The subtitle for John Grisham’s new book, The Innocent Man, could easily describe one of his trademark legal thrillers. Indeed, Murder and Injustice in a Small Town has been the theme that keeps on giving for the Albemarle County novelist, one of the planet’s most successful living writers. But this 360-page work of nonfiction (Grisham’s first after 18 novels) cannot yield Grisham the kind of semi-satisfying conclusion that he could write into something like A Time to Kill or The Pelican Brief. The grisly rape and murder of Debbie Carter, a young waitress in Ada, Oklahoma, ends with a string of broken lives and ruined reputations; the guilty and innocent alike suffer.
But none suffers more than Ron Williamson, the mentally ill, former small-town hero at the center of the story. It was Williamson’s New York Times obituary in December 2004 that inspired Grisham’s foray into nonfiction, and in Grisham’s hands this self-destructive baseball player with the string of missed chances becomes a heartbreaking symbol not for blind justice but rather justice hell-bent on seeing things one way only. Carter was killed in 1982; in 1987, without a single shred of evidence linking either of them to the events, Williamson and a friend, Dennis Fritz, were arrested for capital murder. Williamson’s true crime, it seems, was to be the kind of loud-mouthed, alcoholic character that earned scorn in a self-righteous place like Ada, where the population of 16,000 is served by 50 churches, “two on every corner,” Grisham writes. Under the surface, Williamson was wracked by the effects of serious mental disorders that most of the time went untreated. He was big, noisy and incoherent; nobody seemed to mind getting Williamson off the street and pegging the unsolved murder on him though he had an airtight alibi.
With this kind of material, it’s no surprise that Grisham weaves a deft story. As usual, the book is a page-turner and will probably make a stirring movie. Especially chilling and well suited to his hand are the descriptions of Williamson’s 12 years on Oklahoma’s grim and sadistic death row; nearly tear-jerking are the passages describing Williamson’s bewildered and ultimately sick existence in the five short years that he lived after DNA evidence exonerated him.
Grisham’s passion for justice should be well appreciated by now. Still, it is unexpected to read sarcasm and anger in his prose. Perhaps the real-life material has liberated him somehow. His description of the moment that the prosecutor conceded that he could not try the two defendants based on new forensic evidence is a pointed example: “At no time did [the prosecutor] offer any conciliatory comments, or words of regret, or admissions of errors made, or even an apology.
“At the least, Ron and Dennis were expecting an apology. Twelve years of their lives had been stolen by malfeasance, human error, and arrogance. The injustice they had endured could easily have been avoided, and the state owed them something as simple as an apology.
“It would never happen, and it became an open sore that never healed.”
Reading The Innocent Man one could fervently hope that Williamson’s case is a rarity; alas, it clearly is not. Grisham makes this point crystal clear, too. Ultimately this book, though it reads like the best of his novels, sits uncomfortably next to those works. In other words, it’s a “John Grisham book,” but it isn’t. It forces upon its audience the kind of wider examination that a thriller can never really demand.—Cathy Harding
