Except when they're written by a handful of novelists. Especially John Grisham, the most popular practitioner of the legal thriller the world has ever known. Grisham's ninth novel, The Street Lawyer, published this spring and set in Washington, had a first printing of 2.8 million, a far cry from the 5,000 copies of his first, A Time to Kill. Every year since 1991, when The Firm blitzed bookstores in late February, a new Grisham novel has swept upon the spring lists like a hurricane. . . . It's no exaggeration to say that thousands of media folk, from publishing and printing executives to bookstore owners, film producers, directors and actors and beyond, profit from, and to some extent depend upon, the annual Grisham blockbuster.
Several reasons come to mind.
Readers tend to like heroes who get bruised, and Grisham's protagonists often pay in pain for their beliefs. For another thing, Grisham's usual operating premise, which pits a lone figure against a much larger adversary, such as the legal system, organized crime, or a narrow-minded town, plays well with many readers. The High Noon hero is still in demand. My guess is that many admiring readers consider it a delicious bonus that the contemporary novelist mounting the highest-profile attack on the legal establishment was himself trained in its tenets. And it usually takes more than one disappointing book by a favored author to break the habit.