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Summary
Summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * In his first collection of short stories John Grisham takes us back to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his first novel, A Time to Kill .
Wheelchair-bound Inez Graney and her two older sons, Leon and Butch, take a bizarre road trip through the Mississippi Delta to visit the youngest Graney brother, Raymond, who's been locked away on death row for eleven years. It could well be their last visit.
Mack Stafford, a hard-drinking and low-grossing run-of-the-mill divorce lawyer gets a miracle phone call with a completely unexpected offer to settle some old, forgotten cases for more money than he has ever seen. Mack is suddenly bored with the law, fed up with his wife and his life, and makes drastic plans to finally escape.
Quiet, dull Sidney, a data collector for an insurance company, perfects his blackjack skills in hopes of bringing down the casino empire of Clanton's most ambitious hustler, Bobby Carl Leach, who, among other crimes, has stolen Sidney's wife.
Three good ol' boys from rural Ford County begin a journey to the big city of Memphis to give blood to a grievously injured friend. However, they are unable to drive past a beer store as the trip takes longer and longer. The journey comes to an abrupt end when they make a fateful stop at a Memphis strip club.
The Quiet Haven Retirement Home is the final stop for the elderly of Clanton. It's a sad, languid place with little controversy, until Gilbert arrives. Posing as a lowly paid bedpan boy, he is in reality a brilliant stalker with an uncanny ability to sniff out the assets of those "seniors" he professes to love.
One of the hazards of litigating against people in a small town is that one day, long after the trial, you will probably come face-to-face with someone you've beaten in a lawsuit. Lawyer Stanley Wade bumps into an old adversary, a man with a long memory, and the encounter becomes a violent ordeal.
Clanton is rocked with the rumor that the gay son of a prominent family has finally come home, to die. Of AIDS. Fear permeates the town as gossip runs unabated. But in Lowtown, the colored section of Clanton, the young man finds a soul mate in his final days.
Featuring a cast of characters you'll never forget, these stories bring Ford County to vivid and colorful life. Often hilarious, frequently moving, and always entertaining, this collection makes it abundantly clear why John Grisham is our most popular storyteller.
Don't miss John Grisham's new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM, coming soon!
Author Notes
John Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas on February 8, 1955. He received a bachelor's degree in accounting from Mississippi State University. He was admitted to the bar in Mississippi in 1981 after receiving a law degree from the University of Mississippi, specializing in criminal law. While a lawyer in private practice in Southaven, Mississippi, Grisham served as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 until 1990. He left the law and politics to become a full-time author.
His first novel, A Time to Kill, was published in 1989. His other novels include The Partner, The Street Lawyer, The Testament, The Brethren, The Summons, The King of Torts, Bleachers, The Last Juror, The Broker, Playing for Pizza, The Appeal, Calico Joe, The Racketeer, Gray Mountain, Rogue Lawyer, The Confession, The Litigators, The Whistler, Camino Island, The Rooster Bar, and the Theodore Boone series. Several of his novels were adapted into films including The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Returning to the setting of his first novel, A Time to Kill, longtime bestseller Grisham presents seven short stories about the residents of Ford County, Miss. Each story explores different themes-mourning, revenge, justice, acceptance, evolution-but all flirt with the legal profession, the staple of (former attorney) Grisham's oeuvre. Fans will be excited to settle back into Grisham's world, and these easily digestible stories don't disappoint, despite their brevity. Full of strong characters, simple but resonant plotlines, and charming Southern accents, this collection is solid throughout; though his literary aspirations may seem quaint, Grisham succeeds admirably in his crowd-pleasing craft while avoiding pat endings or oversimplifying (perhaps best exemplified in "Michael's Room," which finds a lawyer facing the consequences of successfully defending a doctor against a malpractice suit). As always, Grisham balances his lawyerly preoccupations with a deep respect for his undereducated and overlooked characters. (Nov.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
New York Review of Books Review
JOHN GRISHAM, shake hands with Michael Jordan. And then get back to what you do best, as His Airness did, more or less before it was too late. Jordan didn't exactly embarrass himself when he experimented with a career in baseball a few years ago; but he didn't redefine the sport, either. In a similar flight of hubris, or what Hollywood calls "stretching," Grisham, the reigning global grandmaster of the legal thriller, has written a collection of tales set smack-dab in the hallowed literary turf of the Mississippi Delta. Never mind that Grisham is a bona fide child of the Delta, knows its terrain and folkways, and has used it as a setting for some of his best-selling novels. We talkin' short story now, sonny - and stories are viewed by many as the major leagues of literary fiction. The seven examples in "Ford County," while not exactly dreadful, suggest that the majors remain as far from Grisham's grasp as they did from Jordan's. Aside from the Upper West and Lower East Sides of Manhattan, the Mississippi Delta has probably generated more and better short fiction per acre than any other real estate in America. Faulkner wrote from here, and Welty, and Larry Brown, and Ellen Gilchrist, and others too numinous to mention. (All right, it is possible to oversanctify these matters. But still.) It's unfair, of course, to compare a selfacknowledged writer of popular fiction with such avatars. Yet Grisham seems to ask for it. Southern-Gothic grifters, drunks, misfits, the downtrodden, the dollarless, the desperate and the dying - the timeless rank and file of Delta literature - populate this book. Grisham has read Faulkner, and his fictional Ford County might be seen as a stand-in for Yoknapatawpha County. Listen close, Grisham seems to be urging us, and you can hear the beating of the human heart in conflict with itself. Such conflicted beatings, however, are seldom audible. They are drowned out by the roar of Grisham's typically hell-forleather plots, the skrawk of sketchy characterization, the clunk of tin-plated dialogue and (inevitably, one supposes) the ceaseless baying and barking of lawyers. Grisham's Mississippi may contain precious few African-Americans or Christian divines or complex, resilient women, but it is well stocked in barristers, a resource generally underexploited by the Southern Renaissance. No lawyers are present in "Blood Drive," the opening story, though the characters could have used one, if only to sue the author for nonsupport. A local boy named Bailey has been injured in a construction accident up in Memphis, and three of his friends, Aggie, Calvin and Roger, volunteer to drive to the hospital and donate blood, even though nobody knows for sure whether he has lost any. Their rescue mission is promptly sidetracked - first by a series of stops for six-packs, then by the lure of a legendary Memphis club where the strippers perform lap dances. A high-speed cop chase soon ensues, leading somewhat indirectly to a scene in which Roger, lying concealed under a Ford pickup, finds it necessary to fling a rock from his prone position so that it "hits something" and causes enough diversion to allow Roger to escape the farmer. (Did I mention there was a farmer?) Grisham doesn't bother to say what the rock hit, perhaps because he, like the rest of us, finds it impossible to believe that a rock thrown by anyone pinned under a truck could hit anything with enough force to create a diversion. The plot required a diversion, and so Grisham thought one up. This illuminates a central problem with Grisham's fiction: plot rules. His novels promiscuously reverse the writerly adage "character is plot," to the point that plot often becomes the main character, leading the human characters around by the nose when necessary. Grisham can get away with this in his long-form writing because of his sheer inventiveness, his encyclopedic knowledge of the legal system and courtroom procedure, and his reliable passion for justice and social causes. But enforced brevity is not his friend. The pointillist demands of short fiction mercilessly expose deficiencies of craft. If the characters are interchangeable markers in the plot's progress, as they are here and in the other stories, if the language they speak is similarly boilerplate and if the plot itself veers into "Dukes of Hazzard" silliness, there's not much left to mask the emptiness. Legal aid, as it were, arrives in the third story, "Fish Files." Mack Stafford is a bored bankruptcy and divorce lawyer going nowhere when an out-of-the-blue chance to cash in on a dormant productliability case presents him with the opportunity to pull a fast one on his four clients, whom he weasels out of their fair settlement sums, then trick his used-up wife into divorcing him after he has fraudulently declared bankruptcy, then make a beeline for Belize, where he is last seen leaping from a long pier into the "saunalike water" and swimming away. Toward his suicide? Toward happy times? Who knows? Who cares? Among the final four stories, only the last one - "Funny Boy," about a young AIDS patient returning home to intolerant Clanton from San Francisco to die - contains any real gesture toward the human condition; and this tale is diverting chiefly for its sentimentality. NONE of this is to say that Grisham is hopelessly a one-trick pony. What diminishes "Ford County" are largely lapses of energy, rather than of potential. Grisham himself has admitted that he is lazy (he was speaking of research, but good writing depends heavily on research). The intermittent bursts of genuine thought and originality in "Ford County" show us how good he might be if he weren't so content to coast. His talent shows up most strikingly in "Fetching Raymond." Leon and Butch Graney, two (interchangeable) brothers of a young death row prisoner named Raymond, have driven their mother to the prison for a final farewell. Raymond turns out to be a congenital poseur, glib and self-deluded. His assurances that his sentence will be commuted as the fateful hour draws near serve only to irritate Leon and Butch, who can see that Raymond is toying with their mother's hopes. The dignity, such as it is, of this sad reunion is shattered when the kitchen crew enters the cell with Raymond's last meal: fried catfish, French fries, hush puppies, coleslaw, a cheeseburger, a bubbling pepperoni pizza. The hungry Leon and Butch try to ignore this tempting repast and grant Raymond a measure of final nobility, but his greedy enjoyment of the meal is finally too much for them. "Do you have to smack like that?" Leon barks. Butch joins in. "Son, you're makin' more noise than a horse eatin' corn." Raymond takes offense: "It's my last meal," he says. "And my own family's bitchin' at me." Leon apologizes. "I'm sorry. We're all a little tense." "Tense?" Raymond asks. "You think you're tense?" Right there, Grisham nails the pathos and hopelessness, counterpointed by comedy, of a family in the very crucible of doom. John Grisham, it seems, may indeed have some talent for the story form. Whether he has the inclination to employ it depends on how closely he conforms to the famous epigram of Pascal, who once observed, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." Ron Powers most recently collaborated with the late Senator Edward Kennedy on his memoir, "True Compass."
Table of Contents
Blood Drive | p. 1 |
Fetching Raymond | p. 65 |
Fish Files | p. 139 |
Casino | p. 205 |
Michaels Room | p. 259 |
Quiet Haven | p. 309 |
Funny Boy | p. 387 |