Great Grisham A Jury’s Deliberation In Tobacco Lawsuit Makes For High Drama And A Compelling Case Against Smoking
“The Runaway Jury” By John Grisham (Doubleday, 401 pp., $26.95)
With a chain of six best-selling legal thrillers behind him, John Grisham has turned his golden hand to an illegal thriller “The Runaway Jury,” which may be his best book.
Courtroom drama is a Grisham specialty, but this time out the details of the big trial are almost irrelevant. The drama is in the jury room.
The case is a big one. A Mississippi lawsuit, Wood v. Pynex, pits the widow of a smoker who has died of lung cancer against America’s third-largest tobacco company, Pynex. The case also pits a complex of political, ethical and medical forces against a cartel of all the major tobacco companies; finally, it pits lawyers against lawyers, with unimaginable amounts of money at stake.
The process of selecting the jury is critical, and both the plaintiff and the defendant have gone to great lengths to check out the potential jurors. Pynex can tap into a vast secret war chest, the Fund, which is administered by the shadowy, fleshy and utterly unprincipled Rankin Fitch, whose business is seeing to it that verdicts go the way the big tobacco companies want them to. He chooses the lawyers, studies the jurors, finds ways to fix them. It’s never a question of direct bribery. Instead, high-paying career opportunities are dangled before jurors or difficulties are created for family members that can easily be resolved if the votes go the right way.
Fitch doesn’t foresee any real problems with Wood v. Pynex, but even on the first day of the trial, something has flown out of control. Somebody outside Fitch’s top-secret circle knows all about him; this person, or people, are playing his own game, and beating him at it. That first afternoon in court, Fitch receives a note from an anonymous woman. “Tomorrow, juror number two, Nicholas Easter, will wear a gray pullover golf shirt with red trim, starched khakis, white socks, and brown leather shoes, lace-up.”
And so he does. Easter, misleadingly ordinary in appearance and history, is a mysterious figure with a magnetic and manipulative personality who has taken infinite pains to arrive on this particular jury. Clearly he is up to something. But just what is it?
Part of the fun is that the reader already knows - or has a pretty good idea. Some of Grisham’s previous novels have been technically maladroit, but this time he plays his game in the open. We know what Rankin Fitch is up to and we know what Nicholas Easter intends to do - but neither of them can predict the other’s next move, and the fun comes from watching these two well-matched adversaries struggle for control of the jury and the verdict.
Grisham’s style is at best utilitarian, although there are occasional unexpected touches of wit. Here’s the history of the plaintiff’s lawyer, Wendall Rohr, for example.
“By the age of forty he had an aggressive firm and a decent reputation as a courtroom brawler. Then drugs, a divorce and some bad investments ruined his life for a while, and at the age of fifty he was checking titles and defending shoplifters like a million other lawyers. When a wave of asbestos litigation swept the Gulf Coast, Wendall was once again in the right place… . He built a firm, refurbished a grand suite of offices, even found a young wife. Free of booze and pills, Rohr directed his considerable energies into suing corporate America on behalf of injured people. On his second trip, he rose even quicker in trial lawyer circles. He grew a beard, oiled his hair, became a radical, and was beloved on the lecture circuit.”
The plot of “The Runaway Jury” isn’t plausible and the subplots meander; the characters are one-dimensional. But the plot of “The Firm” wasn’t plausible either; it was an exceptionally powerful fantasy, and so is “The Runaway Jury.” That is one of the things that make “The Runaway Jury” a page-turner; another is Grisham’s unstoppable momentum. Yet another is that he knows the playing field, and he can make the mechanics of jury selection and the routines of sequestered jury life as enthralling as the desperate and exciting adventures going on outside the courtroom.
What makes Grisham’s books fun is that his villains are people you love to hate - last time out, it was the unprincipled executives of insurance companies, and this time it’s the unprincipled executives of Big Tobacco. And naturally the lawyers on both sides are utterly without scruple, and even the judge bends the rules.
What makes “The Runaway Jury” complicated is that this time Grisham’s heroes and villains are operating by the same code. The mysterious woman admits as much. “All the players are corrupt,” she tells Fitch. “Your clients are corrupt. My partner and I are corrupt. Corrupt but smart. We pollute the system in such a way that we cannot be detected.”
What makes “The Runaway Jury” matter more than some of Grisham’s other books is that the issues raised by this fantasy are real, timely, provocative and important - just as they were in his novel about capital punishment, “The Chamber.” Grisham marshals the scientific evidence against smoking more efficiently than lawyers usually do and repeats the appalling history of how the tobacco companies deceived the public about what they knew about the dangers of their own product.
The millions of people who are going to read “The Runaway Jury” this summer are not going to make the life of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) any easier. And no smoker is going to read it without forming another resolve to quit - but not before finishing the book, please. There’s just too much tension …