John Grisham's Books | Crime Books

Biography

John Ray Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1955. His wasn’t an affluent upbringing; his father worked in construction and grew cotton whilst his mother looked after the family and home. As a teenager, Grisham held down several jobs, watering plants in a nursery and working with a plumber. When he was 17, he landed a job through one of his father’s contacts on an asphalt crew. Whilst laying a road in Mississippi, a fight broke out. It escalated to gunfire, and Grisham hid in a bathroom until the Police had taken the perpetrator away. It was then that he started to appreciate the value of a university education.

As he grew up, Grisham always wanted to play baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals, though he gave up on this dream when he was 19. As he recounts in one of his novels, Calico Joe, whilst playing, he was very nearly hit in the face by a baseball travelling at 90 miles an hour. That shock, and the realisation that his chances of gaining a pro card were slim, strengthened his resolve to study and pass his university exams.

“I was drifting through college, and one night I sat alone and watched a game between Mississippi State and some forgotten opponent. It dawned on me that the players I was watching, though my age, also had a very slight chance of playing pro ball. I decided we were in the same boat. And it was best to start studying for a change.” (Book Reporter)

After bouncing through several different colleges and universities, Grisham graduated. He received a Juris Doctor (Doctor of Law) from the University of Mississippi in 1981.

Practising the Law

Grisham returned to his hometown and started practising as a trial lawyer, specialising in criminal defence and personal injury litigation. He also became a political activist supporting the Democrats.

“I found Mississippi’s lack of emphasis on education embarrassing.” (The Guardian)

Political ambition grabbed him. In 1983 he was elected to the Mississippi state House of Representatives, where he served until 1990.

An Aspiring Author

Despite his early success, Grisham soon became disillusioned with his career as a lawyer and politician. In 1984 he started to write his first novel, A Time to Kill, snatching time to write it between cases and political engagements. The plot was inspired by a horrific story that he heard whilst waiting in court. A 12-year-old girl had been raped, beaten, and left for dead. Grisham wondered what would have happened if the girl’s father had decided to dole out justice with his own hands.

“The story was also autobiographical in that it was about a trial in a small Mississippi town where this young lawyer gets a big verdict. That was pretty much my dream at the time. My ambitions were still legal, not literary.” (The Guardian)

Three years later, in 1987, Grisham finished the novel. It was eventually published in 1989. Over thirty publishers had rejected the manuscript. Only 5,000 copies of the book were printed, and they didn’t all sell. A Time to Kill never took off.

Unphased, Grisham set about his second novel, The Firm. The book was met with wide acclaim and spent forty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was the biggest-selling novel in the U.S. in 1991.

“My first publishing experience was entirely normal and my second entirely abnormal.” (The Guardian)

A Change of Career

From that moment onward, the lawyer John Grisham became the author John Grisham. Since then, he has written over 30 novels that have sold 350 million copies and been translated into 45 languages. He is one of only three authors to have sold two million copies of a book on its first printing; he shares that honour with J.K. Rowling and Tom Clancy.

Despite his phenomenal writing success, that wasn’t the end of Grisham’s legal career. He returned to the law one last time to make a claim against the Illinois Central Railroad after the death of the brakeman John Wayne King. He won $683,500 for King’s widow in the biggest success of his legal career. Before he became famous, Barbara King had hired Grisham, and Grisham honoured the commitment, taking the case to trial.

The Industrial-Strength Courtroom Drama

John Grisham is the first to admit that he writes page-turners, not literary masterpieces.

“This is not literature. This is not literary fiction. This is popular fiction, and hopefully, it’s a high quality of popular fiction. That’s what I aspire to write. I’d much rather sell books than get good reviews.” (The Irish Times)

Although his mantlepiece is short of awards, he has won the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction for The Confession and Sycamore Row. The latter book saw the return of Jake Brigance, the hero of Grisham’s first book.

Style

John Grisham’s books will take you to the Southern States. Here they clip along rapidly, introducing you to southern religion, hospitality, and racism. He also has an eye for characterisation, drawing on the humour and tragedy of life he saw whilst working as a lawyer.

“The humour was there from the start. When you work at street level you never know who’s going to walk through your door. Life is full of fun stuff, sad stuff and crazy stuff.” (The Guardian)

As well as being engaging page-turners, John Grisham’s Books confront many of the legal and moral issues that he has seen. He has tackled the tobacco industry, homelessness, the dumping of toxic waste, and most notably, the death penalty. Grisham was a strict Baptist and believed that premeditated murder deserved the death penalty. However, whilst researching his fourth novel, The Chamber, he visited death row.

“I was talking to the chaplain in the holding room, a tiny cell where the inmate has his last 30 minutes of life before they walk him next door… The chaplain said to me: ‘John, you are a Christian?’ I said yes. And he then said: ‘Do you really think that Jesus would condone what we do here?” (The Guardian)

Grisham became a staunch critic of the death penalty from that moment onward.

The Innocence Project

In 2006 Grisham wrote his first (and currently only) true crime novel, The Innocent Man. It tells the story of Ronald “Ron” Keith Williamson, a failed baseball player who was wrongly tried for murder and spent eleven years on death row.

John Grisham is a member of the board of directors of the Innocence Project. Their stated mission is “to free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment.” Since its founding in 1992 (to date 2022), the project has used DNA testing to exonerate 375 people that the state had convicted of serious crimes. The courts had sentenced 21 of them to death.

Whilst Grisham is far from the only member of the team; he is a tireless advocate.

“There’s so many wrongful convictions that should be prevented by judges who are awake in the courtroom.” (The Irish Times)

The last word should go to Janet Maslin, a New York Times book critic. She wrote that Grisham has “fought harder for truth, justice and the American way than anyone this side of Superman.”