No, instead he, you know, climbs up a ladder, right? You can sort of redesign it once it's on paper.

Well, you tinker with it forever.

I mean, I make Doubleday give me the day and time when the book will actually hit the printer.

And that's months down the road because I'm constantly tinkering with dates, with plots, with characters, names.

And there's a lot of – it may sound kind of weird at this point in my life to say there's a lot of insecurities.

You're never really secure about everything.

Is this character really like this? Is this person going to be – do you want this person to be despised? It's good if you would do.

How bad did it get, and how many rejection letters did you get?

Faulkner,

that's it.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Every high school English teacher thinks she can teach The Sound and the Fury, and nobody can understand it, especially a bunch of high school kids.

But we had to put up with Faulkner, and we tried to plow through that.

So Steinbeck was just a relief, a welcome.

And I remember thinking so many times reading Steinbeck, I would think, gosh, I wish I could write this clearly.

So tell us, John, how do we get from To Kill a Mockingbird to your latest novel, The French Illusion?

And now he's back at Reacher and the whole you guys seem addicted to it.

Well, you know.

Mike, you get spoiled because you were able to live this incredible lifestyle where you don't really have to work, and you get paid well, and you get to travel around, and you get to... do things like this right here.

I mean, 30 years ago, I never thought I'd be talking to you in New Zealand for breakfast, just for the heck of it.

But it's a wonderful lifestyle.

For me, it's addictive.

For Lee, I know for sure.

How much are you looking forward to the midterms on a scale of 1 to 10? 10 being you'd rather shoot yourself.

You guys seem addicted to it.

Well, you know, Mike, you get, you get spoiled because you, we're, we're able to live this incredible lifestyle where you don't really have to work.

And you, and you get paid well, and you get to travel around, and you get to do things like this right here.

I mean, 30 years ago I never thought I'd be talking to you, you in New Zealand, uh [laughs] so, you know, for, for breakfast, just to, you know, just for the heck of it.

Um, but it, it's, it's a wonderful lifestyle and it, for me it's addictive.

For Lee, I know for sure.

I never met Jeffrey, uh, but I know Lee.

How much are you looking forward to the midterms on a scale of one to 10? 10 being you'd rather shoot yourself.

Yes.

It was, it was just after, um...

There were, there were two f- two major factors, I think, that sent me drifting.

One was the fact I was raised in a very strict Southern Baptist environment, very conservative, and I couldn't wait to leave home, to get away, to drink beer and chase girls and have some fun in college, and that was a huge factor.

Also, it was 1973.

We grew up in a suburb of Memphis, and it was a middle-class suburb, well, working-class suburb, and Vietnam hung over us all through high school.

We knew boys who had gone and come back, not in one piece.

Yeah.

Yeah

... a month earlier before Christmas, he had said, "Uh, haven't sold the book yet.

We're gonna wait till the new year.

Something gonna happen then." But the, The Firm, the, the manuscript had, had been around New York for a few months, and nobody, uh, wanted to buy it.

Uh, several publishers had said no.

Uh, and I, I was, I was involved in a big trial.

I'd kind of lost interest.

Yeah.

Mm.

And, um, The Widow came out last year and was a s- surprise.

It was a bestseller, but it really surprised because of the courtroom.

A lot of courtroom stuff.

And so there's no courtroom activity in The French Illusion.

The next book will be a lot of courtroom trials and crimes and murders and-

Okay.

We, we've sued, uh, OpenAI.

It sounds almost like thinking about your – origins as a lawyer and working in the legal system it sounds similar to how you approach storytelling like you're almost i don't say litigating the story but you are making sure that you have every step of the story covered and you know what is going to happen going into it you're not really similar to how you would enter going into a trial right you're probably not going to be going into a trial flying by the seat of your pants like hey we'll get in there we'll wing it

Listen, when I was in law school, about halfway through law school, I had this desire to be a courtroom lawyer.

I'd taken part in the required mock trial competitions and moot court and things like that in law school.

And I really enjoyed it.

The courtroom really enjoyed being on my feet.

And and so my last year in law school, which is always a pretty easy year, I would skip class and go down to the federal courthouse just down the street from Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi.

And I would watch the docket.

And I was wondering if you could speak about about the work that these organizations do, but then also your involvement with them, how you got involved, what kind of role that plays in your life right now?

Even his first line, though, Nate, it said the surveillance began on the third day of the honeymoon, though the bride and groom had no possible way of knowing

it.

God, that's good.

I work on that first sentence the whole six months I'm writing the book.

I keep changing it because especially with this story, I want to hook the reader in the first paragraph.

And this does.

And it keeps you on the hook for 400 pages more.

Even a good spy couldn't write 50 bestsellers, right? So how did you research what it means to be a spy, the world of espionage?

Can you sit in that?

I don't miss law office.

I don't miss suing people.

Yeah.

I never was too happy as a lawyer.

I mean, I dreamed of writing full time.

I never thought it would happen.

There's

And this idea, was it purely from the imagination? Was it from something you watched on screen, something you read about in a newspaper, on a news site, or it was just an idea that sprung to the front of your brain in the way that ideas sometimes do?

No, I'm always inspired by something that really happens, and for years I've been fascinated with Guantanamo.

and all the things we did there, and all the terrible things we did, and the way the American lawyers and British lawyers stepped in to try to defend the innocent people at Guantanamo.

Because most of them were very innocent, but they were abused anyway.

It's a real dark chapter in American jurisprudence history.

And I've been fascinated with that.

So that was the backdrop.

But I mean, do you leave any notion of a film, four wall cinema adaptation or a small screen adaptation until somebody approaches you?

John, you were a criminal defense lawyer in your younger years.

Yeah, it goes back to a confession, false confession.

There's no other proof.

to convict Jens of the murder.

So all they have is a false confession.

And with any false confession case, what you would hope that the authorities do is once they manage to extract the confession, and whatever tactics they use to do that, is that they will match it up to the physical evidence to see if it in fact matches.

And false confessions virtually never match up because there are too many details or specifics in the murder.

How do you explain this?

When you think about that, I mean, does it hit you or is it just, it's what you love to do?

Both.

When I started 40 years ago, I was a lawyer in a small town in Mississippi.

I had no idea what I was doing.

I got lucky e- to get it published in '89.

It was a total flop.

Time to Kill, we couldn't give them away back then.

Is there a character you started writing that you just loved everything about them?

do?

Both.

When I started 40 years ago, I was a lawyer in a small town in Mississippi.

I had no idea what I was doing.

I was lucky to get it published in 89.

It was a total flop.

Time to kill.

That real-world injustice eventually pulling Grisham out of the realm of fiction, leading to his work with the Innocence Project, fighting to free the wrongfully convicted.

For John Grisham, the most compelling slice of America is found in the South.

Writers write about what they know, and that's where I come from.

When you have a place with such a tortured history and a long period of conflict and suffering, you have great stories.

Writers are thieves.

We steal stories.

We steal everything.

We steal names.

That real world injustice eventually pulling Grisham out of the realm of fiction, leading to his work with the Innocence Project, fighting to free the wrongfully convicted.

John Ray, now Shannon's family has to read this and only imagine what Shannon may have or the other victims put up with, what they endured, what they lived through before they died.

I want to vomit.

I can play.

Everybody does, I think.

This monster, this giant monster who I characterize as Tyrannosaurus Rex...

His image is now frozen in the minds of the Gilbert family, and I also represent Jessica Taylor's family, and they had the same reaction.

Twenty-year-old

Go ahead.

And how many publishers turned that down?

Well, all of them did.

They deny it now.

But no, there were about 15 publishers and about 15 agents said no.

They wrote me rejection letters.

But my secretary would send out their submissions.

This is 1987, before the internet.

And can you tease us a little bit about what it's about or it's a secret? Oh,

And how many publishers turned that down?

Well, all of them did.

They deny it now.

But no, there were about 15 publishers and about 15 agents said no.

They wrote me rejection letters.

But my secretary would send out their submissions.

This is 1987, before the internet.

And can you tease us a little bit about what it's about or it's a secret? Oh,

I want to

vomit.

I can play.

Everybody does, I think.

This monster, this giant monster who I characterize as Tyrannosaurus Rex...

His image is now frozen in the minds of the Gilbert family, and I also represent Jessica Taylor's family, and they had the same reaction.

Twenty-year-old

Go ahead.

What was your first trial like?

My first murder case, fresh out of law school, it wasn't capital murder.

It was a self-defense claim.

It was a honky-tonk shooting one night, and everything blew up and it was out of control, and there were more guns than you could count and bullets flying everywhere.

But my client had obviously killed another man, and there was a lot of pressure, and I had no business trying that case by myself seven months out of law school, but that's the way it worked in our small county in Mississippi.

We had no public defender's office, so the cases were parceled out by the judges to all the young lawyers.

And there I was in court, and I was not prepared for the trial.

Why is this such a slow uphill battle in the US, and what do you think it's gonna take to change it?

What was your first trial like?

My first murder case, fresh out of law school, it wasn't capital murder.

It was a self-defense claim.

It was a honky-tonk shooting one night, and everything blew up and was out of control, and there were more guns than you could count and bullets flying everywhere, but my client had obviously killed another man, and there was a lot of pressure, and I had no business trying that case by myself seven months out of law school, but that's the way it worked.

In our small county in Mississippi, we had no public defender's office, so the cases were parceled out by the judges to all the young lawyers, and there I was in court, and I was not prepared for the trial.

I thought the trial would be postponed for another month or so, and the five versus cases ahead of my case suddenly went off on plea bargains, and the jury panel was there, and the judge said, "Okay, you're up next.

Uh, pick a jury and let's go." And I had no idea what to do.

Why is this such a slow, uphill battle in the US, and what do you think it's gonna take to change it?

And I'll come back to Jim in a minute, John, but how were you drawn to the work of the Innocence Project and the Innocence community? Was it related to your other only nonfiction

work? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I was a lawyer.

I still think of myself as a lawyer.

I was a lawyer for 10 years in a small town in Mississippi.

many years ago, and I was starving to death.

I had a lot of clients, most of them were indigent criminal clients, and I did a lot of criminal work, and I never had a client I thought was wrongfully convicted or abused or mistreated by the system.

How did you pick the ones you picked?