5 Reasons Why You Have To Read The Firm, by John Grisham.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,”
Henry VI, Part 2, William Shakespeare.
Language evolves. So does our understanding of words and phrases. Context is everything, and as the original context of a word or phrase in which it is written becomes eroded by the winds of time, its original meaning can be distorted, lost, or sometimes completely reversed. In the case of the Shakespeare line quoted above, you will often hear it said that the playwright wasn’t fond of lawyers, and somehow this quotation has helped fuel a popular misunderstanding that lawyers are generally disliked, or that we would be better off without them. Of course, in Henry VI, this line is actually spoken by a character called Dick the Butcher, and as the more astute among you might have already guessed from the non-de-plume, old Dickie is a dangerous villain, plotting a vicious and bloody authoritarian revolution.
Shakespeare knew back in the 17th century that attacking lawyers is the first major rumble on a political Richter scale that should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention. We see it now, in 2025, all over the world: . Lawyers in Turkey are routinely arrested and subjected to persecution. Similar attacks on lawyers are made in Myanmar, Russia, China and Sudan. Human Rights lawyers are regularly demonized in the media by certain political parties in the United Kingdom. Lawyers just often happen to be the very first group to be targeted by newly installed political Administrations with undemocratic agendas. lawyers are the canary in the coal mine of democracy.
While our rights and freedoms are often handily written down in various laws and statutes, unless someone of great skill and bravery is willing to stand up and defend them, they’re not worth the parchment they’re written on. Targeting the people who understand and protect our rights is as good as ripping up the very laws that establish them. Sometimes, to our detriment, we forget this. Luckily, we can escape into fictional worlds to be reminded – and entertained in the process.
I’m a former civil rights lawyer, but now, I’m a novelist, often telling the stories of these moments where someone must step in to defend our precious rights and freedoms. Eddie Flynn, a former con-artist turned trial lawyer, is the protagonist of many of these stories – nine novels and a novella, The Cross, that’s just been published as an original audiobook.
In The Cross, Eddie must stand up and question authorities, fighting to expose a corrupt system which allows innocent people to have their rights and their very lives taken away. It’s a short listen that all takes place over the course of 24 hours – a perfect introduction to the world of criminal justice explored through fiction. And Eddie Flynn was very much inspired by the character I consider one of the greatest fiction lawyers of all time: Mitch McDeere in John Grisham’s The Firm.
John Grisham changed the way we think about lawyers, writing blistering thrillers featuring heroic lawyer protagonists. Grisham’s McDeere shares some DNA with Eddie Flynn, and if I was going to recommend one book to kickstart your dive into this genre, it would be The Firm. Here’s why.
- You’re Hooked by Chapter One.
We first meet Mitch McDeere as he is on the precipice of a life-changing decision. He’s in crippling debt, and he has job offers from some of the best law firms in the country. When he meets with Memphis law firm Bendini, Lambert and Locke, it’s clear the place is nowhere near as prestigious as some of the others courting him, but they make him an offer he can’t refuse: money, cars, even a house. What is so compelling about this openingis that we the readers are seduced by the firm’s offer just as much as McDeere. And yet, we know something’s off. Grisham puts us squarely into the shoes of our protagonist, and we’re a part of this Faustian bargain just as much as our hero.
2. Trouble in Paradise.
While Mitch gets his feet under the desk at the firm, Grisham taps into the reader’s own emotional state yet again: Have you ever felt that something is just too good to be true? He paints a life transformed from rags to riches, and the price that is attached isn’t just long hours in the office for Mitch, but a slow unraveling of his past. Because Mitch has a secret of his own, one he is desperate to protect.
3. Suspense.
“No-one ever leaves the firm.” This phrase is sprinkled throughout the book, and it takes on a terrifying reality when Mitch discovers that several lawyers died in a mysterious accident in the Cayman Islands. There is a claustrophobia enveloping Mitch, and as we learn more and more about what’s really going on at the firm, the stakes are a matter of life and death.
4. The American Dream.
While this is a suspense novel to rival any, it is also much more than that. As much as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a great American novel, I would argue the same for The Firm. Both books speak to the idea of the American dream. That you can struggle and work hard and if you are lucky you can have it all – you can have the cars and the house and the marriage and the perfect job. But of course, it also exposes the darker side, and that the dream may in fact be a nightmare. Ultimately, the novel explores how wealth and power corrupts whole institutions, and how it us up to the individual, a lawyer, to put a check on that power.
5. The origin of the novel is a great story on its own.
I don’t want to spoil the book for you any further, but I think it bears talking about how it came to be published. It was Grisham’s second novel. His first book, A Time to Kill, had not been a success by any measure. In fact, he was copies by hand from the trunk of his car—it was a five thousand copy first printing by a small publisher that quickly went out of business, and Grisham had personally bought most of that print run. At the time, Grisham was very much like Mitch – money was scarce, he had a family to support and a struggling legal practice. While his agent was also struggling to sell his second novel, The Firm, a much more commercial read, the manuscript got into the hands of an unscrupulous individual who worked on the periphery of Hollywood. He falsely claimed he either represented Grisham, or had the rights to the book, and tried to sell it. His downfall was that several studios wanted to buy it, for huge amounts of money. This caused the charlatan to panic, and he contacted Grisham’s agent, who soon cleared up the mess and went on to sell the book to Paramount for $600,000. Once published, The Firm spent 47 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and launched a titanic literary career. While the American dream gets a kicking in the novel, it was alive and well in the Grisham household.
I’ve met John Grisham, and I have to say I liked him, and think he deserves his every success. I think if you read The Firm, you’ll like him, too.
And if you do like the book, and the complex questions about criminal justice wrapped up in suspenseful storylines, you might like to meet Eddie Flynn next. In The Cross, we find him at his own crossroads, just like Mitch McDeere, and so many real lawyers fighting for our rights every day.
Discover the Audiobook
By clicking 'Sign Up,' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
