The Rest Is Entertainment - How John Grisham Sold 400 Million Books

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

With almost half a billion copies sold between them, Richard Osman is joined by fellow bestselling author - John Grisham. He answers your questions on his writing routine, favourite adaptations and the problem with Hollywood. The Rest is Entertainment is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain's most awarded energy supplier. Sponsored by Lloyds. Looking for extra value from your spending? You can bank on Lloyds to help your money go further. Search Lloyds Rewards in your app. Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus content, ad-free listening, early access to Q&A episodes, access to our newsletter archive, discounted book prices with our partners at Coles Books, early ticket access to live events, and access to our chat community. Sign up directly at therestisentertainment.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Louis Mealing Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Joey McCarthy Social Producer: Emma Jackson Exec Producer: Ami Bennett Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The rest is entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, traditionally, the entertainment gatekeepers had to find you before an audience ever could. It's been the biggest change, really, I would say, in entertainment in the last five years or so. Just that generation, he grew up making their own content on YouTube, on TikTok and things like that, suddenly finding themselves right at the heart of a culture. And they say no one had to commission it from them. Well, we talked before about Kane Parsons for backrooms. He just made his incredible sort of YouTube series of shorts.

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Where I'm Richard Osman There's no Marina hi today Because I am joined by One of my favorite writers Of all time John Grisham he sold Well we discussed during this episode How many books he sold

I will say this If you are any sort of Grisham fan You definitely have to listen If you are starting to write If you want to write, you have to listen. If you're interested in how people write, you have to listen as well. He's such an interesting guy. We talk about everything from the firm, which is the thing that absolutely made him go supernova,

all the way through to his new book, which is the French illusion, which is out on the 29th of September. But it was a real pleasure that I sat down with him in Edinburgh, at the Edinburgh Festival. He could not have been more gracious. And just listening to him to talk about how he writes, what happened in his career when it went so huge. And just looking back about, you know, what writing means to him, the writers that he loves. It's all your questions you sent so many in, especially about, you know, how someone writes.

You know, loads and loads of advice in here as well. I hope you can hear during it as well what an absolute privilege it was for me. But thank you for all of your questions. And here is the rest of entertainment, questions and answers edition with John Grisham. John Grisham, how lovely to have you here. We're talking in Edinburgh, one of my genuine heroes. So it's a pleasure to talk to you. 400 million books sold.

Does that sound right? Well, last night it was 500 million. So I'm not sure what happened in the middle of the night, but that number is arbitrary. Someone, I think, a double day, just sits around and plays with that number. There's no way to know how many books you've sold. I've sold in 56 languages and 50 books around the world in 35 years. Nobody can come out. Who knows?

It could be 200 million. I'm here in 600 million. Let's go for 700 million. Let's go for 700. Let's go 700. Three quarters of a billion copies of your novels. There you. We've had so many questions from our listeners.

I'm going to start you off with Anne Loftus, who asks you this. She says, I'm currently writing my first novel. I am determined, but I'm struggling. You've written over 40 novels, but my question is this. How on earth did you finish the first one? It took three years. I learned a lesson very early on in the process, because I had no time to write.

I had a busy legal career. So, still had a full-time job? Well, too, a full-time job and a part-time job. I was a state lawmaker in Mississippi, and that took half my time. I was also pretty busy in the law office trying to make a living in a small town. And the only way I could write was to get up very early in the morning. I got in the habit of doing it. And I learned the lesson, do it every day.

Same place, same time, same everything. and write at least one page per day, at least one page every day with no excuses. And until you start doing that, nothing's going to happen. And if you do a page a day, at least a page a day, before long, the pages pile up. And in a couple of years, you've written a book. It's amazing, isn't it? You don't think you're going to. It's a slow process.

And you cannot get in a hurry. You don't want to get in a hurry. You want to enjoy the process. I'm not sure I enjoyed it being up at five in the morning. Yeah. But over a, I got, I was in such a habit of doing that. The first book took three years to write. And then I went straight to the second book.

So over a five year period, I wrote those first two books. Well, the first book was a total flop in the marketplace. Didn't work. That was a time to kill. Time to kill. The second book was the firm. And when the firm came out, in 1991, it changed everything overnight. Well, talk about a time to kill.

So when you started writing, Where were you in your head there? What was the best case scenario for you? What prompted you to do it? I saw something in a courtroom one day, a trial. It was very dramatic. And I thought, you know, what if you take that story and make a few changes and create this powerful courtroom drama played out through the eyes of a young attorney

who's dreaming of the big trial and big court. And it's the home courtroom. And that's what I was living that life. I was going to say that was you, right? That was me. So the dream when your writing is actually. I'm going to be something big in law and it turned into something completely different.

I'm going to win this big case. And it's going to just going to change my career. And I'm going to be known as a, at the age of 30, my goal in life was to be a great courtroom lawyer. Yeah. And so I was in trial all the time, always volunteering for court-appointed criminal cases

and the stuff nobody else wanted to take. I was always in the courtroom. And I was on my way, I think, to getting there. It takes time. But I got a detour when I saw this idea, This drama. And one day, just driving down the road, I said to myself, why don't you try to write it?

Just start with Chapter 1 and write this drama and see how far you can go. And it wasn't an immediate, you sold it, but it wasn't, that was not the beginning of the John Grisham we know now, right? They printed a small unknown publisher in New York that went bankrupt the following year after they published my first novel. Didn't sell them. They printed 5,000 hardbacked copies and we couldn't give the books away. I bought a thousand of the $5,000.

I was going to try to sell and make a little money on the retail. But the book didn't work. But by the time the time to kill was published in 89, I had finished, almost finished with the firm. And the firm was always going to be more accessible, more commercial, more dramatic. And so I was almost finished with that book. And when it came out a year later, it was changed everything. Funny enough, Christine F says writing the firm must have changed your life completely. How did that feel at the time and how do you look back on it now?

So a time to kill, you knew you could write a book. So you'd done that, you've proved. I always think that's the most important thing is getting to the end of your first book. So to talk to Anne Loftus there, once you got to the end of the first one, you know then that you can do it. And so you write the firm, then everything goes absolutely nuts, almost immediately. One phone call on a Sunday morning in January of 1990, I was actually at church, and my wife came late to church, and she said, go call New York. And I said, well, it's Sunday morning. And so I went and called New York, and we lived right down the street in our little small town.

And my agent said, I need your authority to take the highest offer for the film rights to the firm. and we had not sold the book rights. Our last conversation a month earlier before Christmas, he had said, I haven't sold the book yet, we're going to wait until the new year, something going to happen then. But the firm, the manuscript had been around New York for a few months and nobody wanted to buy it. Several publishers had said no. I was involved in a big trial. I kind of lost interest.

So I was talking to my agent, and I said, wait a minute. We haven't sold the book rights to the firm. Now you want to sell the movie rights? What's going on? And he said, I'll explain it later. He said, right now these studios are sitting by the phones for the final rounded bidding for the film rights. And the word bidding had a nice ring to it. Yeah, didn't they just.

And I said, okay, just for the hell of it, how much money are we talking about? And he said, I'm asking half a million hope to get $400,000. I said, you want my authority to go do that? And he said, yeah, I said, okay, you have my authority to go do that. Hung up and went back to church and we sat through the church just dying. And finally he raised home with the kids and the phone was ringing. And it was my age. You've been calling.

Oh, wow. He said, we just sold the film rights to Paramount Pictures. for the firm. And so, and I said, okay, he told me how he had negotiated done all this heroic negotiations and stuff. And I said, okay, just for the hell of it, how much money am I going to get? He said, $600,000, which was more than I had earned in 10 years of practicing law. Yeah.

Gross receipts. And I said, okay, nice job. Yeah. And that was the phone call that turned the way. world upside down. When you start writing, there is a dream in various heads that you wake, sometimes you wake up in the morning and go, oh my God, this could sell for everything. This could be a huge movie with Tom Cruise. This could be a bestseller for, you know, years and years and years. And it actually happened to you. Do you think there's something behind that? Do you think,

you always wanted to write commercial fiction, right? Do you think you put yourself in that position or do you think there was an element of luck? Huge element of luck. Yeah. You have to have a stroke of luck, somewhere. But you have to be ready when luck hits, okay? You've got to kind of make the luck happen. And that's what happened to me. I've always said, I had a very fortunate thing happen to me. I got

lucky. But at the same time, I was able to the next decision I made when the firm came out, and it was an instant bestseller. It came out of March of 91. And I was

back in New York, taking a victory lab, doing interviews and all this kind of stuff. A young executive with a book chain made a comment that I had never thought about before. And he said, oh, the big guys come out every year. Yeah. And I thought, yeah, he said, yeah, look, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Robert Ludlam. They come out every year. The big boys come out every year.

And I thought, I want to be a big boy. Yeah. I want to. So I raced back home. And I finished the Pelican briefing just, I mean, I was, I'd been working on it slowly. I finished it a matter of months to get it back in New York to publish the following year. Well, funny off, we've got a question from Cornette Jensen on exactly that. But he says you somehow managed to write a book a year, sometimes more than one book a year.

First of he says, thank you. That's how you get your question read out on this show. He says, thank you. But he says, I've got two questions. How do you write a book a year? And we've sort of touched on this. Why do you write a book a year? So the why is because that's the business.

You know, you're building a loyalty. You're building a brand. Yeah, it's why. Why? Why do I still do it? I mean, I could have quit years ago. First of all, still enjoy it. I mean, this is fun, okay?

Yes. I'd be home in Virginia doing nothing right now. You know, but this. Which is also fun, by the way. It's always fun. I've got to get plenty of that. It's still enjoyable. And also write stories about lawyers and issues and politics and things like that

And the material is just endless. I still think of as a lawyer. I don't practice anymore, thank God. But I still understand the law. And I'm fascinated by the law. Lawyers, law firms, courts, trials, appeals, judges, crime itself. And the actions of lawyers, big law firms blow up. Lawyers steal money.

These great stories that we have all the time. And I'm just taking notes. I'm clipping headlines. And I have tons of files of stories, the potential stories. And when you follow lawyers and judges the way I do, always with an eye for a story, the material is just endless, okay? And I'm just addicted to them. I would write all of them if I could. So the how I do it every year is just the material is there.

Why is just that's what I've done for 40 years and I still do it and I still enjoy it and the books are still popular. That's the thing. I think the other question of how that lots of people were interested in, and you were told this a million times before, but people are endlessly fascinated is how do you actually write? How do you get 90,000 words, roughly 100,000 for one of your novels? How do you get that done across a year? What does your day look like?

What does your year look like in order to do that? Well, it takes a lot. It takes discipline, but it's not, you know, it's not marine-style fiscal discipline. I start a book every year on January the 1st, and I have for years. I start the book on January the 1st, and the goal is to finish by July the 1st. It's six months. A thousand words a day is 5,000 words a week. That's 20,000 a month.

That's 100,000. That's the goal every time I don't want to write a 500-page book. I don't want to read one. I'm getting lazier. My books are getting thinner. I'm getting lazy. I hope I'm getting more economical with words. But that's not a, it's not a,

formula. You do it. This is my goal. There's a thousand words. With no excuses. No days off for the flu. No days off for this or that. If we travel, I never write on the road. I write in one place. One spot. In your house. In my little office behind the house. The same desk, same chair, same coffee, no phones, no fax, no internet, no music,

no interruptions. Very quiet from seven to ten every morning. And it's very productive. And so at 10, you're done for the day. Usually by 11, I'll take a break around 10. I'm back and forth to get coffee and check the Internet for emails, things like that. Make a phone call or two. Take a break.

But it's from 7 to 10, 30, or 11. When you write nonstop for four hours, your brain is pretty well. Oh, my God. I can do like two and a half. And I'm down. Yeah, two at the out. If you really write good, hard stuff for two and a half, three, four hours, I have to do something physical. I leave and go work out or go for a hike or something.

And that's the morning. In the afternoon, I go to an office in town in the city of Charlottesville where I live to get away from the farm, to get away from all that, and do the administrative stuff. The business end of it, check in with New York every day. And that's enjoyable. But it's a matter of discipline. And I love stories of writers. who wrote their first novels at work or at break or midnight

or on the train or on whatever they do. Their daily routines, they found 30 minutes somewhere. And we can all find 30 minutes somewhere to write at least a page a day. But you've got to do it every day. Yeah, I always think, you know, if you've got young kids or if you say you've got a demanding job, if you can do 200 words a day,

you'd be amazed how quickly you get up to 20,000. I always think 20,000 is the point where you think, I have to finish this book now. There's no way this is getting shut away. And so you just keep at it. But that's the thing, isn't it? It's just day by day and sooner or later. I mean, you think this time it's going to be impossible this time.

I'm never going to finish. Eventually, you do finish, right? Yeah, it's like a lot of things in life. If you look at the monumental challenge of doing anything, it looks overwhelming. But you don't look at it. You don't start that way. You take a small baby step, 200 words a day, one page, whatever. do that for several days, a week, several weeks, and before you know it.

And you don't want to get in a hurry. You don't want to write in a hurry. You want to write slowly and thoughtfully and reflectively. And that's, but again, if you write a book every two years, that's pretty fast for publishing, for popular writers. How are you at rewriting? I think the thing that stops a lot of people from writing is they go back again and again and again to their first sentence or their first paragraph or their first chapter and constantly try and polish it instead of moving forwards.

I do it every day. When I start each morning, I read what I wrote the day before and do a fair amount of editing. Yeah. It also gets you back into the flow of the story. You know, you know where you are. And, yeah, the first 30 minutes, I'm redoing the day before. Then I'm not going to touch it again until the end. That's the key, right?

Yeah, I keep going. Keep going. But you always have time to fix it later. You know, it's important to get the first draft down, but make sure it's a pretty good draft. Yeah. And then once you finish the book, once I finish the book, I go back through it and make a million changes. And then my wife reads it and she's got some opinions. I usually listen to her.

Then it goes to my agent, who was my editor for years. He's been my agent for 30 years. And he goes through with a very page-by-page, line-by-line edit that drives me crazy every year. But I listen to him. I still listen to people. And if something is not working, my wife says, I really hate this character. Yeah.

You know, I listen to that. Or if she says, this part is really boring you. I can't take that, okay? She says, if this drags, I can't, you know, I'm writing suspense, okay? I have an American editor. She's so good. Just very occasionally, in brackets, she just write, bored. Oh, God.

Good editor never gives you solutions, but they just say, and she's always right. It's always, oh, yeah, because of course, I don't need to be back with this character at the moment. And actually, I've done a bit too much of that. Repetitious, this is repetitive. You already said this three times. Well, when you write stuff, when you're writing every day, you don't realize that you're repeating things. You just can't remember all the stuff you've written six months ago.

Also, you're constantly telling yourself the story. Yeah. That's the thing. And you forget that, yeah, you've already said it. But the key is being edited, to agree to be edited and working with your editor because a lot of big writers I won't name any names, but they finished the manuscript, they ship it off to New York,

and they say, don't touch it. I'm done, I'm writing something else. And you can tell it. They need an editing, and we all do. Yeah, that's exactly. But as you say, the very first time you do that, I said, my first book took three years. And when the notes come back,

every time from the second book onwards, I immediately know what to lose. You just go, oh, I'm not, I'm literally not going to write that sentence. Because I know it's not going to be there. John, we are going to go to a couple of adverts. I hope you don't mind. But loads more questions from our listeners right after this. This episode is brought to you by Lloyds.

Now, show business loves a club. I love all these sort of unofficial groupings of people. There's two brat packs that I'm a big fan of. There are two brats. Yeah, there's two brats packs because there's the movie brat pack, all of the Judd Nelson and, you know, Rob Lowe and Charlie Sheen and all those guys. Everyone in the Breakfast Club. Yeah.

And then there's also the brat pack of those kind of, turn of the 90s novelists, Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McEnany, Donna Tart. And that's the thing creatively, it's actually very, very useful to hang out with other people who are incredibly talented because you drive each other on to do things. Because a lot of the British novelists in the 80s, Martin Amos, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwen, they all used to sort of go and have lunch and go to have dinner. And you could just tell, you know, they would talk about stuff and they would make each other's work much better.

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You must be a UK resident, age 18 or over to apply. This account has a £5 monthly fee, refunded each month you pay in £2,000 or more. Oh my gosh, it is back. It is back, everyone. Celebrity Traders is back this week. And honestly, for me and Marina, this is like our World Cup. Yeah. For those that don't know, the first episode from the castle is coming out on Thursday,

and it's going to be broadcast every Thursday and Friday right up until the final. Now, we're going to be taking this incredibly seriously this year, as every year. Every Friday at 10pm, you'll have a full debrief on the week's scheming and plotting on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. We'll just be talking about what you've seen. No spoilers for the rest of the series. And don't send us any either. See you there.

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Discover Coffee Plus on Nispresso.com. Welcome back, everybody. I am with John Grisham, as you know, and our next question comes from. Elaine Greensboro. Elaine says, What is the most brutal industry you've seen, law, publishing, or movie making?

Wow, they're so diverse. Good question, though, isn't it? Great question. Movie making is the craziest one I've ever encountered. The movies are insane. Movies are just insane because, I've been around the fringes for 35 years, especially nowadays when you can't

I've not had a featured film made in 20 years and you've had a lot of hits I had the 30 years ago I had the first wave of the big legal thrillers the first five or six movies that looked easy I'd write the book

they'd do the adaptation and two years later the movie comes out that's impossible now and this is what really is hard to believe those are big movies big box office grosses

domestic and foreign big cast great director Sidney Pollock, Alan Pakula, Joel Schumacher. Wow. Great directors, and everybody made money. Yeah. We all made money off those movies.

And that model doesn't work today. Yeah. Because I don't know why. I can't explain why, but they Hollywood makes so few smart adult dramas. Yeah. They just don't, they want to make Spider-Man 10 or whatever. And it's all gone to TV, right? Yeah.

Huge factors, TV and streaming and which has been good for all of us. Yeah. But it's a different world. and Hollywood is William Goldman, a screenwriter said that the first thing you learn about Hollywood is that nobody knows what's going on. And that's true, it's so many ways. And when you see a movie, it's a miracle that got made.

I mean, because publishing, honestly, because I've worked in television for a very long time and a little bit of movies. Movies to me is completely insane. Television is a bit insane. Publishing, I sort of think, is quite, as you say, you write, an editor does a little bit of editing, and then the publisher puts it out.

Nothing else happens. Whereas in movies, there's like 500 people. You think, I don't know who you are, but you're suddenly telling me what this story should be. It's so weird. I're giving you notes. Everybody gives you notes. They give you notes. They tell you how to fix your script.

Publishing is still an honorable business. I mean, most people in publishing still mean what they say. They honor their word. If you offer a contract, you read the contract, your lawyer reads it. You sign a contract. They're going to deliver. most writers deliver when they're supposed to deliver, although we're notorious for being late or drunk or whatever. That's the major thing to the profession. Or a little bit of both.

A little bit of both. But yeah, it's still, it's a very honorable profession. I have literary attorneys in New York I've worked with for years, and when they deal with the Hollywood lawyers, they shake their heads. It's a different, it's a jungle. It's like different species. It's a different species. It's a different type of. person out there. I've always stayed away from it. I've never gone out there. I've never gotten caught up in all the glamour.

And that was back then. Now, we can't get a film made. And I'm fine with that too. Oh, got you. I'm fine. I'm happy to stay away from it. I've read so many bad screenplays trying to adapt my stuff. I'm stopped doing that.

All I can do is, all I can control is the book. I can't. The French illusion comes out in three weeks, okay? The book, from page one, it is a movie. It is nonstop action It's smart It's like a great plot Great ending

All that kind of stuff It's made for a movie I can't do a single thing today To get that movie made If I gave away the film rights For free If I wrote the screenplay for free If I did everything for free

If I said okay I'm gonna be involved I can't do any of that It's not gonna work Yeah It's not gonna help the film get made It's like going into a country Where you don't

It's not just you don't understand The language You don't understand the script Like everything is weird So the French illusion, which is your new book, I would say to anyone who is on their first book or something at the moment, just look at the very, very first chapter of this and understand what it is that you do, which is it is impossible not to read on, which is what you've always been

amazing at in your career, just, and then the next chapter you pass something on top of that, and then you pass something, and it starts very domestic. You're like, okay, I know everyone, I'm meeting with everyone, and then suddenly the camera pulls out and out and out, and the world gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. We go back to movies very quickly. So we have a question from Tim Hattner. It's a really simple one. Do you have a favorite adaptation of one of your books?

You talked about that golden era where you had hit after hit of great movies. But do you have looking back a favorite? Francis Ford Coppola did The Rainmaker. And it was, he loves writers. And he wanted me on the set every day. He had a brand new espresso machine. And he would make his big, thick, rich espresso's Between takes.

So you're sitting there. He wanted him to drink espresso with him all day long. And we were just wired, you know, bouncing off. But watching the movie made was being made was so boring. It's nothing that's boring. Watching a film, but that was, he told me, he said, he said, I'm going to stick to this. I'm going to stick to the story.

I said, please do. That's all you can ask for. Be very faithful to the source material. And that adaptation was very good. Matt Damon, Claire Dane, Danny DeVito, John Voight, but really great, great cast. The firm movie was a mess.

It was fun to watch, but the ending really got lost. Time to kill was okay. They were all enjoyable. The chamber was not very good. Gene Hackman was the old guy on Death Row, and nobody went to see that movie. They brought it to me by the time we saw the movie,

I had read the script. And when I read the script, I said, this thing is in really bad shape. Don't film this. But it's funny that they wouldn't show you much earlier. Listen, they were, I said too much and they got mad. And I said, this is not their story. They filmed it anyway and it didn't work.

Nobody went to see it. I was kind of glad nobody went to see it. But the other movies were big hits. But long-winded answer to your question, the favorite adaptation is the Rainmaker. Jamie Crook says, my favorite writer is John Gusham. Who is your favorite writer? Oh, gosh. That's a tough one, right?

Oh, tough one. We can go around the houses on this a little bit. Favorite writers, I'm going to say. Oh, boy. I love John LeCarray. He, when I read Little Drummer Girl, the book came out in 1980. I read the book about 1990. I was trying to write then.

And I thought to myself, this is a brilliant book. It's timely. It's still timeless. It's the Palestinian conflict. And we look at where we are now. But it's such a great, smart plot. It's so many layers to it. The writing is always brilliant.

How do you deal? Because I love John LaCarrie. How do you deal with reading somebody who is so brilliant when you are thinking of writing? That's quite a tricky one, right? It's very tricky. And as a general rule, I don't read fiction when I'm writing because we always want to read good books. And invariably, I'll catch myself doing something if I'm writing that I wouldn't normally do. I don't know why. You catch yourself doing that. You're being influenced and you don't really realize it. Yeah. Suddenly there's like a small, lawyer in Mississippi talking like George Smiley. Or yeah, I can't do that. But what I realized this last month, I was reading, I'm reading a bunch of classics again.

I was reading Catch 22, which is, it was funnier 50 years ago that it is now. But it's so overwritten. And I called myself writing longer sentences. Did you ever meet LeCarray? Did you ever have that good fortune? No, it's one big regret. I had several opportunities. We had a standing offer in New York.

We had the same attorney, this wonderful literary lawyer that a lot of writers used. He passed away five years ago. And when David would come to town to New York, he would have dinner with this lawyer. And I said, I would love to have dinner and meet him, and the lawyer, so I'm going to make that happen. He said, that would be my dream was to have you two guys at dinner. But it just never happened. We never made it happen. I came over here a couple times and should have reached out more.

I have some regrets over the years where I didn't reach out enough to people who are no longer with us. And I just, I'm trying to learn from that, but I'm not naturally that outgoing. Not that garrulous. It takes some work to strike up a new acquaintance with people and especially writers who are reclusive to begin with. And I've got some regrets over the years. Any writers ever given you good advice, writing advice, life advice?

In 1991, the firm had just come out, and I got this letter one day postmark from Bangor Maine. I opened it up, and it was from Stephen King, and he had clipped the New York Times bestseller list, and I was like number six on the list or something like that. And he just said, John, ladies, I love the firm, congratulations. Welcome to the big leagues. And I thought that's pretty cool. That's fun. So then we met in New York.

He called one. I got a phone call out of the blue one day from Stephen King. Hey, John Stephen King, up here in Maine. He said, the National Book Awards were coming up. And people like us are not. No, we're not invited, okay? Yeah. It's very highbrow.

And he said, I've got, he said, I paid $10,000 bucks for a table. And my goal is to get a bunch of commercial writers to go with me and stink up the joint. And I said, how could I say no to that? And so I went, and I met him with Tabith, his wife, and Donald Westlake, and who else was at our table? And we had a great time, and everybody was polite, you know. So that's how we actually met. He came to Oxford, Mississippi, where we lived back then for a book festival, and we were riding around.

He wanted to go riding around in a pickup truck to find some real rednecks. And I said, well, I can show you a lot of rednecks. I've got to pick up a truck and we had two days together and just great advice about everything especially movies I was in the you know we were doing movies back there

that they were being adapted and he said look man he's had every kind of experience in the world from he won the Oscar with Kathy Bates and misery to actually having to sue somebody to stop a film from being released he's had every kind of experience in the world

40 something books or stories adapted to film 40 I've had you know six or seven and he said he said when you deal with Hollywood there's a very simple advice get all your money up front

kiss it goodbye and expect it to be something different if you don't like that don't deal with Hollywood and I've been that way ever since there's going to be something different

if I don't like it don't take the money the real stuff I always think with books and all of that stuff people are always interested in movie adaptations and I absolutely understand that the key, I think, is the same key as at the beginning, right? Which is you get up and you sit down and you write.

And that's still the key today. Oh, every day. Every day. I've got the final question from Sam, then I'll give her or him the final word. And he or she says, you've lived the dream of every aspiring novelist. Is it as good as it is cracked up to be? Well, yes, beyond what I could have dreamed.

my wife and I still walk around the farm and say to ourselves say to each other we could never never we didn't dream all this we didn't we our dreams were so small back then 30 years ago 40 years ago we got married 45 years ago now the whole thing has been like a dream and and because of that we've managed to stay grounded and enjoy life and thankful for family friends and in the career. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's been everything I could have possibly thought up back then. Yeah. As I say, we had so many questions for you. People love you. There's so many people talking about they, I'm a lawyer because I read these books and but just so much stuff, so much love for you and from me as well. So I,

honestly, all the way from the firm right up to the French illusion, thank you for everything you've done and the company you've kept me in and the stories you've told me. It's such a huge I know you didn't get to meet John LaCarrie, but at least I got to meet John Grisham, so thank you, John. My pleasure. Thank you very much. Three hundred and fifty passengers. The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assess a Prime Minister.

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