John Grisham’s sold 300 million thrillers and you won’t find a sex scene in any one of them
Because his wife laughed at the only one he wrote!
John Grisham is not happy. In fact, as he sits in a hotel bar in North Yorkshire, where he is attending a crime-writing convention, the man who has sold nearly 300million copies of his legal thrillers is close to seething. ‘I wake up every morning embarrassed to be an American,’ says Grisham, 63.
It’s not his latest book – his 39th – that has upset him; he says he is more than pleased with The Reckoning. Nor, despite being someone who prefers not to pursue celebrity, is he distracted by the prospect of imminently facing his public, who have lapped up his books such as The Firm, The Pelican
Brief and The Rainmaker and their Hollywood versions starring the likes of Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts.
No, what is disconcerting him is the current occupant of the White House. Mere mention of the words Donald and Trump seems to send his blood pressure spiralling.
‘Around our house, my wife and I, we try not to say his name,’ he says. ‘He knows nothing, he reads nothing, he listens to no one. Nothing he says is clever or smart. Him, the people around him, his crooked friends: each day brings a new embarrassment.’
However, what concerns Grisham most is Trump’s response to the far-right rally last summer in Charlottesville, the university town in Virginia where he and his wife Renee live. The President’s initial sympathy for the protesters, he believes, lent legitimacy to the kind of politics he thought he had left behind in his childhood in the Deep South of the early Sixties.
‘I wrote a piece for Time magazine saying how great my town is and how we didn’t deserve to be invaded by Nazis,’ he says. ‘When I heard the president of my country say they were good people, I despaired.’
Not that Trump will be too worried by Grisham’s disdain. He’d doubtless dismiss the writer – a close friend of Hillary Clinton and a lifelong Democrat – as a central figure in America’s liberal elite. And there is no denying there is something patrician about Grisham. His understatedly chic linen shirt, his well-tailored jacket, his physique trimmed by an enthusiasm for golf, he looks every inch what he is: someone not concerned about where his next million might come from.
Indeed, midway through our interview, when his phone rings, he gives a hint as to the scale of his financial resources. He answers it, then excuses himself from the room saying he has something of a crisis he needs to resolve. A few minutes later he returns smiling. He explains that it was Renee on the phone. They had flown in that morning from the South of France, and it appears she has left her notebook on the plane. He adds, with a degree of knowing hyperbole, that the continuing happy condition of their 37-year marriage depends on her urgent reunion with the item. To that end he has dispatched their driver to the airport to pick it up. ‘Lucky someone handed it in,’ I say. And Grisham looks at me for a moment, unsure what I’m talking about. ‘I mean,’ I add, ‘it was just as well another passenger didn’t nick it.’
‘Ah, no,’ he says, finally catching my drift. ‘It’s our plane. I just needed to find the pilot to open it up. She should have it back within an hour.’ And he smiles: ‘Marriage saved.’
That’s how the Grishams travel: always on their own private jet. He used to pilot it himself but says he lost his nerve a couple of years back when he realised he was spending too much time when in the cockpit thinking of other things, like the plot of his next novel. So now he employs someone to do the flying.
This is not unusual in Grisham’s life: he doesn’t stint. Back in 1996, for instance, he became concerned when he learned that his son Ty couldn’t find a baseball club to join close to where they lived. Baseball is important to the writer: his great unfulfilled childhood ambition was to play the game professionally. And he wanted Ty to succeed where he hadn’t. So he built him a ball park, complete with seven pitches, a club house and floodlights. It cost him $3.8m. Though Ty played for the University of Virginia, like his father he didn’t make it as a pro. Grisham still owns the park, using it to host an annual children’s tournament for 600 underprivileged youngsters.
But to dwell on present material success is to miss a key point about Grisham – unlike President Trump, he was not born into privilege. Every cent he has spent on planes, shirts and baseball parks he has earned.
‘My father was a share cropper originally, then he got a small farm,’ he says, his accent betraying its Mississippi roots. ‘It was not an easy life. The farm finally lost so much money, we sneaked away in the middle of the night, abandoned the place. Eventually he found a job. And to his credit, it took him 10 years, but he paid off all his debts.’
It is a world he explores in his new atmospheric thriller. The Reckoning centres on the tale of a cotton farmer returning from the war in 1946 to rural Mississippi, where, suddenly and inexplicably, he murders the local preacher. Simmering in the background are the racial politics of the era.
It was an apartheid Grisham remembers all too well from his youth. He admits he was, in effect, brought up to be a racist. ‘It was terrible. When I was young, lynching was still common. We were taught that it would always be the white man in charge.’
What started to change his outlook was when, in 1970, his high school, until then segregated, became the last educational establishment in the United States to admit black pupils. Finally, at the age of 15, he began to mix with his African-American peers.
‘I recall sitting in the locker room a few months later with the black guys on the football team, thinking: why was this so difficult?’ He finds it impossible to understand
‘LYNCHINGS WERE COMMON WHEN I WAS YOUNG. WE WERE TAUGHT THE WHITE MAN WOULD ALWAYS BE IN CHARGE’
how anyone could be nostalgic for the political order of those pre-integration times. Everything about it was loathsome, he says. As a young man he was desperate to escape its shackles. Like the son in The Reckoning, Grisham initially did so by studying law. ‘I was not thinking about changing the world – I just thought being a lawyer would be a way to make some money.’
It didn’t turn out like that. After he married his college girlfriend Renee Jones and his children were born, he found it hard to meet his growing obligations as a practising smalltown lawyer. So one morning in 1986 he sat down to write his first novel, A Time To Kill, in the hope of adding to the family income.
‘I was 31 years old, I had no idea what I was doing,’ he remembers. ‘I was working 60 or 70 hours a week in a law office trying to stay afloat. The only way I could do it was to be at my desk by 5.30am, writing the first word. I did that for three years. I can recall being in court several times at 9am already exhausted, almost falling asleep on the job.’
Those early starts have remained with him. ‘I got in the habit of doing it.I still get up at six, I start writing at seven. Those hours between seven and 11 in a dark, quiet office, alone, no phone, no internet, no music, those are moments I treasure.’
Though his first book was not an immediate success, his publisher encouraged him to write another. And with his second, The
Firm, published in 1991, he hit pay dirt – the book stayed at the top of the bestseller list for nearly a year. Since then, everything he has written has flown off the shelves. From the start the pattern was clear: there are no wasted words in Grisham’s writing and the plot is the priority.
‘With Ian McEwan or John le Carré, I’ll read a paragraph and think, that’s beautiful. I’m so envious of writers who have such a command of language. But I know I can’t match it. When I was first starting out I didn’t know what I was doing, so I’d read everything I could get hold of to find out. I loved good writing. But oddly enough it was some of the bad writers who inspired me. I thought: surely I can beat that.’
From the start he has been helped in his endeavours by his wife Renee’s forthright editing skills. She is still the first person to whom he shows his work. ‘I always listen to her. I once wrote a sex scene and I thought it was pretty damned erotic,’ he smiles. ‘I gave it to her to read and I heard her laughing. She made a comment about my lack of knowledge about sex, which was deeply offensive. But she was right. I took it straight out. Never put one in since.’
Not that his public is worried about the absence of intimacy; it’s his plots they admire. Plots he finds in all kinds of places, in newspapers, magazines or just in conversation. Wherever they come from, his stories grip. There was a time when Hollywood couldn’t get enough of them. In the Nineties, every book he wrote became a film. ‘Those were the good old days,’ he smiles. ‘Twentyfive years ago, The Firm with Tom Cruise was released, four months later The Pelican Brief came out, five months after that The
Client: three movies in a year.’ It hasn’t happened like that for a while. The last book he had turned into a movie was Runaway Jury, in 2003. ‘The old model doesn’t work any more. Hollywood makes so few smart movies for adults. All I can do is write the books.’
And write them he does – because he loves the process of writing, loves the research that proceeds it. He also loves to ‘wrap a story round an issue’ but Grisham doesn’t believe that turning his books into campaigns would make any difference to the world. Even if he let loose his gathering bile and wrote a condemnation of Trump, he’s not sure it would alter voting intentions. Instead, he recently devoted much of his energies to raising money for the Democrats’ mid-term election battle.
‘I don’t think my writing about something would ever precipitate change. I don’t take myself that seriously. What I hope to do first and foremost is to entertain. Actually, whenever I get a little too convinced of my own importance, I remind myself what folks usually say to me when they meet me. Nine times out of 10 they’ll say: “Hey man, I don’t read much but I love your movies.” ’
And he laughs cheerily. Enjoying, at least for a moment, not thinking about the man he refuses to name.