Whodunit? It Doesn’t Much Matter
By Breanne Boland March 11, 2004 Issue

The book jacket of The Last Juror lied to me. Lied, long and hard, no small feat considering that the summary only runs three paragraphs. And like a big, naÔve sap, I believed it. I expected suspense, a whirlwind trial dripping with tension, lawyers fighting for the truth, or just for hefty paychecks, justice served and then undermined, a long chase with twelve lives in the balance, maybe more!

You know what? Lies are good sometimes. Because of the book’s misleading little teaser, I was pleasantly surprised by the easygoing tale inside. Sure, there’s a trial, but the verdict doesn’t come until nearly half the book has passed, and there were barely enough pages beneath my right thumb for the untimely deaths of six jurors, let alone twelve.

And that’s okay I’m not a big fan of suspense, and whodunits make me want to shout, “Well? WHO?!” so I was happy to find what The Last Juror was really about. It’s about Clanton, Miss., and its ten years in the life of Willie Traynor, a northerner from Memphis and the book’s narrator. After going to Clanton seeking an easy, profitable job, he unexpectedly comes into possession of The Ford County Times, a weekly paper recording the life and times of a small county in northern Mississippi, the fictional place the author visited once before in A Time to Kill.

Traynor’s tenure at the paper begins with the brutal rape and murder of Rhoda Kassellaw, and we know from the start that it was Danny Padgitt, wayward son of a secretive family whose history in the area goes back for generations. Rhoda gasps his name with her dying breath. Utilizing a little yellow journalism, Traynor’s paper quickly becomes profitable, and later respectable, and the 23-year-old college dropout has to deal with being looked at as an adult for the first time.

Traynor’s outsider status introduces us to the odd circles and traditions of his accidental new home. As newspaper editor, he has reason to snoop into everything, so we get to snoop too, and hear things both on and off the record. It’s the gradually unwinding tale Traynor tells us in his straightforward journalist’s voice that keeps us reading, as he recounts the lurid and the curious stories with which he fills the pages of his newspaper.

Grisham does a fine job creating a believable world to surround his vivid small town, made tense by unchallenged racism and corruption and the pressures of the times. We know the rest of the world is out there – the effects of Vietnam creep in, for instance – but I was content to keep it at arm’s length, just like everyone else in Clanton. When the story rests there, in the small town where everyone knows everyone else and exactly what they’re doing, I wasn’t in a hurry to leave either.

The conflict between the story and the premise in the summary occasionally surfaces in the story. It seems Grisham struggled with his need to deliver a potboiler, and the desire to properly tell a story that has, he says on his website, been percolating in his head for fifteen years. Elements enjoyable on their own begin to feel contrived as their place in the story becomes evident. It’s awfully convenient that the only friend Traynor makes outside of the newspaper becomes a juror for the Padgitt trial, and the first black juror in the court’s history, which of course means that her life will be at stake, and from more than one threat.

Fortunately, Grisham balances out the threat of being formulaic with enough tangential detail to keep a semblance of normal life. Characters drift in and out with no clear resolution, and as clear-cut as the main storyline is, that ease feels just fine. It’s not a loose end so much as a saunter down a road that isn’t quite where we were going, but it was a nice little trip to take anyway.

The Last Juror shows us a small town reeling from the introduction of chaos and other outside influences, a shock to their society where no one is trusted unless their grandparents are remembered fondly. It also shows rural Mississippi just before the homogenization of business and culture seeped across America. A family could still separate itself from the world around it and be so reclusive that the faintest rumor of their exploits could become legend.

Grisham’s whispering town works well as a setting for a mystery. The residents of Clanton peer over each other’s fences on a normal day, so it’s agonizing for them to be ignorant of who is terrorizing their town and its residents. Meanwhile, as they peer, we get to see the other interesting stuff gathered. The Last Juror does show a little weakness from Grisham’s publisher’s expectations, but overall, it’s an agreeable book, and a fine introduction for this first-time Grisham reader.

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