John Grisham
John Grisham suffers the fate of many popular artists – the cultural snobs condescend because surely something so attractive to the masses can’t have artistic merit. But folks, Proust never wrote a page-turner. Tolstoy never knew a plot he couldn’t overcomplicate. Give me a writer who knows how to entertain. I like John Grisham.
Some basic facts. A Mississippi native, Grisham has now written 29 books, most of them legal thrillers. He’s sold exactly seventy bazillion books, just a few bazillion short of J.K. Rowling. And yet his first novel, A Time to Kill, was rejected by 28 publishers before finding a home with a small press.
Grisham has a great way of creating lead characters we root for, even if they have personality traits we don’t always find attractive. My favorites: The Firm, The Client, and The Runaway Jury. But I’ll read anything he writes – the man can flat-out write.
The Firm was the scariest because it seemed so possible!