the first scene until you know the final scene. If you know the final scene, it’s hard to get lost.
The goal is a thousand words a day. My goal for every legal thriller is a hundred thousand words. Each year on January 1, I’ll start a new one, with a goal of finishing by July 1. I’m almost always on time.
When you write about lawyers and law firms and trials and courts and juries and judges and appeals, there’s no shortage of material. I’ve yet to sit down in thirty-five years with nothing to say.
You watch a baseball game on television and it’s so easy to say, when a guy makes an error, that it looks bad. But to get to that point? You’ve got to be great. And right behind them are the guys in Triple-A—and you’ve got to be so good even to get there.
There are so many innocent people in prison. And most white people don’t believe that. Black people know it’s true because they’ve lived it.
It’s fairly easy to send an innocent person to prison. It’s very difficult to get one out.
This article appeared in the Oct/Nov 2022 issue of Esquire
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My parents taught me lying just makes it worse. And it still does.
After so many books, I could quit and say, “Okay, I’m retired. I’m not going to write anymore. Sorry.” I’ve never thought about doing that.
Sex is just pure physical satisfaction. You can find it almost anywhere. Love is far more complicated and far more meaningful. Combine the two and you’ve got everything.
I laugh and tell people, “I’m a famous writer in a country where nobody reads.” It’s a good level of fame because you have the brand name to sell books but people don’t recognize me.
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2018 lucien barriere literary award
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I could quit and say, “Okay, I’m retired. I’m not going to write anymore. Sorry.” I’ve never thought about doing that.
I don’t want to die with a bunch of money in the bank.
God hasn’t changed. I probably changed.
Each spring I buy a pair of real light khakis for the summer and I wear them every day until my wife yells at me. When she sees a hole or stain that won’t go away, she’ll yell at me and I’ll get another pair. That’s the way I dress.
I’m not afraid of snakes—as long as I can see ’em and get away from ’em.
The great thing about being a writer: You’re not expected to dress nice. You can wear anything to any party because you’re a writer.
It’s insanity for anybody my age to pick up golf, because I really suck at it. It’s a lot of fun being out there with friends, and I’d like to improve. But I don’t want to practice.
John Grisham Talks Hit Storylines, Morning Writing, and His First Reaction to Matthew McConaughey
The bestselling author also discusses his new book, The Exchange, in a candid G&G Reads conversation
By CJ Lotz Diego
November 16, 2023
Before a conversation with John Grisham at the Garden & Gun offices in Charleston, South Carolina, this week, contributing editor Jonathan Miles only slightly exaggerated when he introduced Grisham as the author of some forty-eight consecutive number-one bestsellers “which have sold an estimated thirty-three zillion copies worldwide.”
Their discussion, before a packed house, launched G&G Reads, the magazine’s new book club. The club’s first title is Grisham’s new The Exchange, the long-awaited sequel to his 1991 breakout hit The Firm. During the interview, Miles peppered in questions submitted by G&G Reads members, and chatted with Grisham about his early struggles to get published, some of the secrets behind his success (waking up early every morning to write, for one), and the film adaptations of some of his books. “I’ve been very lucky with Hollywood,” Grisham said. “I’ve had nine movies, and we’ve enjoyed watching all of them.”
A crowd watches John Grisham and Jonathan Miles seated on a stage
Photo: MKMC Photography
Grisham and Miles chat at the G&G offices in Charleston, South Carolina.
With his wife of more than forty years, Renee, sitting in the front row, Grisham told the story of casting a young Matthew McConaughey as the lead of Jake Brigance in the 1996 movie A Time to Kill. “I retained some controls over casting,” he explained, “because I was very concerned about who they would cast to be Jake. And it got to be really, really contentious because they had this full-blown budget, they had a really good screenplay, they had Samuel L. Jackson and Sandra Bullock, and both the Sutherlands, and Oliver Platt, all these really great actors. Great cast. They had no star.”
A person holds a copy of The Exchange
Photo: MKMC Photography
Attendees received a copy of The Exchange. See more photos of the event.
Grisham recalled that a handful of big names were thrown around. “I said, ‘Those guys are never gonna make it in a Southern courtroom with a coat and tie and fake a Southern accent, it’s just not gonna work.’” As the audience laughed, he described how lawyers even got involved. “I said ‘Go back and read the contract. I have the absolute, ultimate veto right over the casting of Jake.’ Which I could get back then.”
The film was almost ready to start shooting when director Joel Schumacher had an epiphany. “He says, ‘Wait a minute. Time out. I know a guy. He was on the set of another movie, and have you heard of, have you seen…’ [Grisham turned to his wife and asked] What was the movie, Renee? Dazed and Confused.”
Schumacher then pulled McConaughey for a screen test and overnighted the tape to the Grishams. “So Renee and I are waiting at the door for FedEx to show up,” Grisham said, “and we get the cassette, we plug it in, and there’s Matthew in the office, perfect accent—he didn’t have an accent, he has a perfect way of speaking—and he’s smoking a cigar, and I said, ‘This kid’s got it.’ Renee said, ‘I think I’m in love.’”
Garden & Gun has an affiliate partnership with bookshop.org and may receive a portion of sales when a reader clicks to buy a book. All books are independently selected by the G&G editorial team.
CJ Lotz Diego is Garden & Gun’s senior editor. A staffer since 2013, she wrote G&G’s bestselling Bless Your Heart trivia game, edits the Due South travel section, and covers gardens, books, and art. Originally from Eureka, Missouri, she graduated from Indiana University and now lives in Charleston, South Carolina, where she tends a downtown pocket garden with her florist husband, Max.
Grisham, John SOOLEY Doubleday (Fiction None) $28.95 4, 27 ISBN: 978-0-385-54768-0
Legal eagle and mystery maven Grisham shifts gears with a novel about roundball.
What possessed Grisham to stop writing about murder in the Spanish moss–dripping milieus of the Deep South is anyone’s guess, and why he elected to write about basketball, one might imagine, speaks to some deep passion for the game. The depth of that love doesn’t quite emerge in these pages, flat of affect, told almost as if a by-the-numbers biography of an actual player. As it is, Grisham invents an all-too-believable hero in Samuel Sooleymon, who plays his way out of South Sudan, a nation wrought by sectarian violence—Sooley is a Dinka, Grisham instructs, of “the largest ethnic class in the country,” pitted against other ethnic groups—and mired in poverty despite the relative opulence of the capital city of Juba, with its “tall buildings, vibrancy, and well-dressed people.” A hard-charging but heart-of-gold coach changes his life when he arrives at the university there, having been dismissed earlier as a “nonshooting guard.” Soon enough Sooley is sinking three-pointers with alarming precision, which lands him a spot on an American college team. Much of the later portion of Grisham’s novel bounces between Sooley’s on-court exploits, jaw-dropping as they are, and his efforts to bring his embattled family, now refugees from civil war, to join him in the U.S.; explains Grisham, again, “Beatrice and her children were Dinka, the largest tribe in South Sudan, and their strongman was supposedly in control of most of the country,” though evidently not the part where they lived. Alas, Sooley, beloved of all, bound for a glorious career in the NBA, falls into the bad company that sudden wealth and fame can bring, and it all comes crashing down in a morality play that has only the virtue of bringing this tired narrative to an end.
Unlike baseball, basketball has contributed little to world literature. Call this Exhibit A.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Grisham, John: SOOLEY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A654727619/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6f3cc339. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Sooley. By John Grisham. Apr. 2021.368p. Doubleday, $28.95 (97803855476801; e-book, $14.99 (9780385547710).
It's no secret that Grisham is a baseball fan, but it's not as well known that he's also an enthusiastic follower of college basketball. In his new novel, he tells the story of 17-year-old Samuel Sooleymon, a Sudanese boy who, like so many of his friends, dreams of playing basketball in the U.S. Unlike many of those friends, Sooley sees his dream come true, only to be hit by tragedy: a civil war brings devastation to his South Sudanese village, and Sooley finds himself, all the way on the other side of the world, fighting to be the best basketball player he can be so he can save his family. It's an intensely moving story, told with the same eye for character and descriptive detail Grisham brings to his crime novels. His occasional forays into general fiction are usually interesting, but this one is considerably more than that. It's skillfully written, with a deeply compelling central character and a story that is full of raw emotion and suspense. A film version seems almost obligatory, but don't wait for that.--David Pitt
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Any new Grisham novel draws readers across genres, and this one will add sports fans to his legion of devotees.
YA: The teenage lead character and the multicultural story make this one a natural for YA readers. DP.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Pitt, David. "Sooley." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 14, 15 Mar. 2021, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A656304007/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7b6c4228. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Grisham, John THE JUDGE'S LIST Doubleday (Fiction None) $22.49 10, 19 ISBN: 978-0-385-54602-7
A vigorous thriller that gets out of the courtroom and into the swampier corners of the Redneck Riviera.
Judges are supposed to dispense justice, not administer the death penalty on their own initiative. That's just what Lacy Stoltz is up against, though. The protagonist of The Whistler(2016), she's a jaded investigator for Florida's Board on Judicial Conduct, which, thanks to budget cuts, is dying on the vine, "a leaderless mess." Lacy acts on complaints, and she receives a doozy from a well-put-together Black woman who introduces herself as Margie, though she admits that's an alias. Her father, a much-respected professor of constitutional law, had retired to South Carolina and was murdered by an unknown killer. Now the coldest of cold cases, his death is a link in an evidentiary chain that only Margie--her real name is Jeri Crosby--has managed to construct. The murderer: a circuit judge sitting in Pensacola, biding his time until he can cross off the next victim on a deeply personal to-be-avenged list. Judge Bannick has more money than God and more technological goodies than Lex Luthor, but though a psycho, he puts on a good public face. Lacy is resistant at first, given that her normal brief is to investigate complaints about drunkenness or corruption, but she allows that "six murders would certainly liven up her caseload." And then some. We don't meet the killing judge until halfway through the book, and then he's a model of clinical badness in a game of cat and mouse that ends in--well, a rather frothily grisly moment. As with all his procedurals, Grisham injects professorial notes on crime and justice into the proceedings: "This country averages fifteen thousand murders a year. One-third are never solved .Since 1960, over two hundred thousand." And as ever, with one body unaccounted for, he leaves the door ajar to admit a sequel--one that, with luck, will team Lacy with the much more energetic Jeri to enact some justice of their own.
A shiny bauble of mayhem sure to please Grisham's many fans.
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"Grisham, John: THE JUDGE'S LIST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A678748474/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a35f243b. Accessed 1 May 2025.
The Judge's List. By John Grisham. Oct. 2021.368p. Knopf, $29.95 (9780385546027).
In 2016 s The Whistler, Grisham introduced lawyer Lacy Stoltz, a member of the Florida Board on Judicial Misconduct, whose investigation of a crooked judge turned up a major conspiracy. Now she's faced with a shocking accusation: a woman claims her father was murdered by a sitting judge and that he was just one of the judges victims. Could this be true? Could a veteran jurist really be a serial killer? Other investigators might shy away from taking on such a case, but not Lacy. Although she initially approaches the womans story with a healthy amount of skepticism, she soon discovers that there could be something to it, and once she's on the case, there is nothing that can deter her, not even threats against her own life. Grisham's ability to create realistic, sympathetic characters really counts here: the story isn't among his most original--the bad-judge theme has been around quite a while--but The Judges List feels fresh because Lacy herself is such a fresh character. Expect this one to hang around best-seller lists for quite a while.--David Pitt
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Grisham is back in his legal-thriller wheelhouse here, and his adoring minions won't be denied.
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Pitt, David. "The Judge's List." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 4, 15 Oct. 2021, pp. 27+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A696451940/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=84a696d2. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Grisham, John SPARRING PARTNERS Doubleday (Fiction None) $28.95 5, 31 ISBN: 978-0-385-54932-5
Three Grisham novellas show the less glorious side of the legal profession.
In the first, Homecoming, Jake Brigance is a lawyer in a small Mississippi town with too many lawyers. One day, his office receives an envelope containing a note and enough cash for a one-week vacation to Costa Rica for Jake and his wife. All he's asked to do is convey a message and relay the response. The offer/request is from Mack Stafford, an attorney who'd skipped town three years earlier with $400,000 of his clients' money, leaving behind his wife, two teenage daughters, and clients who still don't even know they've been bilked. Now he feels bad and wants to come home and reestablish contact with family. Will they want anything to do with him? No startling twists, but Mack is surprisingly sympathetic given what he's done. In Strawberry Moon, 29-year-old Cody Wallace sits on death row for a botched robbery-turned-murder committed when he was 14. His brother had pulled the trigger on the homeowners and was killed in the shootout. Over the years, Cody's lawyer has tried every legal trick and delaying tactic he could, and now it's execution day. The only hope left is clemency from the governor. Meanwhile, Cody's sole visitor has been his lawyer, although a Midwestern woman has corresponded with him and sent him books--lots of books. With execution imminent, he has one last wish that's against prison rules and could get a friendly guard fired. The last yarn, Sparring Partners, features a most dysfunctional family of lawyers. Bolton Malloy is the disbarred head of Malloy & Malloy and is serving prison time for killing his wife, a most disagreeable woman whom no one misses. Rusty and Kirk, his two lawyer sons, despise each other as well as dear old dad, but their old man has forced them to sign an agreement never to leave the firm without paying a serious penalty. Bolton hopes to get out of prison soon, but the kids hope otherwise. So while the first two stories are touching, the last is anything but. You just want everybody to slither back under a rock--or maybe under separate rocks.
Grisham's fans will enjoy these tales of betrayal, hope, and dysfunction.
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"Grisham, John: SPARRING PARTNERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A703414097/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c56e70f4. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Sparring Partners. By John Grisham. May 2022. 320p. Doubleday, $28.95 (9780385549325); e-book, $14.99 (9780385549332).
In "Homecoming," one of this trio of novellas, Grisham revisits one of his most popular characters, attorney Jake Brigance (from A Time to Kill, Sycamore Road, and A Time for Mercy). Here, Brigance is surprised to learn that a former colleague, who fled the country after stealing money from his clients, wants to come home. The story sets the reader up with certain expectations and then goes in an entirely different direction, leading to a satisfying and surprising conclusion. "Strawberry Moon," the most emotionally resonant of the three novellas, is set during the few hours remaining in the life of death row inmate Cody Wallace, who was convicted as a teenager and has spent half his existence awaiting execution. "Sparring Partners," which is most like a Grisham legal thriller, puts readers on the metaphorical battlefield as two brothers, co-owners of a struggling legal firm, are forced to hammer out a truce; the warring brothers are wonderful characters, and the story is frill of twists and turns. An absorbing collection and a real treat for Grishams fans.
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Grisham's books have sold nearly 300 million copies, a number that will take another leap forward with his first collection of novellas.--David Pitt
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Pitt, David. "Sparring Partners." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 18, 15 May 2022, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A704942981/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7999e714. Accessed 1 May 2025.
There are very few constants in life -- and it sure feels as if the number is shrinking -- but one thing readers of popular fiction can count on is that every year will bring a new John Grisham book, or two. With his latest, ''Sparring Partners,'' the prolific and megaselling novelist is offering his humble version of a changeup. The book, his 47th, is the 67-year-old's first collection of novellas. It includes three separate stories, one of which features his old standby Southern-lawyer character Jake Brigance. But while his professional life has been marked by a certain steadfastness, his personal and political evolution wasn't quite so smooth. ''I've come a long way,'' says Grisham, who was a lawyer and a politician before turning to writing. ''Once I became a lawyer, most of my clients were poor people, working people, minority people who had no money. We were on one side of the street. On the other side of the street were the people with money. Real quick I realized where I stood in life and where I was going to be in life.''
With the exception of ''Strawberry Moon,'' the material in the new book feels to me like the kind of plots and subject matter that you normally render at full length. And, to be crass, I've also heard that novellas don't sell as well as novels. So why opt for the form? Over the years, these stories keep lying around, and I realized that the birthdays are piling up and the stories are not being written. So, I said, OK, I'm going to pick out my three favorites and finish them. I'm tired of thinking about them. I emailed Stephen King and said, ''You've done several collections of novellas; how did it work?'' He said he also had a lot of stories, you're not going to be able to write them all as novels, some don't work as short stories, so you do something in the middle. That's how it all came to pass. I can play around with a baseball book or a football book or short stories or a kids' book in my spare time, but I know my readers want the legal thriller every fall.
When you know you've got to deliver a big new legal thriller every fall -- and in between you're often writing those other books -- are you ever able to abandon an idea that isn't working? Or do you just have to find a way to make it work? I've never had the situation where I wrote myself into a corner I couldn't get out of. At the same time, with every book I reach a point late in the game where I have doubts about the story and get nervous, even frightened, about Who's going to believe this stuff? I'm going through it right now with ''The Boys From Biloxi.'' My goal each year with each legal thriller is to write about 100,000 words. That's going to produce a novel, when published, that's about 350 pages. To me, that's ideal. You don't need a big thick book for a thriller. ''The Boys From Biloxi'' -- I'm at 120,000 right now and sweating, because I have a lot left to cover to get to the end. So, yeah, those are issues that come up. But I cannot squeeze a novel out of every idea. A perfect example is the opioid crisis. It's right down my alley because it's tons of litigation, corporate bad behavior, all kinds of bad guys. I've been itching to write that book, but I haven't been able to get my head around a story that I could do in 100,000 words. It's just so big. Guantánamo's another one. I've been collecting research for 20 years. We've kept prisoners down there for 15 years without charging them with any crime. There's a lot of lawyers who spend time down there trying to correct a terrible situation. It's also right down my alley because it's the legal system, but again, I can't get my head around that story.
This is a little left-field, but I was fascinated by the fact that as a young man, you held office in the Mississippi Legislature. Could the 28-year-old version of you be elected in Mississippi today? At that time I was -- I'm not going to say conservative. I was a moderate Democrat. Today that person doesn't exist in the South. If I ran today, I would hope that I would run as a progressive Democrat -- and I would not be elected. I have friends who hold public office in Mississippi who had to switch from Democrat to Republican to keep their jobs. If you have the D by your name, you're not going to be elected. It has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. Also, it ought to be against the law in any state for a 28-year-old to be elected to the state legislature. I see these guys -- the guy from North Carolina?
Madison Cawthorn. Yeah. Just got beat. It shows you what happens when a 26-year-old who's off leash gets elected. He needed to be called home. You've got to be at least 30 years old and have some maturity before you get that job. I didn't do any damage in my eight years, but there's not much of a record to brag about. I didn't do a lot of good.
What was the most morally difficult decision you had to make as a politician or a practicing lawyer? I'll tell you a story. A 15-year-old girl in my church got pregnant. Her parents were devastated. Strict Southern Baptist. Small town. They were terrified people were going to find out. They came to me before they went to the minister because they were talking about adoption, the laws. Abortion terrified them. The father was 15 years old, too, so getting married was out of the question. I remember thinking, These people are leaning on me way too much. I was a 27-year-old kid, one year out of law school. They think I'm wise. I'm not ready for this. The parents weren't a whole lot older than I was -- in their early 40s, I guess. They reached a point where they trusted me, and I'm thinking, I don't want to be in this room. I finally said: ''Let's get the minister involved. You people need help big time, and I'm not giving it to you.'' My point is, I realized that on the abortion issue, that was a decision to be made by that family -- that girl and the parents and nobody else. Nobody else should be in the room.
Including the government? No government, no lawmaker, no judge. That's when I began to realize what's at stake with abortion. I'm opposed to abortion. I didn't want her to get an abortion, because the baby was going to be healthy -- and the baby did make a great gift for someone else. She was able to leave and go live with an aunt in another town, have the baby well cared for, adopt it out. She came back, the family rallied, the church rallied. Made the best of a bad situation, and somebody got a beautiful baby. But there were times when I was thinking the quickest solution would be an abortion. I didn't say that, but it was a quandary I was in because I was getting way too much input. That had a big impact on me as a lawyer, because you realize the influence you have. The law degree is a powerful tool. You can do a lot of good things. That's the fun part of being a lawyer, when you help people. I was not a very good lawyer.
Why not? You've got to be kind of tough on the business end, and I could never say no to people who were in trouble, especially people I knew in the community. When you take everything that walks in the door, you're going to go broke. That was my downfall. At the same time, I had strong ambitions about being a skilled courtroom lawyer. That was my goal, inspired by some great old-fashioned country trial lawyers in Mississippi I knew. I was never afraid of going to court. Most lawyers are. A lot of them are afraid to try a case in front of a jury, but I thrived on that. I dreamed of being so good that people with really good cases -- injury cases or wrongful-death cases or medical-malpractice cases -- would come to me and I would have the chance to make some money, which I never did.
You said that you're opposed to abortion. For religious reasons? I've just never been able to stomach the idea of abortion on demand or women having multiple abortions just because they get pregnant. And I've always thought that late-term abortion, partial-birth abortions were something that we should not tolerate because the fetus is viable. I've always been turned off by that notion of abortion. I guess it's probably religious grounds. But at the same time you don't know what you're going to do until you're in that situation. That's when it becomes a matter of choice.
What political positions did you hold when you were 28 that you don't hold now? Death penalty, for sure.
You used to believe in it? Big time. I'm in favor of tougher gun control. I am much more suspicious of the police and prosecutors because I've seen so many wrongful convictions. Also, race relations: I grew up in the Jim Crow South. A very segregated, racist society was almost in my DNA. It's a long struggle to overcome that and to look back at the way I was raised and not be resentful toward my parents and other people who helped raise me for their extreme racism. It was such a hard right-wing, racist society that I grew up in. The Baptist Church was that way too back then. I've come a long way. I have a lot of friends and even kinfolk who never tried to move beyond the racism. But I try every day. It's been an ongoing, gradual transformation. My wife was another factor, because she grew up in North Carolina, and it was not as hard-core racist as Mississippi. She and her parents were much more tolerant. So she had a big influence on me. You know, we're all tribalists. We all want to be around our people or believe in our people, and it's often too hard to get beyond that. It's still a struggle for me.
Has your sense of the South as a literary setting changed? To my mind, the open resurgence of racist violence makes a book like ''A Time to Kill'' read even more disturbingly today than it did when I first read it in the mid-90s. It's changed in many ways. That story is based on an actual assault that happened in the 1970s in a small town not too far from where I lived and went to law school. When I wrote that story, I was 30 years old and had never written before. I can't tell you there was a lot of careful forethought with ''A Time to Kill.'' I didn't think about the portrayal of Southern Blacks and Southern whites in a small town. That was just my world. At the same period of time, in 1988, I was back from my second term at the Legislature. We had a progressive young governor, a progressive young House speaker. We thought finally Mississippi could change things. We were on the cusp of this progressive revolution. We believed it. Thirty-four years later, it's astonishing how far backward the state has gone. The politics there are very displeasing to me.
Let me shift gears: This could be apocryphal, but I heard that you and Michael Crichton used to have some one-upmanship over money. Each of you wanted to be paid a dollar more than the other guy. Is that true? In the 1990s, for about five years in a row, my agent would take my latest manuscript -- ''Pelican Brief,'' ''The Client,'' ''The Chamber,'' ''The Rainmaker'' -- to Hollywood, get the studios in a room and have an auction. And when they paid, they paid millions. I don't know what was actually said because I wasn't there, but it was like, ''Crichton got this amount; we want more.'' It was back and forth. We were gaming the system big time. It was working beautifully -- until it stopped. I sold the film rights to ''The Runaway Jury'' in 1996 to New Regency for a record amount. I can't get a fraction of that today. You can say, Well, we choked the golden goose, but all those films made money. Then Hollywood changed. I don't understand that world. Nobody understands that world. There's no rules. We learned years ago, do not believe a word until they start filming. ''Runaway Jury'' was actually the last big contract I got. I helped write the script, which was a huge mistake. Joel Schumacher was the director. We had Sean Connery, Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton ready to start filming. It was a done deal, and Joel Schumacher jumped off the bus. The whole cast walked away. It took years to make that movie.
Why was it a mistake to work on the script? I'm not a screenwriter. It's not something I enjoy doing. One of the most frustrating parts is the teamwork. You get notes from people who don't have a clue, who do not understand the basics of storytelling. You wonder if they even make movies. The worst note I got -- it's a great story. In 1993, '94, somewhere in there, ''The Firm,'' ''The Pelican Brief'' and ''The Client'' came out in the span of about 12 months. All three books were at the top of the list, along with ''A Time to Kill,'' which had been rediscovered. Things were hopping. I was finishing ''The Chamber,'' and this was a stupid thing we did: A big-time Hollywood guy said, ''OK, we want to buy your next book right now sight unseen.'' I sent the manuscript, what I had, and this studio honcho read the first draft of an incomplete manuscript and wasn't too crazy about it. Which really pissed me off. Suddenly this guy's a literary critic? He sent a faxed note, I believe, to my agent at the time and said, ''We can't buy this book for a movie unless Grisham will promise three love scenes and a happy ending.'' [Laughs.] If I ever write a Hollywood tell-all, that's the title of my book: ''Three Love Scenes and a Happy Ending.''
Do you think about your critical legacy as a writer? When you get started in the business and you have some success, like I did with ''The Firm,'' you want to be taken seriously as a writer, but you have to be honest with yourself. You can't sell books and be loved by critics. It's not going to happen. There are very few literary authors who sell a lot of books. The best seller for a literary novel is 25,000 copies. Fifty max. If you do sell a lot of books, you're dismissed by critics. So I decided a long time ago, I'll take the money and run. You talk about legacy? I don't care. I'm going to be dead and gone.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the Talk columnist.
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PHOTOS: PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY MAMADI DOUMBOUYA) (MM11); Below: John Grisham in Mississippi in 1996. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE ELLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS) (MM12); Opposite page: Matthew McConaughey and Samuel L. Jackson in ''A Time to Kill,'' the 1996 movie based on Grisham's first novel. (PHOTOGRAPH BY WARNER BROS., VIA EVERETT COLLECTION) (MM13)
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Marchese, David. "John Grisham still struggles to overcome his upbringing. 'It was such a hard-right-wing, racist society that I grew up in. I've come a long way.'." The New York Times Magazine, 26 June 2022, p. 11(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A708251683/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3d181a2f. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Grisham, John THE BOYS FROM BILOXI Doubleday (Fiction None) $29.95 10, 18 ISBN: 978-0-385-54892-2
Friends turn foes in this Mississippi mix of courtroom and crime.
In 1960, 12-year-olds Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco are Little League fast-balling all stars and great friends in the Gulf Coast city of Biloxi, Mississippi. They'd love to make it to the big leagues one day, but alas, this story isn't Field of Dreams. The lads' lives diverge dramatically: Keith studies hard at Ole Miss, becomes an attorney, and sets up a law practice, while Hugh thrives in a seedy underworld of strip joints, honky-tonks, prostitution, and "unchecked vice" along "the poor man's Riviera." The Category 5 Hurricane Camille flattens Biloxi in 1969 and gives Keith many clients from cheated insurance policyholders. Unfortunately, Camille doesn't clean up the local underworld so much as rearrange it. So Keith decides to run for district attorney and put criminals behind bars. At first, corrupt county sheriff Fats Bowman isn't worried. "Need I remind you," he tells his gang, "that the graveyard is full of politicians who promised to clean up the Coast?" But he and Hugh soon feel the heat from Keith, and they fight back hard. Plenty of murders stoke the story's engine, naturally leading to courthouse scenes where the author excels. But how far will Hugh Malco go to keep Biloxi dirty and profitable? He wouldn't try to hurt his old pal, would he? This is a multigenerational tale also starring Keith's and Hugh's fathers, Jesse and Lance. Perhaps because the novel spans decades, a lot of material feels like summary--readers quickly learn that many residents are of Croatian descent, and there are barely enough mentions of Black people to acknowledge their existence. The interpersonal dynamics make the story, because attentive readers will suss where the plot is going from a country mile away. For one thing, it's a straight line save for one humongous surprise. But the author is always an engaging storyteller even when he could add another twist or two.
Not vintage Grisham but still a worthy yarn.
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"Grisham, John: THE BOYS FROM BILOXI." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A719982969/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ff00b24d. Accessed 1 May 2025.
* The Boys from Biloxi. By John Grisham. Oct. 2022.464p. Doubleday, $29.95 (9780385548922); e-book (9780385548939).
Keith Rudy and Hugh Maleo were born a month apart in Biloxi, Mississippi, in the 1960s. They were best friends who played baseball together, and they might have remained close were it not for their fathers: Hugh's dad wound up being a big man in Biloxi's thriving organized crime world; Keith's father, on the other hand, was a crusading anti-crime prosecutor. As sons will do, each followed in his father's footsteps. Now, a tragedy sets the two men on a direct collision course, and nothing, not even a friendship that once was, will stop the war that is coming. Naturally, Grisham's latest is a legal thriller, complete with a riveting courtroom showdown, but it's also much more than that. It's a family saga reminiscent of Jeffrey Archer and Dennis Lehane, and in its exploration of the gray area between absolute right and absolute wrong, it frequently has the feel of a Don Winslow novel. Grisham has created some of his most memorable characters here (the supporting cast is especially rich and meaty), and readers will very quickly find themselves completely invested in the story and the lives of everyone who inhabits it.--David Pitt
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Grisham's legions will follow him anywhere, but they will be especially thrilled to find him at the top of his game this time.
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Pitt, David. "The Boys from Biloxi." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 4, 15 Oct. 2022, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A732242570/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8649f355. Accessed 1 May 2025.
The Exchange: After 'The Firm'
John Grisham. Doubleday, $29.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-385-54895-3
Grisham's disappointing sequel to The Firm, set 15 years after the events of that 1991 blockbuster, isn't worth the three-decade wait. After extricating himself from a Tennessee law firm run by the mob, Mitch McDeere has begun a new life in New York City with his wife, Abby. Mitch has become a partner at Scully & Pershing, "the premier international [law] firm on the planet," allowing him and Abby to enjoy a comfortable existence on the Upper West Side with their eight-year-old twin boys. That stability gets shaken when Mitch is sent to Libya to represent Lannak, a Turkish construction company that's been stiffed hundreds of millions of dollars by Libyan dicrator Muammar Gaddafi. Despite extensive security precautions, Mitch's team comes under attack by Libyan forces; the fallout claims multiple lives, puts the McDeeres' twins in peril, and nudges Abby to abandon her post as a cookbook editor to try and save her husband. Grisham conjures some suspense, but nothing here deepens or complicates his original characterizations--it often feels like a somewhat loopy standard-issue legal thriller has been papered over with characters from The Firm. It's a letdown. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Co. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Exchange: After 'The Firm'." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 34, 21 Aug. 2023, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A763459886/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=80c9084c. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Grisham, John THE EXCHANGE Doubleday (Fiction None) $29.95 10, 17 ISBN: 9780385548953
In this sequel to The Firm (1991), star attorney Mitch McDeere tries to rustle up ransom for a kidnapped colleague in Libya.
In The Firm, he barely escaped the clutches of the corrupt law firm Bendini, Lambert & Locke. Now it's 15 years later and Mitch is living in New York and is a partner at Scully & Pershing, the world's largest law firm. He's frustrated that his Alabama and Tennessee death row clients keep getting the needle, except for the latest one who supposedly hanged himself in his cell. He doesn't want to take any more of these cases, so he agrees to help out on a lawsuit for Luca Sandroni, a Scully partner in Rome who's dying of pancreatic cancer. The client is Lannak, a major Turkish construction company that's suing the government of Libya for an unpaid debt of $400 million. Please let my daughter, Giovanna, come and help you, Luca asks Mitch. She's an associate in the firm's London branch. It's 2005, the time of Muammar Gaddafi, who came up with the harebrained idea of building the "Great Gaddafi Bridge in central Libya, over an unnamed river yet to be found," Luca says. (It's true!) Mitch plans to see the bridge, but he comes down with a wicked case of food poisoning, so Giovanna volunteers to go instead. Soon she's been kidnapped, and her guards and driver are murdered. In Manhattan, a mysterious woman tells Mitch's wife, Abby, that the price of Giovanna's return is $100 million, and she will die if anyone involves the government or police. Can Scully & Pershing put their hands on that much dough? And who are they dealing with? Mitch isn't even certain whether Gaddafi is behind the crime or whether it's some unknown gang. Mitch and Abby come across as sympathetic and credible, while other characters are no deeper than they need to be. The story moves at a fast pace, leaving a trail of bodies in its wake.
A tense legal thriller with nary a courtroom scene.
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"Grisham, John: THE EXCHANGE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A762669074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=510d0ef3. Accessed 1 May 2025.
The Exchange: After the Firm. By John Grisham. Oct. 2023.36p. Doubleday, $29.99 (9780385548953); e-book (9780385548960).
Remember Mitch McDeere? In 199 l's The Firm, the novel that made Grisham a literary superstar, McDeere and his wife, Abby, brought down a Memphis law firm and sent several people to prison. Now, 15 years later (many of them spent in hiding), Mitch and Abby are settled comfortably in Manhattan, where Mitch is a partner at a major law firm. A request from a client in Italy plunges Mitch into another complex plot that puts his life, and his wife's, at risk. This novel has all the makings of a top-flight thriller, as one expects from Grisham, yet something feels off. Unusually for the author, the story takes a long time to get moving. There's a lengthy setup, including a detour back to Memphis that seems to exist only to reveal what happened to Mitch immediately after the events of The Firm, and the writing feels lethargic. Devoted Grisham fans will want to read this, but casual readers may well give it a miss. A serviceable but disappointing offering from a usually excellent storyteller.--David Pitt
[HD] HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Grisham's mi a crime-fiction favorite and this return to a key character will bring in the fans.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
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Pitt, David. "The Exchange: After the Firm." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 2, 15 Sept. 2023, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767773013/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=889dd464. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Preston, Douglas FOURTEEN DAYS Harper/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $32.00 2, 6 ISBN: 9780358616382
A Decameron-esque storytelling collaboration with a Covid-19 premise.
Thirty-six authors contributed to this lively and predictably somewhat uneven work of fiction sponsored by and benefiting the Authors Guild Foundation, styled as an unclaimed manuscript found in New York's lost property office. The narrative within is set on the rooftop of a Lower East Side "six-floor walk-up with the farcical name of the Fernsby Arms, a decaying crapshack tenement that should have been torn down long ago," per the lively frame story penned by Douglas Preston in the persona of Yessenia Grigorescu, the building's super. From a notebook left by her predecessor in the job, Yessie knows the tenants by evocative sobriquets: The Lady With the Rings, Amnesia, Eurovision, Hello Kitty, the Poet, Vinegar, and so forth. They come up to the roof at 7 p.m. to participate in the huzzah for health care workers, which was a nightly ritual during Manhattan's lockdown, and then settle into the routine of sharing stories, each written by a different author. One is constantly flipping to the backmatter to see who wrote what; though not all authors are household names, plenty are--Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Diana Gabaldon, John Grisham, Erica Jong, Tommy Orange, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, Meg Wolitzer, and more--though it's not always the big names who contribute the best work. Fortunately, Preston's frame story keeps everything moving. Day One gets off to a rollicking start, with stories from Merenguero's Daughter and The Therapist, actually Maria Hinojosa and Celeste Ng. Anchored in Dominican and Chinese culture, respectively, these stories introduce a theme of diversity that's one of the joys of the book. There are ghost stories, a war story, many tales of betrayal and revenge, and a report on Shakespeare's plague experience by scholar James Shapiro. Little to no information is provided about the process behind the book, how contributors were chosen, etc. Since celebrity-watching is part of the draw, that could have been fun.
A multicultural tribute to the New York lockdown experience. Many parts are moving and/or funny; others, easy to skip.
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"Preston, Douglas: FOURTEEN DAYS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A776005454/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c226d6a. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Fourteen Days
Edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston. Harper, $32 (384p) ISBN 978-0-358-61638-2
This beguiling novel of the Covid-19 pandemic was coauthored by 36 members of the Authors Guild, including Atwood, Preston, John Grisham, and Celeste Ng. The loosely connected narrative portrays a group of tenants who regularly convene on the rooftop of their New York City apartment building during the lockdown to share stories with one another. It begins on Mar. 31, 2020, with the arrival of a new unnamed super, who inherits a handbook irom her predecessor with a list of the current tenants identified by their nicknames. They include "Whitney," a librarian who works at the Whitney Museum and tells a ghost story about a fallen soldier at the Alamo. There's also "Maine," an ER doctor who's visiting from Maine to help with the overload of Covid cases, and who shares a story about a nun's ability to predict patients' time of death at the doctor's Maine hospital. As the weeks go by, the super declines to share a story of her own until the final evening on April 13, when her revelation casts the tenants' situation in a new light. Though the authors' contributions aren't identified until the end notes, the reader senses various shifts in style and voice, which can be welcome or jarring, depending on one's taste. Still, fans of literary puzzles will find this worthwhile. (Feb.)
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"Fourteen Days." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 51, 18 Dec. 2023, p. 61. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A779652475/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=06152df4. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Grisham, John CAMINO GHOSTS Doubleday (Fiction None) $20.96 5, 28 ISBN: 9780385545990
A descendant of enslaved people fights a Florida developer over the future of a small island.
In 1760, the slave ship Venus breaks apart in a storm on its way to Savannah, and only a few survivors, all Africans, find their way safely to a tiny barrier island between Florida and Georgia. For two centuries, only formerly enslaved people and their descendants live there. A curse on white people hangs over the island, and none who ever set foot on it survive. Its last resident was Lovely Jackson, who departed as a teen in 1955. Today--well, in 2020--a developer called Tidal Breeze wants Florida's permission to "develop" Dark Isle, which sits within bridge-building distance from the well-established Camino Island. The plot is an easy setup for Grisham, big people vs. little people. Lovely's revered ancestors are buried on Dark Isle, which Hurricane Leo devastated from end to end. Lovely claims the islet's ownership despite not having formal title, and she wants white folks to leave the place alone. But apparently Florida doesn't have enough casinos and golf courses to suit some people. Surely developers can buy off that little old Black lady with a half million bucks. No? How about a million? "I wish they'd stop offering money," Lovely complains. "I ain't for sale." Thus a non-jury court trial begins to establish ownership. The story has no legal fireworks, just ordinary maneuvering. The real fun is in the backstory, in the portrayal of the aptly named Lovely, and the skittishness of white people to step on the island as long as the ancient curse remains. Lovely has self-published a history of the island, and a sympathetic white woman named Mercer Mann decides to write a nonfiction account as well. When that book ultimately comes out, reviewers for Kirkus (and others) "raved on and on." Don't expect stunning twists, though early on Dark Isle gives four white guys a stark message. The tension ends with the judge's verdict, but the remaining 30 pages bring the story to a satisfying conclusion.
Fine Grisham storytelling that his fans will enjoy.
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"Grisham, John: CAMINO GHOSTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789814870/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3046027d. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Grisham, John FRAMED Doubleday (NonFiction None) $30.00 10, 8 ISBN: 9780385550444
Ten cases of egregious miscarriages of justice and their aftermaths.
Bestselling novelist Grisham teams up with McCloskey, the founder of an organization that works to free the wrongfully convicted, to spotlight 10 cases in which innocent people were falsely accused of a crime, went through trials marked by various sorts of bias and misconduct, and were unjustly incarcerated. Grisham and McCloskey alternate the book's 10 chapters to show guiltless suspects being victimized by corrupt police officers and detectives, dishonest government officials, racist and/or unsympathetic jurors, untrustworthy witnesses, incompetent doctors, and underprepared lawyers. Grisham's cases include the story of the Norfolk Four, Navy sailors browbeaten by detectives into confessing to a rape/murder in 1997, and the ordeal of three men convicted of killing a 70-year-old woman, based on the testimony of a police informant saving himself from doing time and despite all three being exonerated by DNA testing. McCloskey's chapters profile individuals he has worked with, among them Clarence Brandley, a Black janitor convicted by an all-white jury of murdering a white 16-year-old volleyball player; and Ellen Reasonover, a witness who became a suspect in the murder of a gas station attendant when the police basically pressured two women to testify that she had confessed to them. Many of these cases were brought in front of judges based on police hunches, which they buttressed by manipulating uneducated and impressionable witnesses and defendants, suppressing evidence, and in some cases coercing confessions. The list of perpetuated wrongs is endless, and the co-authors are empathetic to the plight of people who had nothing to do with the crimes they were accused of committing. The truth eventually came out in these cases, but that does little to lessen the impact of this sobering look at what happens when we turn a blind eye to injustice.
A powerful and infuriating must-read about ineptitude and injustice in America's legal system.
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"Grisham, John: FRAMED." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504531/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2657af38. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.
By John Grisham and Jim McCloskey.
Oct. 2024. 368p. Doubleday, $30 (9780385550444);
e-book (9780385550451). 364.1097.
Framed, which looks at ten miscarriages of justice involving a total of 21 defendants, is cowritten by Grisham and Jim McCloskey, the founder of Centurion, which since the early 1980s has been dedicated to freeing people who have been wrongly convicted. The authors relate stories that utterly boggle the mind. In the book's first essay, the police, lacking hard evidence, keep adding suspects until they're claiming seven men (some of whom don't know each other) committed the crime together. The authors spend little time on the processes that eventually freed the wrongly convicted people; they focus instead on the processes by which the police railroaded the defendants--lying to them, coercing confessions, manufacturing proof of guilt where none actually existed. For regular readers of crime nonfiction, the book confirms what the reader already knows: people are sometimes deliberately put behind bars for crimes they didn't commit. Readers unfamiliar with the genre--those, perhaps, picking up the book because Grisham's name is on the cover--will be shocked and outraged, which is precisely the response the authors were looking for.
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Legal-thriller star Grisham is the hook, but the true-crime topic will also be a big draw.
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Pitt, David. "Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 1, Sept. 2024, p. 6. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829860599/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=71980d51. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions
John Grisham and Jim McCloskey. Doubleday, $30 (368p) ISBN 978-0-385-55044-4
Bestseller Grisham (The Exchange) teams up with Centurion Ministries founder McCloskey (When the Truth Is All You Have), whose nonprofit works to exonerate wrongly accused individuals, to tell 10 such stories in this gripping account. In alternating chapters, Grisham and McCloskey cover cases with a variety of stakes and backgrounds--some involve forced confessions, others faulty forensics. Most chilling is the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man convicted of killing his three daughters by setting fire to their house, who was executed in 2004, just before a new forensics report went public, confirming that the lethal fire wasn't arson. Not all the stories are so bleak: Grisham opens with a detailed account of the "Norfolk Four," Navy sailors who were given nearly $5 million by the Virginia government in 2017 after their wrongful convictions for a rape and murder. Elsewhere, McCloskey traces the decades-long saga of soldier Mark Jones and his friends, who were exonerated of a killing that took place on the night of Jones's 1992 bachelor party. Grisham's narrative gifts come in handy--his chapters are slightly more propulsive than Jones's--but both men deliver a series of thoroughly researched spellbinders. Readers will find this equal parts fascinating and infuriating. Agent: David Gernert, Gernert Co. (Oct.)
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"Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 33, 2 Sept. 2024, p. 58. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812513319/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=48b41adb. Accessed 1 May 2025.