Creator / John Grisham

"I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not."

John Ray Grisham, Jr. (born February 8, 1955) is a former attorney turned writer, who decided to write suspense stories involving the legal profession.

After a tepid response to his first novel, A Time to Kill, he achieved national recognition for his sophomore effort, The Firm. Soon after, he would write many more books, such as The Pelican Brief, The Client and The Rainmaker. Each book had a Tom Clancy-like fetishism for detail about whatever aspect of the legal profession it centered around, and all are clear cases of Grisham having written what he knows.

Occasionally, Grisham has dabbled in lighter, non-legal-oriented fiction, but it's his legal thrillers that put bread on the table, more or less. Thus far he has made a profession known mostly for paperwork and long speeches seem like a breeding ground for some of the finest Chessmasters and Smug Snakes in modern literature.

A fair number of Grisham's books have been adapted into movies at one point or another, with varying degrees of quality and faithfulness to the source material.

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Novels by John Grisham with their own pages include:

• The Chamber
• The Confession
• The King of Torts
• The Rainmaker
• The Street Lawyer

Film adaptations of Grisham novels with their own pages include:

• Christmas with the Kranks^note Based on Skipping Christmas, one of his non-legal-thriller novels.
• The Client
• The Firm
• The Gingerbread Man (based on an original screenplay by Grisham, but largely rewritten)
• The Pelican Brief
• Runaway Jury
• A Time to Kill

Other novels by John Grisham contain examples of:

• Alas, Poor Villain: Diantha tells her daughter at the end of "Sparring Partners" that Rusty and Kirk are good people deep down, but that their privilege and their father's influence caused them to make bad decisions.
• Ambulance Chaser:
  • The Rooster Bar deals with DUI lawyers who hustle for cases in the waiting room.
  • The Litigators: The eponymous partners of Finley and Figg chase injury cases constantly. Figg is noted to eat lunch in hospital cafeterias to look for prospective clients.
• Amoral Attorney: Patton French, a tort lawyer who appears in several of Grisham's novels, serves to embody everything Grisham hates about the American tort system, getting rich off of other peoples' medical misery while screwing his clients. His appearance in The King of Torts, giving aspiring tort lawyers advice on how to wring the most money out of their clients, leaves the protagonist feeling like he needs to take a shower.

• Author Tract:
  • The Summons and The King of Torts both serve as condemnations of the American tort system and the predatory lawyers that use it, as exemplified by the character of Patton French.
  • The Appeal serves as a condemnation of the controversial system of electing appellate and Supreme Court representatives, rather than simply of the predatory litigants that use it to replace offending (read: plaintiff-friendly) judges. Ironically, it's very supportive of the Tort system compard to the previous works.
  • Downplayed in the Theodore Boone juvenile fiction books. Grisham states that both of Theo's parents are political moderates overall.
  • The Runaway Jury seems like a massive Take That! against the tobacco industry (in the novel) and the gun manufacturers (in the film).
• The Bad Guy Wins: The Appeal. The small town lawyers are rendered bankrupt, the sympathetic banker loses everything, the chemical company that ruined the town's water supply and the lives of those "trailer park peasants" within its limits walks free with zero punishment, and the Corrupt Corporate Executive (and primary stockholder) Carl Trudeau becomes even wealthier then before (the final chapter ends with him wanting to make even more).
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The King of Torts ends with Clay losing everything, but ending up with the woman he loves and not in jail.
  • The Testament ends with the protagonist finally expelling his demons and finding something worthwhile to do with his life. But it comes at the expense of the one of only two decent and good human beings presented in the story, who died unknown and unmourned deep in the Amazon rainforest.
  • Sooley. The title character, a South Sudanese refugee who started out redshirting^note sitting out the season, but still practicing with the team his freshman (first) NCAA men's basketball season at North Carolina Central,^note a historically African-American school that in real life has done little of note in that sport was put into the lineup after an injury crisis, and ended it as the face of college basketball, leading NCC to an improbable Final Four appearance, died shortly after that season from a drug overdose. But after his death, his quest to bring his surviving family out of their war-torn country to America succeeded, and when the family made a VIP visit to NCC's arena, his 13-year-old brother (already 6 ft/1.83 m) drained a long jumper on his first try, possibly foreshadowing his own bright future in the sport.
  • The Judge's List. Laci Stolz and Jeri Crosby, with help from the FBI, figure out that the titular judge was also a monstrous serial killer. Unfortunately, by the time the law was getting ready to close in on him, he killed himself, dipping his hands in hydrochloric acid during the process so his fingerprints would be destroyed. They do manage to definitively link some of the murders to him.

• Burying a Substitute: A variation shows up in The Partner, where the main character buries 4 cinder blocks because he needs the corpse of the guy who died in order to fake his own death.
• Character Overlap: Characters like Reuben V. Atlee, Patton French and Harry Rex Vonner have appeared in multiple novels.
• Code Silver: The plot of The Street Lawyer kicks off when a homeless man breaks into the posh law firm where the protagonist works, and takes him and a few of his coworkers hostage for about six hours.
• Contrived Coincidence: Twofold in the backstory of "Sparring Partners": Bolton Malloy's scheme to kill his wife, a woman with a weak heart who happens to be scared of snakes, is to lure her to his cabin in the woods, scare her with a captive speckled kingsnake and trigger a fatal heart attack. The plan proceeds without a hitch until the snake bites Bolton's hand, leaving a nasty mark. After phoning an ambulance as part of setting up his alibi, Bolton drives his dying wife to the hospital and leaves the snake in his cabin unattended. When the paramedics arrive, they collect the snake because their supervisor just so happens to collect reptiles as a hobby. A month later, the supervisor shows off the snake at a reptile fair and by chance its former owner quickly recognizes "Thurman", identifying Bolton as the man who purchased him. It isn't long before the authorities piece Bolton's plot together, and they use their information about Thurman to force Bolton to plead guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter.
• Courtroom Antics:
  • Normally averted. Unlike most legal-related fiction, Grisham's courtroom proceedings tend to be pretty low-key and realistic. The drama and antics occur outside the courtroom.
  • In the prison court in The Brethren it's expected — it's a half-serious joke court for cases between convicts, who are usually not the smartest or most legally adept. The judges don't like the antics, but the worst you're likely to get is an admonition to watch your language.
• Creator's Oddball: Only six of Grisham's novels aren't legal thrillers; they include Skipping Christmas (which was later adapted as Christmas with the Kranks); A Painted House, a coming-of-age story in Depression-era Arkansas; Calico Joe, about rookie baseball star Joe Castle and the events that cut short his career; Playing for Pizza, which is about football; and Sooley, about college basketball.
• Creator Thumbprint: You'll notice a lot of his titles are "The [Something, likely a legal term]".
• Determinator: Two examples in The Judge's List:
  • Jeri Crosby, who spent 20 years trying to track down the man who killed her father. Who turned out to be...
  • ...the titular judge, who spent even longer tracking down and murdering people whom he felt had wronged him.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • The Testament mostly glosses over the fact that the holographic will signed by the deceased Mr. Phelan, and the one signed by his daughter at the end of the novel, will be subject to severe estate taxes, greatly reducing the value of the estate itself. Phelan's lawyer laments the fact that it was done that way, as it means hundreds of millions of dollars lost. Twice!
  • In The King of Torts, Clay is advised on how to sue a company for a dangerous product, then receives some off the books advice that short-selling the company on the stock market before he sues might be a good idea, a move that nets him millions of dollars. In the third act, he's investigated for insider trading.
• Dirty Old Man: Apart from being a murderer and a tax cheat, Bolton Malloy in "Sparring Partners", a man in his seventies, had a sexual relationship with Diantha Bradshaw when she was a young associate at his law firm, which is strongly hinted to have been coerced and is the reason she had spent the years since seeking counseling. After bribing the governor into granting a pardon, Bolton plans to use tax-sheltered money to travel the world and sleep with as many young women as he wants.
• The Dog Bites Back: Diantha Bradshaw decides to get back at Bolton Malloy and his sons for mistreating/abusing her for the eighteen years she spent at their firm. And boy, does she.
• Downer Ending:
  • The Partner. Patrick has successfully orchestrated getting off completely scot-free for everything that he did in the course of stealing the money, but Eva and the money are both gone and Patrick is left completely broke and alone - it is left ambiguous whether Eva simply abandoned him and ran off with the money or whether she was kidnapped and 'disappeared' by any of the various unsavory characters and companies after the money. Either way, Patrick is completely screwed.
  • The Appeal. The small town lawyers are rendered bankrupt, the sympathetic banker loses everything, the evil company that ruined the town's water supply and the lives of those "trailer park peasants" within its limits walks free with zero punishment, and the Corrupt Corporate Executive Carl Trudeau becomes even wealthier then before (the book ends with him wanting to make even more).
• Down to the Last Play: Playing for Pizza opens with the main character, a journeyman third string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, blowing a colossal lead in the AFC Championship Game and being knocked unconscious, costing his team a chance at the Super Bowl. He's so disgraced he has to play in Italy.
• Elvis Impersonator: In The Firm, Tammy Hemphill's truck driver ex-husband actually believes he's Elvis come back to life. He even changed his name to Elvis Aaron Hemphill and moved the family to Memphis (the main setting of the story) so he could be closer to Graceland.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The US President in "The Pelican Brief" is never named. He's just "The President", or "Mr. President" if someone's addressing him. This is particularly noticeable because all of the other highly-placed characters (such as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the FBI Director and the President's Chief Of Staff) do have names.
• Follow in My Footsteps: In The Appeal, F. Clyde Hardin finds himself forced into this position after his father, an enthusiastic and highly skilled trial lawyer, died. The son is neither enthusiastic nor highly skilled.
• Food Porn: The book "Playing for Pizza" has quite some detailed descriptions of the Italian cuisine virtually all the characters in the novel are head over heels in love with.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: The basic premise of "Sparring Partners". Kirk Malloy is the sibling who handles Malloy & Malloy's finances and political dealings, while Rusty Malloy is the free-wheeling litigator who has suffered a string of disastrous losses in court. Ultimately both siblings fall into the foolish category when they try to bribe the governor and are arrested for their troubles.
• Gambit Pileup: "Sparring Partners" ultimately turns into one, with Bolton Malloy bribing Governor Sturgiss into giving him a pardon, Bolton's sons Rusty and Kirk catching wind of this and bribing the governor into not pardoning their father, and Diantha Bradshaw stabbing all three of them in the back by ratting them out to the feds while securing Bolton's tax-sheltered money for herself and Stu Broome.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Brethren makes reference early on to one Natli Chenkov, a Russian politician and Communist hardliner who is suspected of planning to stage a coup and start a war the director of the CIA doubts America can win. The main action of the book involves the CIA director's underhanded plan to block Chenkov's ambitions, and the domestic fallout from that; Chenkov himself is hardly mentioned after the initial explanation.

• Have You Told Anyone Else?: In The Judge's List, the Serial Killer captures an Amateur Sleuth and asks her if Lacy, a judicial investigator who's been asking about him, also knows about his killings. His prisoner falsely denies this so he won't go after Lacy, but he's not convinced and leaves to kill her. He fails, and when he comes back to finish off his prisoner, he finds that the police have already rescued her.

• Honey Trap:
  • In The Firm, the crooked law firm that employs the protagonist hires a prostitute to seduce him and record it so they'll have something to hold over him if he becomes a problem.
  • The Brethren has the homosexual blackmail version; three small-time scammers accidentally hook a man the CIA is vetting to become a Presidential candidate.
• Human-Interest Story:
  • These are at the core of The Last Juror. It was a story on a black family that boasted five college graduates that made the newspaper profitable, and, by the end of the book, the protagonist had done such a story on every person in town.
  • Same with Sooley, a non-legal story in which a South Sudanese refugee ends up as the face of college basketball while playing at North Carolina Central, a historically African-American school that in real life has done relatively little of note in the sport.
• Idiot Ball: In The King of Torts, Clay picks it up and runs with it after the halfway point, unable to see beyond his own needs, just what he promised he would avoid in the first half of the book.
• It Gets Easier: In A Time to Kill, the guy who kills the two guys who raped his kid daughter thinks that it was harder to kill the first Viet Cong fighter.
• Jury and Witness Tampering: Part of the main plot of The Runaway Jury (and its film adaptation Runaway Jury) has attempts to coerce or incapacitate the jurors in a lawsuit.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Max Pace, the "fireman" that convinces Clay to sell his soul for $15 million in The King Of Torts, is never caught, and never seen or heard from in the third act. Clay takes the fall instead.
  • In The Appeal, a phone call from "The Senator" sets into motion a chain of events through which The Trudeau Group (the main shareholder of the affected firm) escapes a Humiliation Conga. Carl Trudeau gets away with having carcinogens dumped into the water supply of a poor Mississippi town, rigging a judicial election to avoid having to pay damages for said dumping, bankrupting the main characters, and purposefully running his company into the ground so he can buy the stock while it's dirt cheap and then make billions when the lawsuits for the illegal dumping are dismissed and the stock rises in value. The novel ends with him being worth $3 billion, and contemplating how to make it into $6 billion.
  • It is left ambiguous just how badly the bribery scandal will affect Governor Sturgiss at the end of "Sparring Partners". Despite the scandal breaking just days before the election, Sturgiss wins a second term by a comfortable margin and the federal prosecutor handling the case acknowledges that nailing him will be impossible if his implicated operative, Jack Grimlow, doesn't flip on him.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In the final act of The King of Torts, Clay pays dearly for all the things he did wrong: his stock market victories are forfeited to prevent prosecution for insider trading; his unbelievably successful mass tort litigation went too fast, because he was blinded by the money, and he finds himself on the receiving end of a mass tort as a result; his callous treatment of his clients as sources of money rather than people with needs gets him viciously assaulted by those same clients, and on and on.
• The Mafia:
  • In The Client, Mafia members play a large part.
  • The Firm: The titular firm is secretly in bed with the Mafia.
• Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy: The Firm has its protagonist uncover that the seemingly amazing law firm he works for is actually a front for the mob, and that they kill anyone who either gets to close to the truth, or who learns it and doesn't want to become a partner, and therefore be in on The Conspiracy. The Firm conducts Sinister Surveillance on its employees, wiring their cars, homes, and telephones and monitoring their lives closely. When they do kill people, they tend to Make It Look Like an Accident.
• Obfuscating Disability: Sarge in The Pelican Brief. He's an elderly janitor who works at the White House. He moves slowly, doesn't talk much, and wears sunglasses all the time, so people tend to think that his hearing and eyesight are very bad. Consequently, high-ranking officials don't always watch what they say around him. His hearing is actually fine, so he overhears a great deal of sensitive information. He sometimes leaks stories to The Washington Post, and he always gets away with this, because who in their right mind would suspect him?
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: "Playing for Pizza" makes it abundantly clear that the protagonist is not a great Quarterback. He's still good enough for the Italian league...
• Oh, Crap!: The reaction of a LOT of people in The King of Torts. Philo Products, the corporation that bought the company Clay sued, have a massive Oh, Crap! when they find out Dyloft is much more deadly than previously thought. The clients who took Dyloft have an DA Oh, Crap! when they find out that their bladder tumors, previously benign, have become deadly. And the lawyers are aptly summed up by Patton French: "We're screwed!"
• Omniglot: In The Firm, Mitchell's brother, Ray, has a natural affinity for languages, and is using the immense free time he has in prison to learn several new ones.
• Only Known by Their Nickname:
  • One of the migrant Mexican farmworkers in A Painted House is known as Cowboy because he wears a cowboy hat all the time. He turns out to be a very important and very nasty character, but we never learn his real name.
  • The protagonist of Sooley is named Samuel Sooleymon, but everyone calls him Sooley.

• Papa Wolf: Carl Lee Hailey in A Time to Kill. After a brutal first chapter detailing the rape of his 10-year-old daughter by a couple of rednecks, Hailey goes berserk on the two and opens fire on them with an assault rifle (even though they were already on trial), catching a court deputy in the process. The deputy forgives him, as does the jury when they acquit him of murder charges by reason of "temporary insanity."
• The Pardon:
  • A presidential pardon starts off the plot of The Broker.
  • In The Brethren the protagonists are inmates in a federal prison who find themselves in possession of blackmail material that might get them all killed or might get them a presidential pardon.
  • In The Firm, one of Mitch McDeere's conditions for helping the FBI include getting his brother pardoned.
  • "Sparring Partners" has Bolton Malloy attempting to bribe the governor for his pardon. His two bickering sons decide to join forces and bribe the governor into not granting the pardon.
• Parent ex Machina: Theo's parents in the Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer series.
• Passed-Over Inheritance:
  • The plot of The Testament kicks off when a filthy rich businessman passes over his Dysfunction Junction Inadequate Inheritor family, and leaves his vast fortune to his previously unknown illegitimate daughter, a missionary doctor in a remote area of Brazil.
  • The plot of Sycamore Row is driven by the suicide of Seth Hubbard, and the hand-written will he prepared just before killing himself that cut his entire family out of his estate in favor of his housekeeper.
• Pretty in Mink: In The Firm, Mitch buys his wife a fox coat in their first Christmas after joining the law firm.
• Put Me In, Coach!: Sooley, about a South Sudanese refugee basketball player, is all about this trope. The title character wasn't supposed to have played his first season at North Carolina Central University; he had huge potential, but had played little competitive basketball. After a string of early-season injuries, his coaches "burned" his redshirt, followed by his meteoric rise to become the face of college basketball as he led the Eagles to an improbable Final Four run.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Bleachers has Neely's old high school flame doing this to the entire town (though only Neely hears it) about how obsessed they are with football, such as having prayer breakfasts on Fridays, putting so much local pride in winning so many games, and even reacting to a kid dying of heat stroke during tryouts (one of the multiple controversies that eventually forced the football coach to retire) with accusing him of "not being tough enough".
• Revenge Porn Blackmail: In The Firm, the titular mafia-backed law firm invokes this trope to keep its staff in line—they hire prostitutes to get them drunk and seduce them, have the private detective on their payroll take photos of the incident, and threaten to send the photos to the staff member's spouse if they ever suspect they're ratting them out to the feds.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: In The Appeal, the main stockholder for a NYC chemical plant is looking to reverse a $41 million judgement. The head of a shadowy Florida firm tells him he can buy a seat on the bench of the state Supreme Court for a cool $8 million, only $1 million of which is actually recorded. Let the chess match begin.
• Selective Obliviousness: In "Sparring Partners", when Rusty and Kirk decide to bribe Governor Sturgiss's campaign operative into cancelling their father's pardon deal, they reason to themselves that they aren't committing a crime because they are compelling Sturgiss to not granting a corrupt pardon. Diantha knows this isn't true because they are still committing bribery, and what's more, she knows they know this.
• Spiteful Will: Troy Phelan's will in The Testament is set up as a massive "Screw you!" to his multiple Gold Digger ex-wives and heirs, ensuring that all of them (except his illegitimate daughter, the only one he actually cares for) get a much smaller share of his wealth than they were expecting and none of them will be able to contest it.
• Suspiciously Specific Sermon: Not so much a sermon as a Sunday School lesson, but in A Time for Mercy, as Jake decides whether to ignore the inevitable call from Judge Noose to take on the Drew Gamble case, he helps his daughter Hanna study the Book of Jonah, about a man who received an uncomfortable order from a higher authority and ran away rather than follow it.
• Thanatos Gambit: In The Testament, the terminally ill Troy Phelan commits suicide and screws his family (whom he hates) out of his $11 billion fortune, giving it all to an illegitimate daughter instead. The kicker is that before his death, he fooled his own family into thinking he had signed a (fake) will that evenly distributed his assets, and even had a team of top-notch doctors examine him and declare him mentally competent. After his death, the doctors' testimony made it next to impossible for his family to legally challenge his will. Not only that, but he tricked his family into digging themselves into debt, since they were expecting a free cash handout after he died.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: In The Testament, Troy Phelan's long-lost daughter Rachel Lane, a beautiful, saintly missionary doctor (and the only relative he can remotely stand), dies of dengue fever and malaria in the penultimate chapter.

• Verbing Nouny: Skipping Christmas.
• Villainous Breakdown: His status as a villain (as opposed to a pawn) is debatable, but protagonist Clay, by the end of The King of Torts, has "survived one of the more spectacular breakdowns in the legal profession's history."

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