A Time To Kill John Grisham? Never!

It’s easy to say that there’s nothing special about John Grisham. For many novelists he represents the worst of the worst in the world of fiction – and it’s easy to see why this is the perception.

Where other authors make the average reader suffer through a pile of bile-filled drudge, all in the hope of winning a Booker Prize at the end of it all, Grisham makes reading so simple. If you weren’t holding the pages in your hand, flipping them one-by-one, at certain points you’d swear you were watching a movie.

The words just fly in and you keep on reading, until you notice the time and pledge to read just one more chapter, and then, Jesus to the Christ: what happened, because you’re at the end of the book.

This is a typical John Grisham book – and there are enough of them. Over his 20 year career, he’s put out – on average – one book a year and they just keep on coming, even if they have started to become a tad repetitive.

His latest, The Associate, is essentially his second novel – The Firm – repackaged with new character names, a bit of modern technology, and a new location for good measure.

Yet, being a Grisham novel, you don’t hear too many complaints beyond those of the stuck-up reviewers at the New York Times or the Guardian. Always whining and whinging they are, so why would Grisham worry about what they think?

He won’t, and he doesn’t, because he knows by now that beyond the occasional novel that is universally praised for its subject matter – like his take on Deep South race relations in his debut novel, A Time to Kill – he isn’t well liked by the reviewers that make up the nouveau riche. Not being the new James Joyce writing his version of Ulysses, he sticks to making his fans happy. He knows what they like, and he writes it.

And happy the fans continue to be. Booksellers say that you can tell whether people are truly reading by their reaction to a new John Grisham novel. If it doesn’t sell, Mr Waterstones and Mr Eason – if they did actually exist in their three-piece 1920s-esque suits – would be in a backroom, hitting their heads against a wall cursing the latest recession. But, seemingly, they have no need to smash their monocles just yet.

First week sales of The Associate (or The Firm II, as some would say) put the book chiefly at the top of the Irish Times’ hardback fiction chart for both Ireland and Britain. And given the paper’s printing of exact figures for bestselling books, it shows just how lucky other authors are that there is even a market for books beyond those written by Grisham and his contemporaries.

John Grisham hasn’t always been someone to count on to sell millions of books. His first novel, published while he was still a Democratic member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, lead to a pile of rejection letters piling up on his desk. At the end of the first printing of the initial 5,000 copies he had a pile of unsold books that he brought, marked-down, to sell himself.

But, of course, Grisham isn’t the only author who received rejection letters for their first novel – Harry Potter author JK Rowling met with the same fate before she made it big – and now, look at them both, they are for all intensive purposes, the two bestselling authors in the world.

Eat your heart out Cecelia Ahern.