In my last few posts about books, rather than publish my usual Book Bag posts, I’ve incorporated book reviews into other types of posts; holiday memories and posts about books made into films and so on. During my last few holidays, I always seem to either have a couple of John Grisham books with me or found some in the places, usually rented villas, where we have stayed. I thought it might be an idea to write a John Grisham themed book bag post. Who actually is John Grisham then?
Let’s go over to Wikipedia and see what they have to say:
Born February 8, 1955 John Grisham 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. 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.
Pretty impressive credentials, aren’t they? Most of the inside back covers of my copies of his books say pretty much the same thing and in the back of the last Grisham book I read, The Racketeer, there are extracts from an interview with Grisham in which he mentions his favourite book is A Time to Kill, his first book and apparently the most personal of his legal thrillers.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the books that I have read.
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
As I said earlier, this book turns out to be Grisham’s first novel and he says in the introduction how proud he was of finishing it, as back then he hardly ever finished anything. It also contains some autobiographical elements; Grisham used to be a street lawyer, similar to the character in the book.
The book is set in America’s deep south where there is or was a great deal of racial prejudice. Two white guys decide to kidnap a young black girl, tie her to a tree and repeatedly rape her. They drive her away and dump her like garbage but she survives and the police arrest the two scumbags responsible. Next, the young girl’s father Carl Lee Hailey decides to take a rifle and shoot the two guys. He is arrested and put on trial for murder and street lawyer Jake Brigance takes on the case.
The case ignites the small town of Clanton Mississippi. The Klu Klux Klan become involved as do various other groups and the stage is set for a tense murder trial which goes on while the police and the National Guard try to keep order.
It’s a very exciting read although the ending was a little underwhelming and if you find the N word offensive then this is a book which is not for you as that particular word appears numerous times on almost every page.
The Client
This book was a great holiday read. It’s about an eleven year old boy who witnesses a suicide but before the man kills himself (he is a lawyer defending a known murderer) he tells the boys, Mark and his little brother Ricky, where his client has hidden the dead body of a murdered US senator. The senator was the victim of a mob ‘hit’ and Mark won’t tell the police or the FBI about the body as he is concerned for the safety of his mother and brother. When he and his mother are in hospital staying with his brother Ricky, as he has gone into shock, Mark contacts a lawyer and a big legal stand off begins with the FBI. Things eventually get settled but I can’t help wondering why the boy wouldn’t trust the FBI or even why he wouldn’t tell them about the body in the first place. Of course, if he had then there wouldn’t be a story. Either way this was a great holiday read and the narrative kept me interested all the way to the end. I didn’t realise it was also made into a film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon which I must remember to look out for.
The Pelican Brief by John Grisham
This book might be the best book by Grisham I have read so far. The book opens with the murder of two US Supreme Court judges and this in a way plays into the hands of the President as he can now nominate new judges who share his political views. At the same time, law student Darby Shaw is having an affair with her law professor. She decides to look closely at the murders and develops a thesis, an idea about who may have done the murders and why. The thesis becomes known as the Pelican Brief and she passes it to the professor who in turn sends it to his friend, an FBI lawyer. It then gets passed up the chain to the head of the FBI and on to the White House where the President instructs the FBI not to investigate further.
Not long afterwards the professor is blown up in a car bomb which Darby narrowly avoids and from then on, she is on the run trying to evade death herself.
This for me was one of those unputdownable novels which was exciting and kept me interested all the way to the end.
The Firm by John Grisham
There is a process by which I choose books to take with me on holiday. I like to think it’s a thoughtful process combining different genres of books, some novels, maybe the odd classic, and some biographies and autobiographies. What actually happens is that the day before our trip I’ll just grab something near to hand that I know I haven’t read yet and shove it in my suitcase. Anyway, that’s how I ended up with The Firm. Last year I read The Rainmaker by John Grisham and I thought it was a pretty good read. I must have mentioned that to Liz so she filed that away and got me a stack of Grisham novels for my last birthday. The Firm isn’t a bad read and in my case it was a nice change of pace after reading some non-fiction books.
It’s a good story but like a lot of Grisham’s works, it’s more plot driven than character driven. The characters are sort of bland templates that I’ve recognised in a lot of his novels. Anyway, characters aside, this is a really original story about a young guy who graduates from law school and gets head hunted into a firm he has never heard of but which offers tremendous financial benefits, a brand new BMW, and an ultra cheap mortgage as well as other financial bonuses. The downside, as he comes to learn later, is that the firm is just a cover operation to launder money for a big mafia crime family and the FBI wants our hero James McDeere, to help them.
Verdict: Highly enjoyable and a great holiday read but nothing more, although that didn’t stop the book from becoming a best seller as well as a hit film in the 1990’s.
The Racketeer
This is another legal thriller about a man convicted of money laundering, which he denies by the way, sentenced to ten years in a federal institution. Naturally he is not happy but he hoped to get out by using rule 35 of the Federal Rules for Criminal Procedure which means that if the inmate can solve a crime which the federal authorities are unable to solve, then his sentence can be reduced.
The man, Malcolm Bannister, helps other inmates of the prison with their legal issues and in doing so has come across some information about the murder of a judge, in which the Police and the FBI have no clues about the culprit. He plans to barter this information for his freedom but it turns out that Bannister is actually double bluffing the FBI and has a scheme in mind in which he can gain his freedom and walk away with a considerable amount of money as well as a new identity.
Like most of Grisham’s books, this was an excellent holiday read but towards the end it almost feels as though the writer has become a little fed up with this increasingly complicated story and is rushing to get it finished. This was mostly a good read but the end was a little disappointing.
The Boys From Biloxi
This is a very oddball book indeed. It’s not a courtroom drama although courtroom battles do feature in the book. It’s actually a very long-winded story of two families, one on the wrong side of the law and one on the other. One family is part of a rough and ready area of town and owns saloons that have illegal gambling and prostitution on tap and the other family who hope to clean the town up.
A lot of the story is just reeled off like a sort of narration you might listen to in a museum (which is how one review I read described the text). The author just seems to recount a lot of the story in this same long distance way. Eventually the story becomes more fleshed out and detailed when a tornado hits the town and a lawyer with ambitions to become the district attorney helps the residents fight for compensation from insurance companies that do not want to pay out. His success with compensation claims help him to become the DA but he is murdered before he can bring the criminal family to justice. His son however goes on to clean up the town.
Again this was another great holiday read but if I had been reading it at home for twenty minutes or so before going to sleep at night, I reckon that after a few nights I would have perhaps picked up something else to read.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 