John Grisham is generally considered to be the gold standard of the legal thriller. The Street Lawyer is his ninth novel, and like his other work was critically well received, and almost guaranteed to be made into a blockbuster film, or at the very least, a made-for-television movie. There were some criticisms though, revolving largely around the fact that Grisham had not developed the characters very well, and that his work was beginning to give the impression of being a brand-name production from a fiction factory rather than a thriller with highly developed characters and an intricately-worked plot.
However, this novel is more than a legal page-turner; it is also a feelgood story of characters capable of introspection and of change, and it is also a novel that gives the reader the ultimate conclusion of the victory of the good folks over the bad ones. The novel opens dramatically with the introduction of a character who at first meeting seems like one of the bad guys; a homeless man who goes by the name "Mister" storms into the offices of Drake and Sweeney, a powerful and influential law firm who operate in Washington D.C. He takes hostages, and demands information about an unspecified eviction. Mister is killed by a police sniper but one of his freed hostages, Michael Brock, is intrigued enough by the situation, and captivated by what must have driven a man to the lengths that Mister has gone to in order to get answers, that he decides to investigate further for himself.
There is a saying that eavesdroppers rarely hear good about themselves and in Grisham-world this is doubly true for lawyers. Brock begins to learn some truths about his law firm that are unpalatable at best; he discovers that his firm has been the driving force behind a series of illegal evictions resulting in the tragic death of a homeless family. He learns that they are also involved in bribery and the facilitation of federal projects that hike rent, with Drake and Sweeney attorneys turning a blind eye to blatant conventions of the existing housing law.
In the course of his investigations, Brock also begins to learn more about the plight of the homeless in Washington D.C. He meets the passionate and driven advocates for the city's homeless, and realizes that he has far more in common with them ideologically than he does with his own employers and fellow Drake and Sweeney lawyers. He feels that he has no choice other than resigning from his law firm; after he does so he takes a position with the free legal clinic which is poorly paid in money but much more rewarding in ways that he had not expected would matter to him very much.
The novel has some striking similarities with another Grisham novel, The Firm, and just as in that book, the law firm who have been left behind by the protagonist seek their revenge using a variety of underhand and plain illegal tactics. They attempt to implicate Brock as a thief and accuse him of malpractice, but this deeply disturbs Drake and Sweeney's senior partner, who fires a number of quite senior people and subsequently, shocked by the person he appears to have become, offers his lawyers for pro bono work on behalf of the city's disenfranchised homeless citizens. In short, it is a triumph of good over evil, a motif that is strongly seen through all of Grisham's novels.
Like his other work, the novel was immediately optioned for the screen, although this time it was the small screen that came calling rather than Hollywood itself. A pilot was filmed, and the intention was to make a mini-series of the novel, adding some scenes that were not in the original book and adaption the story to create a multi-episode thriller. Eddie Cibrian was cast as Brock, and at the time this seemed like a popular choice; however, shortly afterwards he became involved in a highly publicized relationship with the then-married country singer LeeAnn Rimes; the pilot was abruptly pulled and never made, with no explanations, although insiders pointed to the rapidly waning popularity of Cibrian among female viewers.
Grisham's characters are often based on real-life characters he met whilst working as an attorney himself, which, given the duplicity of many of his antagonistic characters, does not speak particularly highly of the political and legal professions. He was actually a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives during the nineteen eighties, where he became fascinated by the process of lobbying, and the link between the political process and the legal profession. Grisham's books have been translated into forty-two languages. He is one of the most-translated thriller authors in the world.
