A Time to Kill

A Time to Kill was published in 1989 and was John Grisham's debut novel. He had been a lawyer in Mississippi and a member of the state legislature, and he wrote the book before the novels that made his name. It was rejected by many publishers before Wynwood Press printed five thousand copies, and it was only when Doubleday published The Firm that the earlier book was reissued in paperback and became a bestseller in its own right.

The novel is a courtroom story with a siege around it. Grisham writes the procedure carefully: jury selection, motions, the rules about what a witness may say, and the way a trial is conducted as a series of small decisions that the public reads as theatre. Around the courthouse he builds a town under pressure, with the Klan, the local press and the defendant's family all pressing on the case, and the lawyer's marriage and practice are part of the stakes rather than background.

Grisham followed it with The Firm and a long run of legal thrillers, and he returned to these characters much later with Sycamore Row and A Time for Mercy. The film adaptation of this novel arrived in 1996 and followed the book closely. It is a first novel, and it reads like one in places, but it is also the book that set out the territory Grisham has worked ever since, including the closing speeches in which the argument of the novel is delivered in open court.