BY MOLLY BALL
ON A RACK AT THE FRONT OF BURKE’S BOOK Store in Memphis is a postcard showing the shop in an earlier era, overhung by a billboard that’s no longer there. GRISHAM IS COMING, it says in big red letters, next to a photo of the youthful lawyer turned author. His brow is knitted, mouth pursed. Below, a line of people wait for the store to open. John Grisham picks up the postcard and looks at it. “Oh, yeah, I remember those days,” he says in his honey-thick drawl.
The image is from a book signing for The Chamber, in 1994. It’s a memento of the heady days of his early success, when he released a succession of best sellers that became hit movies. People camped out in line for his signings, studios got in bidding wars for his film rights, and stores could barely keep his book in stock. Much has changed since. Publishing has fallen on hard times, while the legal arena Grisham writes about has never seemed more tormented.
What hasn’t changed is Grisham’s steady commitment. Since breaking out with the legal thriller The Firm in 1991, he’s published at least one book a year—48 consecutive No. 1 New York Times best sellers, a feat no other writer has matched. This October, he’s gone back to the beginning. His new book, The Exchange, is a sequel to The Firm, the 1993 movie version of which starred Tom Cruise as lawyer Mitch McDeere. The new book was inspired in part by Cruise’s reprise in Top Gun: Maverick. Its release has Grisham feeling reflective. “When I started writing the book, I really got nostalgic,” he says.
He’s not the only one. A late-career Grisham renaissance may be in the offing. Feature films of Grisham’s novels Calico Joe, The Confession, The Partner, and The Racketeer are all in development, while several others are being turned into TV series, according to his agent, David Gernert.
Grisham’s books have shaped the way millions see the law and its discontents, tackling themes like racial violence, corporate greed, environmental destruction, and capital punishment. By his own account, he is obsessed with injustice, and often takes a novel as an opportunity to explore an issue. But he never wants readers to feel they’re being lectured to, he tells me. “I don’t spend a lot of time delivering messages,” he says. “I want to tell a story in such a way that the reader is caught up in it, and the pages turn.”
On this late August morning, Grisha
