Q&A with John Grisham
“I JUST TAKE THE BEST IDEA I’VE GOT AND RUN WITH IT.”
—JOHN GRISHAM, 69, BEST-SELLING WRITER OF COURTROOM THRILLERS LIKE THE FIRM AND THE PELICAN BRIEF, TALKS ABOUT HOW THE AMERICAN LEGAL SYSTEM PROVIDES ENDLESS MATERIAL—AND WHY IT NEEDS TO CHANGE.
Your new book out this month, Framed, cowritten with Jim McCloskey, is a departure from your fiction—it looks at real-life cases of the wrongfully convicted. Why this book, at this time?
I’ve been infuriated for 18 years now, ever since I wrote The Innocent Man (2006), and I realized how many innocent people are in prison—and there are thousands of them. You study these cases, and they’re hard to believe, that the police and prosecutors can screw up so badly. These are not all innocent, honest mistakes. There is a lot of deliberate lawbreaking, deliberate malfeasance and deliberate bad behavior in every one of these cases.
What would it take to stop most wrongful convictions?
There are about four or five things that would prevent most wrongful convictions. For example, in most of these cases, you have a jailhouse informant, who is nothing but a con man who’s been paid by the cops and prosecutors to give false testimony against the accused.... So I would eliminate snitch testimony. I would require the police to film all interrogations. That would probably eliminate almost all false confessions.… And I’m from Mississippi—we elect every judge down there, and most states do that. So you’ve got a bunch of politicians who are on the bench. It’s a bad system.
You were a lawyer yourself for a while. What was that like?
I only did it for 10 years, and I kind of wanted to get out of it the whole time. It was a small-town practice in Mississippi, and I quickly learned it’s really hard to make a living that way. We were [working with] people who needed help, not those who can pay fees. But I never had a client who I thought was wrongly convicted, because I knew the policemen, the prosecutors, the judges, and we had a good system. Everybody kind of played by the rules.... And I assumed, wrongly, that that was pretty much the situation everywhere.
You’ve said fiction is easier to write than nonfiction because you can make stuff up. But writing fiction seems pretty hard to some of us nonfiction writers.
I’m blessed with a hyperactive imagination. And I’m blessed with a lot of material because even though I’m not a lawyer anymore, the law fascinates me, and that’s what I read about: law firms, lawyers, cases, courts, appeals, trials, crimes. That’s where I live, and there’s a ton of material there that you can take and fictionalize and have a great story. And it honestly just comes easy for me. I’m very lucky.
You start writing a new book every Jan. 1 and finish it by July 1. Do you always have an idea by the first of the year?
Anytime there’s a downtime, I’m thinking about the next book and so kind of gearing up for it with several ideas. And when it’s time to start writing, I just take the best idea I’ve got and run with it. But my wife and I were talking about my next book after Framed, and she said, “I am so sick of death row. Please do not write any more books on death row.”
What’s your writing ritual like?
I get into the habit of getting up early and going to the computer around 7 or 7:30. In my little writing room, there are no phones, no fax, no internet, no music, no disturbances—nothing but the same brand of strong coffee, the same coffee cup. I sit there for several hours, just in another world. After 35 years, I still treasure those moments. But after four hours or five hours, I’ve got to have a break. My mind is kind of muck.
What do you do with your free time?
My wife and I are just about full-time grandparents. We live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one grandchild is here in Charlottesville and two are in Raleigh, North Carolina, about three hours away. So we see them all the time, and we do a lot with them. I’m babysitting them right now. We spend a lot of time on the farm—it’s 1,000 acres of beautiful countryside—and we take hikes, and my wife has horses. We travel, play some golf. It’s a pretty laid-back life, really.
What types of books do you like to read, besides legal dramas?
I like adventure nonfiction by authors like Hampton Sides, who just came out with The Wide Wide Sea [about the final, fatal adventure of Captain James Cook], and David Grann, who wrote The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Is there one book that you consider an all-time favorite?
A book that just thoroughly entertains me every five years is called The Little Drummer Girl by John le Carré, who really inspired me to write better suspense. It was published in 1983 and is so timely. It’s about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s a brilliant story of suspense and espionage and also about that very big troubled land that the author captured beautifully.
Sadly, we’re still in a troubled time when it comes to the Middle East. But more generally, would you say that you’re hopeful about the future?
I’m always cautiously optimistic. I’m not a complete optimist, because there are so many problems that we face on so many different fronts. I’ll be 70 years old in February and have been thinking about what kind of world do we leave behind for these grandkids who are running around my feet right now? That’s a very good question for all of us to address. What are we going to leave behind for them?
Are you at an age when you are thinking about your personal legacy?
I don’t worry about that. I don’t want anybody to write a biography of me after I’m gone. I told my wife and kids, do not do that. Don’t worry about my legacy. I don’t care. But if people remember me, I hope it’s because they remember the books that they read, that were highly entertaining, and it got them through a difficult period. I helped some folks get through tough times.
Interview by Christina Ianzito