EP 28 Muckraker John Grisham

Larry's Sorta Fun Stories

It all started last Christmas when my sister came to visit for the holiday.

My sister is an avid reader. Every time she comes to visit, she will bring several books with her to read. Last Christmas she brought a couple of John Grisham’s books. And I got hooked when she introduced me to Ford County. It was his first book of short stories.

In the 1990s, I had read most of his earlier books, but I had not read much of his work since that time but reading Ford County spurred me on to read more.

The book contained short stories reveling around a mythical county in the Mississippi Ford County. This county was where his first book story A Time To Kill took place. The short story that caught my attention was Fetching Raymond. A story about a poor aging mother and her two sons who had to borrow a pickup truck to drive to Parchman prison for a final meeting with her third son. Raymond was on death row. Grisham’s description of the journey to the prison was so full of color and feeling, I thought I was riding with them. And the narrative of the Raymond’s final hour to live before his execution in the electric chair was riveting.

Grisham was a small-town lawyer, and it took him three years to write his first book A Time To Kill in 1991. It was also rejected by twenty-eight publishers. This book did not immediately gain success. His second book, The Firm exploded to popular acclaim, and he discovered that if he could write a book a year, he would become a popular author. Today, it is reported that his books have sold over sixty million copies making him one of the most successful authors of my time. At this time ten of his works have been adapted for the silver screen.

He attributes his success to two things. One his pacing can be slow or breakneck and second his theme revolve around the little guy takes on the big corporate conspiracy.

What comes to my attention as I read his books, he addresses social issues: wrongful execution regarding the death penalty, racism, the homeless, health care, insurance companies, sleazy advertising, pharmaceutical companies, and big coal.

In the 2016 The Whistler and a follow-up book written in 2021 The Judge’s List, he deals with corrupted judges. Utilizing the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct as his starting point with a female leading character.

But what got me was his insight to the homeless on the streets of Washington DC in his 1998 book The Street Lawyer. He writes of main charter holding a small child in his arms at a makeshift shelter on a cold night and the next day learns that the child along with his mother and other children were found frozen to death because they were homeless and had to sleep in a car and the car’s exhaust asphyxiated them.

In Gray Mountain written in 2014 he addresses the plight of coal miners in the mountains in Virginia. Miners who are stricken with Black Lung Disease and have little or no recourse fighting the massive coal companies for better health care.

The Racketeer written in 2012 starts with a prisoner who is a lawyer that has been railroaded into prison but has evidence of a murder if he would be released.

While reading his books I am remember reading books I read in high school. Books by Sinclair Lewis who was called a muckraker. He had a social conscience about the plight of the less fortunate and struggle of immigrants at the turn of the century in the early 1900s.

In The Jungle 1906 Lewis wrote about the horrific living and working conditions of immigrants in the hog butchering plant in Chicago.

In Babbitt Lewis traced a satirical novel in 1922 about the emptiness of middle-class life and the soci

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