CRIME DEFINITELY PAYS!

John Grisham chats to us about how a career pivot from law into writing legal thrillers turned him into one of the world's most successful authors

- BY JANE VORSTER

MARRIAGE can be a minefield, a daily dance of diplomacy where you often have to bite your tongue so you don't wound your partner's ego. But John Grisham's wife has no such qualms. Her husband may be one of the world's bestselling authors but when she thinks something he writes is rubbish, she tells him so.

Which is exactly what happened when Renee Grisham finished reading his latest novel, The Widow. The ending was terrible, she told him. You need to rethink it.

John wasn't convinced. For over 40 years Renee has been his most-trusted critic but this time he was sure she was wrong.

"I said, 'Okay, I'll show you'," John (70) says as he chats to YOU by video call from his farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia. “I sent it to my editors.”

To his horror, they agreed with his wife. And so, with only a month left before he had to submit the book to his publishers, he had to completely rewrite the ending.

His voice, with its distinctive southern accent, is as smooth as honey and there's a definite note of pride when he talks about The Widow.

Even with 52 bestselling books under his belt, sales of over 300 million and blockbuster movie adaptations, including A Time to Kill, The Firm and The Pelican Brief, he still gets excited when a new book hits the shelf.

And his latest is extra special to him because it's different to anything he's ever written before.

John is famous for his legal thrillers but this time he's serving up what he refers to as “a pure, old-fashioned mystery”. It was a lot of fun to plant red herrings and introduce false suspects to keep his readers guessing, he says.

The book revolves around small-town attorney Simon Latch who's mired in gambling debts as his marriage falls apart. When he takes on an elderly widow as a client and discovers she has a fortune and nobody to leave it to, Simon sees a solution to all his problems.