No one wanted Grisham’s first novel
FICTION very rich man, has never cared. “Camino Island” is not an ingratiating effort to turn the MFA crowd into Grisham readers. But the subject matter might lure some of them in.
Grisham and his wife, Renee, came up with the idea for the novel a few years ago on a summer drive to Florida. “We listen to books on tape, to podcasts, we’ve got the dog in the back seat,” Grisham said, proving that best-selling authors are just like us, except for the part where the driver and passenger dream up thriller plots.
“I can’t remember what inspired us to start talking about rare books and rarebook thefts,” Grisham said, although he vaguely recalls hearing an NPR story about a book heist in London. It’s a world the couple knows well. The Grishams, who live near Charlottesville, collect rare first editions by Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald.
Grisham began doing research, calling rare-book dealers for details. He did not, however, visit Firestone Library at Princeton, where the heist takes place. For one thing, he admits to being a lazy researcher. More important, he was concerned for the library’s safety.
“I don’t want to inspire anyone to get any bad ideas,” Grisham said. “I couldn’t go there and say, ‘I want to see the manuscripts because I’m writing a book about how to steal them.’ ”
The first chapter is vintage Grisham — fast, taut, daring:
“All trails became dead ends,” he writes. “Tips that had at first seemed urgent now faded away. The waiting game began. Whoever had the manuscripts would want money, and a lot of it. They would surface eventually, but where and when, and how much would they want?”
To avoid giving away the plot, perhaps it’s best to say they wanted slightly more than what a copy of “A Time to Kill,” in perfect condition, is currently worth in rare-book marketplaces online.
“Slight hint of bump to spine head of jacket,” one listing says. “This lovely copy is housed in a fine condition custom clamshell case.”
Price: $4,499.99. That’s $200 more than the seller’s listing of Hemingway’s masterpiece “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Among the collectors of Grisham’s first book is John Grisham. After “A Time to Kill” was published in 1989, he gave away or sold nearly 1,000 of his own copies, keeping 50 or 60 for himself.
“I’ve got those buried in the backyard,” he said.
Sometimes he gets a call from a friend or rare-book dealer who has run across a copy. “I’m always interested if the book is in great shape,” Grisham said, while acknowledging that it is “kind of weird” to spend thousands of dollars to buy an old copy of a book he wrote. The books’ original value, he jokes, was derived mainly from their utility as doorstops.
“These things were stacked up around my law office,” Grisham said. “A lot of my clients couldn’t read very well anyway, so they didn’t want a book. I couldn’t give the books away.”