The Firm by John Grisham

First published: 1991

Type of plot: Suspense

Time of work: The 1980’s or the early 1990’s

Locale: Memphis, Tennessee, and the Gulf Coast

Principal Characters:

• Mitchell Y. McDeere, a star graduate of Harvard Law School hired as an associate attorney by a Memphis law firm
• Abby McDeere, the young wife of Mitchell, a schoolteacher
• Ray McDeere, Mitchell’s brother, who is serving time in a Tennessee penitentiary
• Nathan Locke, a longtime partner in Mitchell’s law firm
• Oliver Lambert, the senior partner of the law firm
• Avery Tolar, the partner in the firm with whom Mitchell is assigned to work
• DeVasher, head of security for the law firm and liaison with the Morolto family
• Wayne Tarrance, an FBI agent who involves Mitchell in his investigation of the law firm
• Eddie Lomax, an ex-convict turned private detective who knew Mitchell’s brother Ray in prison
• Tammy Hemphill, Lomax’s secretary and later Mitchell’s coconspirator in his plot against the firm

The Novel

Drawing upon his experiences as a native of the Deep South and as a lawyer, John Grisham created in The Firm a chase and suspense adventure involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Mafia, and a young attorney coming to terms with the reality of life in the world of big business and big money.

The Firm is divided into forty-one short chapters. It is written from the third-person point of view, principally from the perspective of Mitchell McDeere; parts of the book are told from the viewpoints of other characters.

When Mitchell McDeere completes Harvard University Law School in the top five of three hundred graduates, he is much in demand, but no offer matches that of the firm of Bendini, Lambert, and Locke in Memphis, Tennessee. In addition to a starting salary of eighty thousand dollars a year, he is assured payment of his student loans, an expensive automobile, a low-interest home loan, and incredible perks for good work. When Mitchell and his wife Abby settle in their new house in Memphis, he is caught up at once in preparing for the state bar exam, which he passes a few months later with the highest score in the state.

Soon Mitchell is working twelve or more hours a day, and his home life suffers. The senior members of the firm are pleased, however, and his career seems well on its way to success, for he does not know the dangerous secret the senior partners are hiding from him and other young lawyers. The firm is a front for the Morolto Mafia family in Chicago and is involved in tax frauds and other illegal operations involving millions of dollars.

Satisfied with the firm despite the long hours, Mitchell is shocked when he is approached in a downtown restaurant by FBI agent Wayne Tarrance and told of the firm’s illegal activities and Mafia connections. Several deaths of younger firm members in recent years were in fact murders, not accidents and suicides as had been reported. Tarrance endeavors to recruit Mitchell in a plan to expose the firm.

At first reluctant, even frightened, by such a dangerous scheme, Mitchell begins to become disillusioned when he discovers that both his car and his house have been bugged. Two senior members of the firm, Oliver Lambert and Nathan Locke, informed by their security agent DeVasher of taped conversations between Mitchell and his wife, are increasingly concerned about their new “star.” To assure his compliance with their plans, they send him with Avery Tolar, his mentor in the firm, to Grand Cayman for business and relaxation. There, a young woman in their employ seduces Mitchell, who has previously been totally faithful to his wife.

Subsequent contacts with the FBI, both in Memphis and in Washington, and his growing suspicions about the mysterious deaths lead Mitchell to contact a private investigator, Eddie Lomax. Eddie is a friend of Ray, Mitchell’s brother, who is in prison. Eddie agrees to investigate the firm, but before he comes up with any significant information, he is murdered. Mitchell resolves to divorce himself from the firm and its illegal activities, and together with Eddie’s secretary and sometime lover, Tammy Hemphill, who wants revenge for Eddie’s death, he conspires to outwit the firm.

While devoting ever more hours to his work, Mitchell is at the same time meeting with the FBI agent, who promises him a new life for his cooperation; Mitchell also gathers material for his own purposes. Meantime, DeVasher, increasingly suspicious, shows the young attorney compromising photographs made of him with the young woman in Grand Cayman; DeVasher threatens to send the pictures to Abby McDeere should he find any cause whatever. Though fearful that Abby will discover his infidelity, Mitchell continues in his dangerous plan. With the aid of Tammy Hemphill, he manages to photocopy confidential files from the firm and place them in storage. On Grand Cayman, Tammy seduces Avery Tolar, puts knockout drops in his drink, and steals his keys to the storage files in the firm’s island condominium. Abby McDeere has secretly flown to Grand Cayman to meet Tammy, and the two copy all the incriminating files, which Tammy then takes to Nashville.

Through a plant in the FBI, the firm learns of McDeere’s defection and plans his destruction, but Mitchell’s scheme progresses. At his insistence, the FBI arranges for his brother Ray’s escape from prison. When Mitchell receives a coded warning from the FBI that the firm knows everything, he sends a message to Abby through Tammy and flees Memphis. He and his wife rendezvous on the Gulf Coast, where they videotape many of the documents shipped to them by Tammy and plan their escape.

For days, they are pursued by both the FBI and the Morolto Mafia family before their escape arrangements are completed. Barry Abanks, a scuba instructor from Grand Cayman, and a man known only as George, himself a fugitive from the law, arrive in George’s boat to pick up the McDeeres, who are armed with fake identification and the videotapes of the documents, and speed them away to the Caymans. The original documents are left in the motel for the FBI, but the McDeeres keep the videotapes as security. The novel ends with Mitchell and Abby drinking rum punch on a tropical beach and planning their future as fugitives.

The Characters

Mitchell McDeere, the protagonist, is an idealistic graduate of Harvard Law School at the beginning of the novel. He is something of an all-American boy, a former high-school football player who has always scored highly in whatever endeavor he undertook. He is happily married, and when he is offered the fantastic job in Memphis, his life would seem to be almost perfect. It is, however, clouded by several shadows: His widowed mother, whom he has not seen in several years, is a a waitress living with her second husband in a trailer park in Florida, and his brother Ray is serving a sentence in a Tennessee penitentiary for killing a man in a barroom brawl. As Ray points out when his brother visits him in prison, Mitchell is the first McDeere in generations who has made something of himself.

The Firm is to some degree a novel of initiation, for Mitchell, something of an idealist, learns many bitter facts of life as a result of his involvement with Bendini, Lambert, and Locke. When the plot reaches its climax, he has not only outsmarted the members of the firm, the Mafia backers, and their hired gunmen, but he has also hoodwinked the FBI agent and would seem to have gained the ascendancy. He, his wife, and his brother are in possession of eight million dollars, documents to use as security, and the necessary papers for a new life and new identity. Yet questions remain: At what cost has such a seemingly idyllic existence been achieved, and what are the perils and anguish to be faced by fugitives constantly afraid of being apprehended by dangerously vindictive members of the underworld? The groundwork for making credible the change in Mitchell’s character from bright and promising young attorney to conniving fugitive is laid in the early revelations concerning his dysfunctional family, particularly his brother’s criminal record.

Abby McDeere is a model wife and schoolteacher, product of a wealthy and privileged background, who is very much in love with her husband. Their relationship seems ideal, although the time and energy required of Mitchell by the firm annoys her, and an increasing amount of tension develops in their marriage. She remains blissfully unaware of her husband’s one-night infidelity on Grand Cayman. By the end of the novel, she is fully involved in Mitchell’s nefarious schemes to outwit both the Mafia and the FBI, and become independently wealthy. The change in her character is abrupt and, if the reader is inclined to analyze it closely, hardly credible.

The senior members of the firm—Royce McKnight, Nathan Locke, and Oliver Lambert—are rather standard “crooked lawyer” stereotypes, although Locke is given somewhat more dimension because of his grim and frightening behavior. He is early described as “an ominous and evil man,” and his appearance and demeanor are a foreshadowing of the dark secrets behind the firm’s shiny facade. The Mafia members, Joe Morolto, Lou Lazarov, and others, are fairly standard villain types, as is DeVasher, the brutal security manager for the firm, who takes pleasure in using the “bugs” in the homes of young lawyers to monitor their sex lives.

Among the FBI agents, all are stereotyped except for Wayne Tarrance, who has certain character idiosyncrasies that distinguish him from the others. His personal habits, his comments, and his appearance all serve to make him a credible, if not fully rounded, personality. The other agents, like the Mafia members in the novel, are flat and undeveloping characters.

Tammy Hemphill, although she exhibits most of the qualities of the archetypal hardboiled secretary of the archetypal private detective, is a rather well-developed character. Married to an Elvis Presley impersonator so devoted to the singer that he has legally adopted Presley’s name, she loves her boss and thus becomes involved in Mitchell’s undercover scheme to outwit the firm and the FBI. Her actions are much more credible than those of Abby or even Mitchell, since she is bent on revenge for the firm’s murder of Eddie Lomax.

Critical Context

With The Firm, John Grisham established himself as one of the leading practitioners of the craft of suspense writing. He has mastered well all the trappings of the genre, including particularly the age-old battle between good guys and bad guys and the obligatory chase in which the protagonist is put into grave danger and escapes through his wit and other talents. The novel established Grisham as a popular writer, and his subsequent works, including The Pelican Brief (1992) and The Client (1993), were eagerly awaited and immediately became best-sellers.

There is also something of the novel of initiation in the work, since Mitchell McDeere certainly loses whatever illusions he may have concerning the ethics of the practice of law, at least law as practiced by the firm for which he works. It is clear that Mitchell is awakened to the basic corruption in certain areas of business, law, and human life in general, and that the pattern of the novel is clearly entwined with this change in him. In contrast to most disillusioned heroes, however, Mitchell ends the novel in a happy state, living in a kind of earthly paradise, even though his security may be tenuous.

Bibliography

Grisham, John. “The Rise of the Legal Thriller: Why Lawyers Are Throwing the Books at Us.” The New York Times Book Review 97 (October 18, 1992): 33. Grisham analyzes the rise of the “lawyer novel,” a phenomenon to which he has contributed as much as any author. He discusses the abiding fascination with the law of the reading public and how lawyers have turned to fiction in order to satisfy this interest. In addition to his own work, he considers that of other lawyers turned writers and their varying approaches.

Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “Law’s Labors Lost.” New Republic 210 (March 14, 1994): 32-38. Klinkenborg reviews five books that deal with legal themes. In the latter part of the essay, Klinkenborg focuses on The Firm, citing it as a “notorious” example of portraying the culture of lawyers as opposed to the “nature of the law.”

Landner, M. “An Overnight Success—After Six Years.” Business Week (April 19, 1992): 52. That a magazine such as Business Week, aimed at the commercial community, should include an article on an adventure novelist indicates clearly the extent to which Grisham has been a financial success and how that success has drawn the attention of people other than his readers. Landner traces Grisham’s remarkable career as a writer who struggled for years to write a successful book.

Matthews, Thomas. “Book ’em.” Newsweek 121 (March 15, 1993): 78-81. A review of Grisham’s fourth novel. The Client (1993), which, like the two before it, The Firm and The Pelican Brief, immediately appeared on best-seller lists. Matthews considers this work and those that preceded it in relation to the genre of the “lawyer novel.” He also analyzes the phenomenal success that made Grisham one of the most widely read American authors in the space of only three years.

Pringle, Mary Beth. John Grisham: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. Pringle explains the genre of the legal thriller, tracing its evolution from the thriller tradition and detective fiction, as well as the romance, gothic, and crime novels. Following a biographical chapter on Grisham, she devotes a chapter to each of his novels, including a penetrating study on The Firm.