John Grisham likes to describe hostage situations – but the best-selling author doesn’t want to write a book about Donald Trump.
Mr. Grisham, after more than 30 years we meet again the lawyer Mitch McDeere, the hero of your first big success “The Firm”. Why?
Mitch and his wife Abby were never far from me. They were the main characters in my breakthrough in 1991, and my life changed because of them. In addition, “The Company” became even more famous thanks to the film adaptation with Tom Cruise. I always wanted to go back to them, I just waited until a story came to me.
You are a lawyer yourself, and even with “The Firm” many readers wondered whether Mitch had autobiographical traits.
Not at all. Mitch, a highly paid elite lawyer, studied at Harvard. That was never my world, I studied law in Mississippi and worked as a regular lawyer.
In what is now your 40th novel, “The Abduction,” you move into territory that is unfamiliar to you. It takes place in Libya during the time of Gaddafi, a lawyer colleague of Mitch’s is kidnapped in the desert, there is brutal murder and mutilation, and in the end there is a ransom of many millions of dollars. Have you become bored with American courtrooms?
No, but I wanted to do something different, something I knew little about – like international law and negotiating to free or buy hostages. I didn’t know that, and I was very interested in it. And how the Harvard lawyer Mitch, who lives wealthy and with a family in New York and knew nothing about it, moves in this world.
Your novel is fiction, yet your descriptions of the hostage business read so real. Like the daily news from the world of terror.
The incident I am telling about has a real background. That was in Libya more than ten years ago, when security guards from a private company were kidnapped by terrorists and immediately shot.
Are this business and blackmail more widespread than we realize?