From out of obscurity, Grisham has exploded into commercial supernova. Within 24 months he has placed four thrillers on the best-seller lists, launching himself into the company of Stephen King, Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel. Next week “The Client,” with a prepublication run of 1.23 million hardcovers, will open at No. 1 on the fiction list. New Regency Productions has already paid $2.5 million for film rights to the book, Grisham’s third straight megabuck sale to Hollywood. Next summer the afterburner from the first of the movies-“The Firm,” starring Tom Cruise-should propel his book sales (19 million now in print) right into the ionosphere. All of this from a nice guy who in the age of omni-sex and mega-gore doesn’t want to write anything that might embarrass his mother or children.
In his publicity shots Grisham, 38, has the blue eyes and killer smile of an “L.A. Law” legal stud. But the real Grisham wears rumpled Dockers, shaves once a week-on Sunday, just before church-and coaches a Little League baseball team. A few years ago he and his wife, Renee, 32, lived in a small house where every fresh coat of paint or new stick of furniture could be dated to a case he had won. Now they have built a new Victorian house on a hill and 70 acres outside Oxford (“We wanted something that looked old, but where the toilets flush”). But millions haven’t spoiled them. Grisham’s idea of luxury is owning a Chevrolet pickup and a Jeep Cherokee. And just when you begin to wonder whether Renee and her interior decorator might be overdoing it some, she tells you the exquisite antique brass boxes on the table in her parlor had to be metal so it would be all right for the kids to drop them on the floor.
Grisham is a straight arrow making his way along a very crooked path-a world of sleazy lawyers, fathead politicians and hotdog G-men where something always stinks just below the surface of wealth and respectability. Grisham’s law is as simple as Aesop and as old as Scheherazade: bore ’em and you die. In “The Client” his hero is Mark Sway, an 11-year-old who tries to stop a suicide only to learn a mob secret that could cost him his life. To save himself from the bad guys-and the good guys-Sway pays $1, all he has, to hire Reggie Love, 52, a street lawyer with a divorcee’s past and a grandmother’s soul. Dodging Mafia hoods, crazy neighbors and the police, vowing to join a health club and get in better shape if she ever gets out alive, Reggie wonders whether she is “too old for this nonsense. The things lawyers do.”
It was those things that drove Grisham right into fiction. “I’m pretty cynical about the legal profession,” he says. “Thrilled to be out of it.” “A Time to Kill,” his first and best novel, is also his most autobiographical. In Jake Brigance, you find the distillation of Grisham’s own experience as a small-town ham-and-egger around the De Soto County courthouse. Before an all-white jury, Brigance defends a black Viet vet who took an M-16 and blew away two crackers who raped his 10-year-old daughter. Grisham took three years to write it, getting up at 5 a.m. and scribbling in a Sparco notebook, the kind court reporters use. “My motives were pure when I wrote ‘A Time to Kill’,” he says. “It’s better because you can almost smell the biscuits and the eggs and the grits and hear the chatter in the Coffee Shop; the people are better, the setting is better; you can feel the sweat sticking to their shirts in the July heat around the courthouse.”
But the book didn’t sell, so Grisham wrote his second novel, “The Firm,” as “a naked stab at commercial fiction.” He tells the story of Mitchell Y. McDeere, Harvard Law, seduced by an $80,000 starting salary and a black BMW into joining a top-drawer law firm that turns out to be a money laundry for the mob. Into this tale Grisham poured his own contempt for corporate lawyers in $1,200 suits who pay for their $245 Cole Haan loafers and solid-cherry desks by billing $300 an hour for 30-hour days. He wrote “The Pelican Brief,” partly to convince Renee, his most important critic, that he could invent a strong woman. When the world’s deadliest terrorist bumps off two Supreme Court justices, it is left to Darby Shaw, a Tulane law student, to figure out a plot the FBI can’t-and the White House won’t-unravel. It’s the quintessential Grisham formula: “You take some horrible, mean, vicious, nasty conspiracy over here,” he says. “You put a very sympathetic hero or heroine in the middle of it, you reach a point where their lives are at stake-and you get them out of it.”
Not exactly “Crime and Punishment”? Grisham pleads nolo contendere. He puts on no literary airs. And yet … something seems to be eating him. “I’m concerned about Little John,” says H. R. Garner, an old friend and lawyer who has noticed “a little bit of a brooding, moody side” to Grisham. “He gets melancholy.” With 19 million books in print? With $4.4 million in movie deals? William Faulkner might have been Oxford’s most celebrated citizen, who won the Nobel Prize and two Pulitzers, but his first four novels sold an average of 2,000 each, and the highest he ever got on the best-seller list was No. 10 with “The Reivers” in 1962. So what’s eating Grisham? “These legal thrillers are driving me nuts,” he says, a confession that should give his publishers heartburn. And Oxford bookseller Richard Howorth, whose grandfather once gave Faulkner a D in English, warns literary sourpusses not to do the same with Grisham. “Anyone who dismisses Grisham as ‘commercial’,” he says, “is making a big mistake.”
Grisham was a writer made, not born. His father worked for a construction company, shuttling the family around the Deep South. Grisham says, “We’d move into a small town and the first thing we’d do is join a local Baptist church, the second was go to the library and get our library cards and check out all the books we were allowed.” His eighth-grade teacher noticed “special qualities” in him; prime among them were fierce self-confidence and a drive to be No. 1. But he devoted those resources to baseball. Then one day, halfway through Mississippi State, he had “one of those awakenings” and started reading The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Fortune. He got a degree in accounting and resolved to become a tax lawyer.
But after his first tax course, he said to himself, “Never again will I get near that stuff.” The code was horrendously complicated, the theory changed every day, the result was “Fill in the blanks and you pay.” In moot court, he discovered that he was “very, very good on my feet.” When Paul Scott, a classmate, enlisted him to play Slimey Caldwell, a town drunk accused of murder, Grisham turned up with a scraggly beard, a T shirt that said DRINK TILL YOU PUKE and an attitude so convincing that Scott had to argue like Darrow to defend him. Grisham’s feel for the dramatic would come in handy later on.
Grisham acquired honestly the gritty, street-lawyer touch of his thrillers. In his first jury trial, he was paid $1,000 to defend a husband who had plugged six hollow-point bullets into his wife’s boyfriend. As it happened, the dead man had pulled a tiny .22 and fired one shot that bounced off the husband’s chest. Grisham got him off on self-defense. The trick was to convince the 12 in the jury box that some people just deserve killing. He couldn’t actually say that, of course. He had to send “Subtle messages,” good training for a writer. But he had to give up criminal law, “because it’s impossible to feed your family if you are representing garden-variety criminals.”
Civil law offered Grisham somewhat richer compensation. He won one of the largest damage settlements in the history of De Soto County for a kid burned over 92 percent of his body by an exploding water heater. Grisham was so pleased he kept the water heater in a glass case in his office. But he “took a long, hard look at litigation” and decided that wasn’t for him, either.
One day he came up the back steps of the De Soto County courthouse, into the big courtroom and right by a defendant charged with rape. No one had stopped Grisham. Suddenly it hit him: if the victim had been Grisham’s little girl, “this guy would be dead.” He would have shouted, “I did it. Give me the same jury. Let’s go to trial.” The story became an obsession. He began to write. Eventually, after 25 rejections, he sold his novel for $15,000. The run was 5,000 copies. He bought 1,000 himself. Then, heart pounding, he went down to Square Books and asked Howorth for a book party. “Look,” said Howorth, “if we invite your mama and your wife, your friends and all your relatives, we will do well to sell 50 copies.” That’s just what happened.
“In those days, I never even thought about how I was going to hook my readership,” he says. He did now. This time he wanted nothing regional, no Southern novel. “Three Days of the Condor” was his favorite movie. He had developed a fascination for normal people suddenly thrown on a run for their lives. In a copy of Writer’s Digest he found an article on the rules of suspense. What he was after was something very fast, very entertaining, episodic and highly visual, long on dialogue, short on symbol: a thriller.
The next step, “always the scariest,” was to try the idea out on Renee. She consumes a short stack of popular novels every week and knows the form inside out. Grisham will say, “Urn, I’ve got an idea for a book,” and rush out three or four sentences of synopsis. “She loves to shoot them down, which really irritates me,” he says. But when Grisham dreamed up “The Firm,” a sort of “L.A. Law” meets “The Godfather,” Renee said, “Wait a minute. That could be a big book.”
Then came the X factor. Sometimes it’s a smart calculation, sometimes it’s just dumb luck. “The biggest break of my career, I didn’t even know about it,” he says. “The Firm” fell into the hands of a movie scout in New York, who touted it to Paramount before it was sold as a novel. The first Sunday in 1990, Grisham and Renee were getting ready for church when the phone rang and his agent said, “I need your authority to take the highest offer from Disney, Paramount or Universal for the film rights to ‘The Firm’.” So they sat in church thinking, “Golly.” Later the agent called back and said “We got $600,000.” Grisham said, “How did you get $600,000?” And the guy from New York said, “I’m just a hell of an agent.”
With the movie, Grisham was a made writer. Doubleday got the book rights for $200,000 and Grisham has been with them ever since, his rates and royalties leaping geometrically.
Since “The Firm” and “The Pelican Brief,” the mail has confirmed that Grisham hit his target dead center. Two thirds of his correspondents are women, one third men, the oldest 96, the youngest 10. People write to say that it was the only book they read all year or the only book their husbands had read in 17 years. Half commend him for leaving out graphic violence, obscenities and profanities. One young couple wrote that they had made the mistake of taking only one copy of “The Pelican Brief” on their honeymoon. They got to wrestling over the book and never consummated the marriage. “I’ve had some crazy letters,” he wrote back, “but y’all take the cake.”
For a writer committed to thrills, Grisham practices only safe sex in his prose. “I cannot write about sex,” he confesses. At one meeting with his editor in New York, the subject came up, and Renee said, “Johnny can’t write about sex. He knows very little about it.” Stifling a guffaw, David Gernert, his editor, said, “Don’t even try.”
So readers love his books, but are they art?
“Oh, there are a few literary snots in town who take shots at me,” Grisham says mildly. Vernon Chadwick, professor of English at Ole Miss, argues that the market people in Hollywood and New York have seized on Grisham to water down American culture with the Southern-novel lite. But it isn’t that easy. “Marketing can do many things, but it can’t just buy a mass readership,” says Gary Fisketjon, an editor at Knopf. “Readers detect crassness, the wrong touch.” Like trout scrutinizing a badly tied fly, they may rise, but they won’t take the offering.
Given the abundance of ego and the shortage of cash among so many “real” writers, the astonishing thing is how many around Oxford, where literary matters count, are willing to speak up in Grisham’s defense. “I suppose I would have been more sullen if a bad book were taken as serious literary work,” says Barry Hannah, whose own “Bats Out of Hell,” just out from Houghton Mifflin, is superb. “I liked the way John cleared the air.” Donna Tartt, the author of “The Secret History,” who comes from nearby Grenada, observes that Dr. Johnson believed anyone who wrote for any reason but to make money was mad.
Let’s not duck the literary issue: artists do something Grisham doesn’t. The artist clearly enlightens where the commercial writer entertains. Consider the case of Larry Brown, another Oxford novelist, who tried to go commercial only to wind up an artist in spite of himself. Brown was a captain in the fire department. He once hoped to make a little money moonlighting in literature. Over eight years, he wrote five novels-the first, he says, was about “sex-starved women and man-eating bears in Yellowstone,” an idea that should have turned the trick, but didn’t. He also wrote 100 short stories, only to throw them all out before publishing “Facing the Music,” the collection that established him as one of the South’s authentic new voices. In the best writing, Brown discovered, character counts more than plot. That may not have helped his bank account much; but he doesn’t hold it against Grisham. “Everybody’s glad for what happened to John,” he says. “He paid his dues. He works harder than I do.”
An astute justification of Grisham comes from Sydney Pollack, who directed the movie of “The Firm.” “This is a very suspicious, cynical decade,” says Pollack. “All bureaucratic authorities are suspect. Part of the reason the book is so successful is you have an Everyman taken advantage of by the authorities and by the experts who are supposed to defend you against the authorities. And he beats them both.”
Last month Grisham told a chamber of commerce group that “A Time to Kill” was his best novel and that he had been going downhill ever since. “Was this wise?” wondered Hannah, for whom Grisham had inscribed a book: “To one of my heroes.” The truth is that in the cluttered office Grisham calls “mission control,” the only room on his spread that he won’t let Renee redecorate, the place where he pins the deadline on the wall once a year, shooing out his son, Ty, 9, and his daughter, Shea, 7, for the duration, Grisham is restless.
Someone once asked him to explain the significance of the fact that where Faulkner, a complicater, invented Yoknapatawpha, Grisham, a simplifier, dreamed up Ford County in “A Time to Kill.” (“Give me a break,” he replied.) Once upon a time, his plan was to alternate one Ford County novel with every thriller. His Ford County ideas brought hems and haws from his agent and editor. The result was a three-book contract with Doubleday that holds him to legal thrillers. Now, he says, “what I’d really like to do is just go back to Ford County and never leave.”
Of course, you can’t go home again and bat out a Ford County novel in six months (“The Pelican Brief” took 100 days, “The Client” six months, and both show some damage). But Grisham says he’s now so rich he could write a book every five years or maybe every 10 years. He doesn’t intend to get into the ring with Count Tolstoy, as Hemingway would put it, or Faulkner. His idea is just to take more time, and in the tradition of Larry Brown, pay more attention to character. Whatever the case, he has what it takes to make the change. A while ago Bill Ballard sat in his law office near The Bookworm in Hernando, writing a review of “The Client” for the local library. Grisham, he wrote, now enjoys what Mark Twain called “the calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces.” And it’s never been a good idea to bet against him.
THE FIRM (1991) COPIES IN PRINT Hard: 600,000 Soft: 6.5 million $600,000 Movie Deal THE PELICAN BRIEF (1992) COPIES IN PRINT Hard: 1.35 million Soft: 4.5 million $1.28 million Movie Deal THE CLIENT (1993) COPIES IN PRINT Hard: 1.25 million $2.5 million Movie Deal
