To be honest, I had not read a John Grisham book since Sycamore Row. When I learned that A Time for Mercy, the sequel to his first book, A Time to Kill, was out, I couldn't download it onto my iPad fast enough.
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| Photo from jgrisham.com |
I've followed Grisham's career for several reasons, but we'll get into that later. You may recall that A Time to Kill featured young lawyer Jake Brigance. Good old Jake returns in this sequel having been appointed by Judge Omar Noose (Don't you just love it. Judge Noose, ha!) to defend a young, skinny, shy teenager—Drew Gamble. The kid is accused of fatally shooting a local deputy at point blank range, and the community is demanding the death penalty.
Drew, his mother, and sister have been living with the hard-drinking and abusive guy for some time. Jake reluctantly accepts Noose's appointment to defend Drew. But when he starts digging, he uncovers more than the obvious about the case. That's all I can tell you, except that the characterization was so real, and the plot was brilliant, and the dialogue very believable.
The book is a page a turner—that's for sure. Jake is played by Matthew McConaughry in the Time to Kill movie. There is speculation that he might do an encore if this is made into a film. Problem is—The two cases are five years a part in book time. In real time, the first movie was released in 1996, and now it's 2020. If anyone can pull this off, Matthew can. He credits the first movie with jump-starting his film career.
Well, back to the other part of this story. Why am I interested in John's career? Yes, I can call him by his first name. We are the same age, and we happened to be at then Northwest Junior College in Senatobia, Miss., at the same time. For me, those years were 1972-73 and 1973-74.
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| Grisham in the 1974 Rocketeer, the Northwest yearbook. |
Herein lies the irony. I didn't ever run into John, that I know of during that time. I'm sure he would have remembered me. He came back to his alma mater soon after the release of The Firm movie, probably around 1994. That was my only face-to-face meeting with him. He set up in the conference room in the McGhee Building to sign copies of his books. His real reason for being there was that he had donated a short story to the Northwest Review, the literary magazine.
And it was at that event that he told the students that he had taken Freshman English from the late Miss Frances Smith, a no-nonsense English teacher who spoke with perfect diction. He did not make a good grade. When he got to Northwest he had planned to be a stand-out player, but his grades put a damper on that. He left Northwest and transferred to Delta State University.
"I decided I needed to leave," Grisham joked. "I could not trust such a promising career to coaches with such limited vision." This, from a July 3, 2015 article in The Clarion Ledger.
We, I, too am a published author. Since retiring from Northwest in 2010, I have written a three-book series including The Carving Place, The Bargain—Paulette's Story, and Finding Marian.
Like Grisham, I sold books from the trunk of my car, at local shops, and even a few from Square Books in Oxford. I think I read that he sold 50 books at his first signing. I sold 5 at Square Books. Grisham has made millions, an estimated $300 million on his writing career. I have barely broken even. And when I took Miss Frances Smith's English class at Northwest, I made an A.
