Criminal law
John Grisham, who writes one bestseller a year, found fame with The Firm, but before that he wrote a novel set in the milieu he knew well. A Time to Kill was set in Ford County, Mississippi, in America’s Deep South, and the story was predictably driven by black and white politics. A lawyer must defend a black man who has killed two men guilty of raping his daughter. It sounds like a simple matter to get him off, but the case gets out of hand. The racist Ku Klux Klan marches into town, black preachers rally their church groups, and Grisham throws in everything but the kitchen sink.
In The Firm, he told a more focused story about a bright young rookie who joins a small-town law firm, on unbelievably generous terms. The firm turns out to be a front for the mafia. Our hero outsmarts the ruthless mafia killers as well as the FBI agents who want to use him to close down the operation. He hands over clinching evidence and makes off with huge sums of money, to no one’s surprise.
In The Pelican Brief, a brilliant law student in Washington takes only a few hours to crack the case of two murdered Supreme Court Justices, type up her theory and pass it around. She spends the rest of the book running from everyone until… well, you get the picture.
Recently I read that one of this past year’s unexpected bestsellers was Grisham’s Ford County, a collection of short stories. Unexpected because collections of short stories generally are not bestsellers. A reviewer from the New York Times explained it by saying that John Grisham can do anything he wants. Oh really? Or can he just sell anything he wants?
Grisham’s non-thriller writing has an easygoing swing to it. But the stories are uneven. The first, about three yokels who drive to Memphis to donate blood for an accident victim, starts out with rural American humour but the ending, as they would say in Mississippi, ain’t worth diddly. Then there is a lawyer who is offered an out-of-court settlement for a long-dead lawsuit about defective chain-saws. He makes off with most of the money, but this story too just seems to end when the writer gets tired of it.
Two tales rise a bit above the rest. In one, a lawyer who got a doctor acquitted in a case of medical negligence is forced to confront the plaintiff, a blind, brain-damaged child who lives in a bed and is fed through a tube. He discovers the shattering, daily consequences of his successful defence on this impoverished family.
In the other, an AIDS patient comes home to Ford County to die. It is the early 1990s, and his wealthy parents farm him out to be nursed by a woman in the black part of town. The neighbourly exchanges in the coffee shop and on front porches reveal the small minds of this small town. In his last days, the young man and his nurse become friends.
Grisham’s writing sometimes reads like reportage, but he seldom crafts a plot elegantly. A short story, even more than a novel, needs good bones. Anticlimaxes are a relief in real life, but when you buy a book you expect a good ending for your money. Grisham’s books do better on the screen, where their satirical commentary makes for a drawling voice-over that makes you forget how ordinary the plot is, and where swelling music distracts you from the lame ending. If Ford County soon comes to a multiplex near you, perhaps John Grisham really can do anything he wants. n
Latha Anantharaman is a freelance writer and editor based in Palakkad