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Christina Harcar: Hello, I'm Audible Editor Christina Harcar and I have the pleasure today of speaking with bestselling author John Grisham. Actually, it's a double pleasure because we'll be discussing Sparring Partners, comprised of three terrific novellas. Jake Brigance, familiar to Grisham fans from A Time to Kill and other audios, makes an appearance in each. Welcome, John Grisham, and thank you for your presence today.

John Grisham: Thank you. My pleasure. Happy to be here.

CH: Great. So, let's head out to Clanton. What do you think? When you wrote on Goodreads in the middle of the pandemic that you had been writing novellas to finish up some stories that had been with you for a while, did you know that they were going to be these stories?

JG: There are three stories in Sparring Partners. The first story is called “Homecoming.” That is set in Ford County. The second story's called “Strawberry Moon.” That's set in a place, we never really know where. It's on death row. The title novella is “Sparring Partners,” which is set in a totally fictional office in St. Louis.

CH: Let's start with the first novel, “Homecoming.” I did not expect Mack Stafford to show up. How long has he been lurking around since he first appeared in “Fish Files”?

JG: Well, “Fish Files” was published in 2009, with a short-story collection. And Mack is the protagonist. Mack is a local lawyer in Clanton. His office is across the square from Jake's office. They're old buddies. Mack saw the opportunity to take some money that wasn't his and leave town in the middle of the night. And he made a clean escape. When we left Mack in “Fish Files,” he was on a beach in Belize, living the good life and happy to be away from all the bad things. That was 2009.

I've often thought about Mack since then. You can't run away from your problems. You can't run away from life. And you can't live on a beach for the rest of your life. And so Mack schemes to return to Clanton. He first notifies Jake and Harry Rex, Jake's sidekick. And he says, “I want to come home. I want you guys to make sure there are no warrants out for my arrest, nobody's looking for me, including my ex-wife. I'm not coming back if there's going to be trouble.” And Jake and Harry Rex fish around and they tell Mack that the coast is clear. So, Mack decides to come back to Clanton, and nothing goes as planned.

CH: Yes. And without spoiling it, in “Fish Files” we got to know Mack's daughters just barely as two immature young women who were kind of stiff when he hugged them. But, wow, the character of his daughter Margot comes to life in living color in this story. How did you feel about her?

JG: Margot's the older of the two. Four years ago, my daughter had my first granddaughter, my only granddaughter, and named her Margot. And it was not because I had used that name in “Fish Files.” My daughter just loved the name Margot. So now I have a four-year-old granddaughter named Margot.

I did not really anticipate Margot taking over the story the way she did. And I really came to love the character, because, at first, she's not too thrilled to see her father. He left the family. She's 17 or 18. She's got a smart mouth. And she's not going to live the rest of her life in Mississippi or a small town. She's got bigger dreams. And she's hard to deal with at first because she has a lot of anger toward Mack, as any child would. And the story is the way they kind of make peace with each other. I really came to love the character of Margot.

CH: I did too. I wanted to come back to this concept of “fish files” because I loved this idea from the first time it occurred in the book. And I will not spoil it, I'll let you tell us what lawyers think fish files are. But my question is, do you feel that your unfinished stories kind of tagging along, are those the author equivalent of fish files for lawyers?

JG: I don't think so. Fish files are files that you don't like, and the longer they sit there the worse they smell. I never heard that term; it's something I just started using with the short story in 2009. I think it's very appropriate because every lawyer in a small town takes cases that he wishes a million times he had never taken. It's favors to a friend. It's cases that are not going to earn a decent fee. And once you take the case, invariably those are the worst clients because they have high expectations, and you're not doing any work on the file because you don't want to.

I can vividly recall my office that I closed 32 years ago, as a very young lawyer. I only practiced for 10 years, but I can tell you where those fish files were. I had a place for them. And I had to look at them every day. I couldn't forget about them because I had clients, but you just really hate yourself for taking work that you don't like. And so that's where the name came from.

Mack had an office full of fish files. And he never made much money. And he finally said, “I gotta get out of this.” That sentiment is not unusual in small-town America. You go to law school because you have this dream of a better life. And then once you get into the small-town office practice, you realize you're not going to make any money. And Mack was very much in that rut. And he had a really bad marriage. On top of that, he was drinking too much. Pressure was getting to him.

CH: You know, I'm so fascinated by one piece of your own biography, which is that you had been doing a lot of menial work and that made you feel very serious about college. And then when you became an attorney, pulled into litigation, and you suddenly had this idea, the seed of A Time to Kill. My question is, it sounds like being an author is a lot better than being a small-town attorney sometimes. And yet, you portray them with such sympathy. And I just wondered if you had any thoughts about litigators being the storytellers of the attorney world. And the importance of that to your journey on the way to becoming an author.

JG: Good question. There are two things about being a lawyer that really help you as a writer. First of all, you see a lot of human suffering. You see a lot of misery. People really do bad things to each other and to their families and friends. So, the material is there. And to be a writer, you have to be able to handle the language to survive law school because there's so much reading and writing involved in the practice of law. Even if you're writing a letter or a lawsuit or a motion or whatever, you’ve got to keep the writing crisp and clear and clean and understandable, and most lawyers don't do that. I realized early on in my practice that I was not going to fall in the trap of just being too verbose and grand with the language. And I kept it clean, clear, efficient, and that has served me well writing novels.

"To be a writer, you have to be able to handle the language to survive law school because there's so much reading and writing involved in the practice of law."

CH: That's wonderful insight. Before we leave Mack, I do want to say that I listened to Jeff Daniels' performance of this. I was curious, what about Jeff Daniels captured the quality of Mack Stafford at this point in life that made you think that he would be a good match for the role?

JG: I saw him on Broadway three years ago in Mockingbird and was just enthralled with his portrayal of Atticus Finch. Gregory Peck will always be the greatest Atticus Finch ever, but Jeff was very believable as a small-town Southern lawyer in Mockingbird. And that's where the idea came from. When it comes to casting or finding readers for my audiobooks, they’ll send me ideas, and I listen to them and they're almost always good, because they're professionals. My favorite has been, for many years, Michael Beck, who has read so many of my books and has a fan following among audiobook fans because he's really good. Jeff was an obvious choice to ask. And we were very pleased when Jeff said yes.

CH: I think it was very serendipitous that he said yes. So, I don't mean to have a glib introduction to the next novella, but let's move on to “Strawberry Moon.”

JG: “Strawberry Moon” is the story of Cody Wallace, who's a young man with three hours to live. And he's 29 years old. He's been in prison for 14 years. He'll be the youngest man ever executed in the unnamed state. He was convicted of killing two people in a home invasion that went bad, he and his brother. He didn't actually pull the trigger but his brother did, so he was convicted as an accomplice under the law and sent away to death row. He had no family, no friends. He lived with his brother in the woods. And they were two kids that nobody wanted.

I wrote this story probably 15 years ago for a literary festival in Rome. They invited me to come participate. And I read the story in English, obviously. It was translated into Italian. It was a magical evening. Behind me was the Colosseum, and it was a huge crowd of people. It was the Rome Festival of Literature and they do it every year. It's one of the coolest things I've done as a writer.

So, I wrote this story. The theme was the moon. And I wrote this story about a kid who is about to die. He has not seen the moon in 14 years. And he grew up in the woods watching the moon every night. He loved the solar system and the constellations. And he knew them all. And that's how he would spend hours with his brother, watching the stars. And he wanted to see the moon one more time. When he gets down to the very end, when the clock has finally run out on him, he asks his favorite guard if he could step outside just for a moment and see the moon one last time before he is executed. And that's where the story came from.

CH: I really can't overstate how much this story stayed with me after I finished listening to it. The last couple of minutes are just intense in the best and worst way. What pulled me in at the beginning was the fact that Cody Wallace is a reader. And we all know that reading fosters empathy. So, how important was it for you to have a character like Cody whose empathy comes from reading?

JG: It's something that’s based on a lot of truth. I'm on the board of the Innocence Project in New York and have been for 12 years, I guess. And we throw an annual fundraiser in New York to raise money. And we fly in our exonerees for the past 12 months. I meet these wrongfully convicted, innocent men, who have served 20 or 30 years in prison. Not all of them on death row but in prison. And they're incredible people. They're fun to hang out with. And several of them have told me over the years, they've said things like, “When I went to prison, I was basically illiterate. And there's nothing else to do in prison but read. And I've read all your books. They have educated me. They have entertained me.” These are conversations that usually end up with tears, because they're very emotional people. And I get emotional too.

"I meet these wrongfully convicted, innocent men, who have served 20 or 30 years in prison. Not all of them on death row but in prison. And they're incredible people... So that was the inspiration for Cody."

And so that was the inspiration for Cody. Cody was 15 when he went to prison, basically illiterate because he had dropped out of school at a very young age. And he had no interest in reading. Every death row has a portable library. They roll it down between the cells and you can check out a book or two, and reading is all they’ve got to do. But Cody got lucky and he found a friend, a pen pal that he had never met, a little old lady from North Platte, Nebraska, named Ms. Iris. And she sent him a letter one day. And he'd never got letters. He had no family. He had no friends. She said she was praying for him. She was concerned about him because he was so young. And would he like to be her pen pal?

Well, he couldn't write very well. He'd never written a letter. And so he borrowed a dictionary and worked real hard at writing her back. And thus the pen pal relationship started. It lasted for 12 years. He had been in prison for a couple years before Ms. Iris contacted him. And she began sending him used paperbacks that she would buy at flea markets and garage sales. She never paid more than a dollar for one. Over the 12-year period, she sent him over 1,000 paperbacks. And he read them all three, or four, or five times. And all different types of books, crime thrillers, police procedurals, literary fiction, all kinds of stuff. And he devoured them. The more he read, the smarter he got, the better his writing was. And she encouraged him to practice his handwriting. And she would send him a book on penmanship. And he devoured that. And practiced and practiced and practiced.

She sent him money, a few dollars, to buy pencils and paper in prison because you have to pay for it. And over the period of time he became very well read and loved to talk to her about books. They wrote back and forth all the time. And she probably saved his life. She probably saved his sanity, because solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment. And it should be abolished everywhere, because you can't take away human contact from people without paying a price for it. But she saved his life, saved his sanity, and he was extremely grateful.

About an hour before his execution, Ms. Iris makes her appearance. She's come to visit and say goodbye. It's the only time they ever met. They spent about 30 minutes together, talking. In his cell he had every book; he had cheap bookshelves installed. It took a federal lawsuit to get the bookshelves and to allow him to keep the books. He files several federal lawsuits. He was that smart. And he always won, except when it came to air conditioning. He couldn't get air conditioning. But the walls of his 8-by-10 cell are lined with these colorful paperbacks. Louis L'Amour, Elmore Leonard. All the famous writers that we all grew up with. And he's got them all alphabetized. He knows where they all are. And he's very proud of his library. It's over 1,000 books.

And she can't believe it when she sees all the books that she purchased for him and sent to him all on display. And it really livened up an otherwise very gloomy place where he lived for 14 years. So that's the background of the books and where they came from in his library.

CH: And that's actually the moment that made me cry in this story. The first but not the last.

I think Ethan Hawke is another piece of terrific casting. He just gets across the ebullience of a young man and the way he delivers it. You feel like this is a young person. It heightens the pain in the story for me. What is it about Ethan Hawke that made you choose him?

JG: I can't say I chose him. I didn't have any input into that. They called one day and said, “We've hired Ethan Hawke to read ‘Strawberry Moon.’” And I said, “That's pretty incredible.” And when you hear him read it, it is incredible. It brings so much more to the story. When he was reading it, he actually became emotional and kind of broke down and had to stop and collect himself. I probably could not do that even though I wrote the story.

CH: So, let's turn to the big novella, “Sparring Partners,” the title novella. Why did you choose the title “Sparring Partners” for this story about Rusty and Kirk, the two most combative brothers I think I have ever seen in your work?

JG: It all goes back to reality. Almost every story I've written, every book I've written, has some basis in truth. I was inspired by a character. I was inspired by a trial or a conflict or a court case or a lawsuit or an appeal. Or something inspired me. That's where I get my ideas. I heard about this law firm. I know a friend who was in this particular law firm where the partners just couldn't stand each other. They weren't brothers, but they were bitter enemies. And most law firms blow up. Law firms blow up every day because it's hard to get along with a bunch of lawyers. And law firms are notorious, big firms, small firms, they don't last very long. Some of them do. But most of them blow up for a number of reasons, usually money.

But this firm, they could not separate because there was a very harsh partnership agreement that made any partner who wanted to leave surrender all of his files and cases to the remaining partners. And it was so punitive that nobody could leave the firm. It was so bad, the main two partners, one would work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the other would stay away from the office. One would work Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and the other one would stay away from the office. And I thought that's too good to pass up.

“Sparring partners,” of course, comes from the boxing world. It's not a very good job being the sparring partner because you're getting your head pounded all the time by the real pro. The name just kind of stuck.

CH: I’m going to get to how fun certain parts of this are, but what I wanted to pause a moment on is that even though it is the story of these two brothers, and they are larger than life, our lens and our guide through this story is a really wonderful character in her own right named Diantha. Why did you choose Diantha to be the one we follow through the story?

JG: Well, she is the glue that can barely hold the place together. This is a law firm with probably 20 lawyers. And it's split right down the middle. One brother is a liberal Democrat trial lawyer. He's on one side of the building. The other brother is a conservative Republican who does state and tax work. He's on the other side. They each have the same number of associates, secretaries, clerks, paralegals. Everything has to be equal. They split the money equally. And they're always fighting over money.

[Diantha’s] in the middle. Her desk is literally in an office between the two warring factions. And she's not a partner because they don't bring anybody else in as partners. They pay everybody well. She's been around for a long time. And if one brother wants something, he goes to her and she tells the other one, back and forth. She makes all the major decisions because they can't make any decision. They can't agree on anything. And so she's the most powerful person in the firm because they both trust her, because she's a great lawyer and a great person.

You mentioned humor. I think all three stories have a lot of humor. That's intentional. Because we all like a good laugh. And oftentimes when I'm writing a real tense legal thriller, I'll throw in a one-liner or something just for the fun of it, to get a laugh. But with these stories, I was not restrained in using humor. There's some really funny elements in all three of them.

"I think all three stories have a lot of humor. That's intentional. Because we all like a good laugh."

CH: That is definitely true. So, let's talk about some of the fun stuff. For me, actually, this was the type of story where you have this detailed and nuanced scenario where business and legal details are indispensable to the plot. And they're not boring at all. This is what you perfected in The Firm. I had that feeling in this. Some of the asides were hilarious. You will know, if you listen to this, which country club each brother goes to and how he voted and why. And their pettiness and the states of their marriages. Is that fun for you to dream up and to write? And what would you say was the moment that was the most fun for you to put down on paper in this story?

JG: There's this really tragic scene. Their father built the firm. It's in downtown St. Louis. Their father was a great trial lawyer who was smart and he built a powerhouse law firm. And he had a terrible marriage. Their mother was a very unpleasant person. He went to prison. He pled guilty to manslaughter for killing their mother. So, you have the two partners, their father is in prison for killing their mother. And he's scheming of ways to get out of prison because he has plenty of money and a lot of political contacts. So, I thought that setup was pretty unique and humorous.

There's an early scene where the trial lawyer brother, Rusty, has a huge trial and he asks the jury for $35 million in damages in his closing argument. He puts the numbers on the board and tries to justify a $35 million verdict. The jury comes back and gives him zero. That's not funny to him, but it's kind of a funny scenario because, again, he got greedy and he wanted too much money. And he didn't get anything. His poor clients are crushed. He could've settled for a little bit but that wasn't enough money. His ego wouldn't let him take a small amount of money.

Perhaps the funniest scene is when their father actually figures out a way to do away with his wife without using a gun or a knife or any kind of weapon. She has a history of coronary disease and a weak heart. And he frightens her in a way that would terrify anyone. And she didn't die immediately; he took his time getting her to the hospital. He was in no hurry. Anyway, it just goes on and on and on. I'm getting tickled thinking about it.

CH: I have to say, people in your stories often have really solid personal reasons to just get out of dodge. Sometimes it is an escape and sometimes as crooks. What's up with that, Mr. John Grisham?

JG: What's up with that? Most of us, at some time in our careers, our lives, have wanted to get out. Most of us have been in a bad job or a bad company or a whatever, maybe a bad marriage, maybe a bad family situation. And we dream of just kind of walking away from it, and having the money to do so. It probably goes back to the 10 years I spent practicing law. It was not a bad career. It was not that rewarding. It was a lot of frustration and a lot of daily grind, dealing with trying to make sense out of people's problems, and I got really tired of it.

And in all fairness, about halfway through that 10-year career, I started writing my first novel. And from that point on I was consumed with this dream of writing full-time. What a life. You write a book a year, you make enough money to survive, or maybe, if it sells a lot, you make a lot of money. And I just had this burning desire to write full-time. And I thought it would be the greatest life of all. That dream really engulfed me for a few years until it came true. I got lucky. The dream came true. But I remember the days when the law practice was dreary and not profitable. And I thought, “Man, I'd love to get out of this.” I'm not going to run away and leave my wife and kids, never thought about that. But doing something else, that was the dream.

CH: And it's interesting too, I read in Goodreads that you finished up these novellas, or perfected them, I would say, during the pandemic. Now is definitely a time where things can be hard and tedious and dreary, yet we're still very fortunate and trying to strive for more meaning, which is what I just heard you say.

JG: It's amazing what the pandemic did for reading and listening. When it first hit, two years ago, publishers were terrified. Everybody fled New York. And publishers were not sure they could publish a book remotely. The bookstores were closing. And supply chain issues, and printers were unable to print. The first month or so it was a really frightening time in publishing. And then a funny thing happened. People were stuck at home and they started reading and listening. Book sales skyrocketed. And they're still strong. People have rediscovered the love of reading. Listening and all types of books—e-books, paperbacks, hardbacks, audiobooks—are doing very well.

CH: So, what do you want listeners and readers to take away from your stories, either these three novellas or one particular, or in general? What are you hoping someone who has communed with your tale walks away with?

JG: To be entertained. This is popular fiction. It's not literary fiction. I'm not trying to change the world or reinvent the novel. First and most importantly, it's to entertain. Occasionally, I'll take a very compelling plot, a suspenseful story with some good and bad characters, and I'll kind of weave an issue through the book, a serious issue like wrongful convictions or the death penalty or environmental destruction or insurance fraud, and make the reader more aware of a certain problem, a certain fallacy, a shortcoming in our legal system. Because that's what I like to write, and at the same time entertain, but also to educate, or to make aware. You can't really preach. I don't try to preach in popular fiction. You can't assume that your readers share your politics or your worldview or your religious background. I'd never assume that. I don't want to make my politics intrusive to the reader. So, I'm careful about that.

"I'll kind of weave an issue through the book, a serious issue like wrongful convictions or the death penalty or environmental destruction or insurance fraud, and make the reader more aware of a certain problem."

Some stories have the social value of an issue that's exposed or with heightened awareness and some don't. Some are just stories. And that's why books are always going to succeed. We're always going to have bookstores, writers, publishers, because storytelling is never going to go away. We love it too much.

CH: Amen to that. So, my final question before I let you go on the lam and get out of dodge: Is there anything else you'd like to share with listeners about Sparring Partners?

JG: I've always got stories. I'm not a short-story writer. I don't like to write long novels. I don't like to read long novels. But I'm too long-winded for short stories. So, the novellas are too long for short stories and too short for full-blown novels. They're somewhere in between. I hope it works in the marketplace, with the readers. I hope they're well-received. Because I'd like to do it again. Some of these stories have been around for a long time. And as I get older, I was beginning to realize some of these stories are not getting written. They're just there. I've had them for a long time. And so that was the idea for putting the three of the shorter stories together in the novellas.

If it's well-received, I'll probably go back and do it again sometime fairly soon. That's kind of my plan for the future. I'm writing the next legal thriller now, from January to July. I finish on July the first and turn it in. It comes out in October. I'm working hard every day trying to finish it.

The pandemic really stuck us at home. And as I tell people, I've been quarantined for 30 years anyway because I work at home. I don't work around anybody else. I've been doing two books a year now for several years. I wrote a lot during the pandemic. Writing a lot now, always thinking about the next book or the next two books. I'm always looking down the road, always thinking of stories.

CH: Well, I can tell you that my personal opinion is that I'm very confident about how your fans will receive Sparring Partners. And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming today to talk to us and to share a little bit of your experience. Thank you.

JG: Thanks, Christina. My pleasure.

CH: Listeners, you can download Sparring Partners now at Audible.com.