GRISHAM'S LAW

By Martha Duffy

John Grisham has shown a rare gift for creating suspense. But there's no suspense anymore about what happens when a new Grisham novel hits the bookstores. His latest, The Rainmaker (Doubleday; $25.95), has just made its debut at No. 1 on the best-seller list; its first printing of 2.8 million copies set an all-time record. When Hollywood offered a mere $6 million for the movie rights, the author temporarily withdrew his book from the market. After all, he got the same amount for his last movie sale, A Time to Kill, and the only direction Grisham can see is up. Each of his first three best sellers doubled the sales of the previous one. Total sales of his six novels to date: 55 million copies. Worldwide box-office take for the three movies (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client) made from his books: $572 million.

Writing even a single best seller is one of the few ways a person can generate riches solely by his own efforts, and Grisham is enjoying it to the fullest. At 40, he has little patience for the rites of celebrity. He gives few interviews and signs books mostly at stores that helped him out when he was driving copies of his first book around the South. He has even moved away, temporarily, from the dream house he built on a 70-acre spread in Oxford, Mississippi, because too many tourists were coming down from Memphis after buying a tour package that included Elvis' Graceland and Grisham's farm. He now hides away in an exclusive country preserve near Charlottesville, Virginia.

It's a wonderful life, almost too good to be true. Grisham is rich and handsome (the only novelist on PEOPLE magazine's list of the 50 most beautiful people this year), with a happy family (a wife and two kids), a religious faith (Southern Baptist) and the vast and varied world of entertainment at his feet. Too good, it seems, not to attract some criticism. Like most widely popular novelists, he has been pummeled by reviewers -- for paper characters, bad dialogue (not true; he writes realistic talk), disappointing endings. Ray Sawhill, in Modern Review, says Grisham's books "aren't Middle America as seen and expressed by an artist; they're Middle America entertaining itself. A Grisham novel is cousin to those catalogs you find in the seat pockets of airplanes."

There are rumbles too from the author's former Shangri-La. A rancid attack by Atlanta-based free-lancer Ed Hinton in January's GQ charged that Grisham is sullying the sacred ground where Faulkner once trod: "In a long line of Mississippi writers, Grisham is a singular aberration and paradox, the worst and the richest, the least distinguished and the most popular." The article outraged most locals, who point out that Grisham helped pay to repair the Faulkner estate and rescued a new literary periodical, the Oxford American. Says novelist Barry Hannah, who has a formidable reputation but not Grisham's millions: "I guess in America if a guy gets some fame and celebrity, he can't seem to do anything right."

Grisham's fame and fortune are based on the law. The son of an itinerant construction worker, he graduated from the University of Mississippi law school and practiced criminal law for nine years in Southaven, outside Memphis. The experience gave him his particular take on an age-old formula: little guy triumphs over big guy. Or over the feds, the Klan, the Mafia, the cia, the fbi-or, in The Rainmaker, the insurance industry.

Rudy Baylor, the novel's protagonist, has just graduated from law school and is scrambling for legal work when he happens upon an excellent case: a giant insurance company has repeatedly turned down a claim for a procedure that might have saved the life of a young man dying of leukemia. His efforts get Baylor caught up in every kind of deadly trap that Big Business and big law firms can lay.

Grisham has said he reads reasonable reviews and tries to learn from them, and The Rainmaker shows evidence of that. Though the plotting is crafty enough, it lacks the dervish pace of such earlier novels as The Firm and concentrates more on character and even humor. Baylor and his "partner," a fellow who has flunked the bar for 15 years and calls himself a paralawyer, are really ambulance chasers, and their desperate lunges after a subsistence income are a little like Roadrunner sketches. Baylor, for example, studies for his own bar exam in the cafeteria of a local hospital, the better to zero in on the newly maimed. As a page turner, the book is very smart-until a resolution that, like The Firm's, is a bust. Bowing to best-seller formula, Grisham introduces a love interest for Baylor, but she is of little use except to get the author out of his plot. It may be that Grisham simply disapproves of smut-or else he can't write sex scenes and knows it.

No matter; Hollywood can fix that. Screen rights to The Rainmaker will probably go for $7 million to $8 million. Initial bids were less than expected, according to reports, because a ponderous 750-page draft of the novel was leaked prematurely (editing later streamlined it to 434 pages). But how can Hollywood resist another

No. 1 best seller from a writer who, like Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, is as bankable as the biggest movie stars? Says screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who adapted The Client and will do A Time to Kill, based on Grisham's first novel: "He shoots you into the story and then takes his time letting it play out. He's a formidable engine.'' Early in his career, Grisham was indifferent to Hollywood, but its allure seems to be growing on him. He has script approval on A Time to Kill and is a consultant for a new cbs series based on The Client. He is also writing an original screenplay about a lawyer in the toils of a seductress.

Still, he keeps in touch with the folks back home. Last week he returned to Blytheville, Arkansas, not far from his birthplace of Jonesboro, for a book-signing jamboree. The crowd was big and enthusiastic; they regard this gracious Southerner as an old acquaintance. The feeling is mutual. Grisham goes back because Mary Gay Shipley, the owner of That Bookstore in Blytheville, was an early booster. He may be Hollywood's hottest author, but Grisham remembers his friends. -With reporting by Elizabeth Bland/New York, Jacqueline Savaiano/ Los Angeles and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh

With reporting by ELIZABETH BLAND/NEW YORK, JACQUELINE SAVAIANO/LOS ANGELES AND LISA H. TOWLE/RALEIGH