John Grisham, who is himself a lawyer, has become "rich and famous" not because of his courtroom prowess, but because of his literary talent and his capacity to use the law and lawyers as the basis of bestseller-list novels. Almost invariably, Grisham's lawyers are at least somewhat idealistic, smarter than their foes in the criminal world or in law enforcement, and able to extricate themselves from situations that are potentially lethal. A case in point is The Firm, a 1991 Grisham book which became a major film hit for Tom Cruise in the role of young Mitchell McDeere.
Mitch McDeere, as the reader first meets him (Grisham, 1 û 14), is an about-to-be-grated Harvard Law School student who is interviewing for "the job" that will put an end to the poverty in which he and his wife, Abby, have lived for several years. He is an extremely ambitious man who is being courted by Wall Street and other New York firms, but who comes to the attention of a somewhat obscure and small firm (Bendini, Lambert and Locke) that is located in Memphis, Tennessee. At the interview with the firm's representatives, Mitch is initially somewhat nonchalant; he has received good offers and expects little from this small and (he thinks) unimportant firm. However, when he is offered a starting salary that is significantly higher than any other he is expecting û and when he thinks about how much more the money will be worth in Memphis than in New York û he signs on (Grisham, 22 û 26).
However, as any reader of Grisham's novels knows, there is more to the firm than can be seen on the surface. Mitch arrives in Memphis and learns that two members of the firm have mysteriously died in a diving accident while at the firm's condos in the Cayman Islands. From that point, the revelations pile up on one another. The firm, as it turns out, is simply a front for organized crime; legitimate clients such as Sonny Capps notwithstanding (p. 89), the real benefic...