The Boys From Biloxi

 

The Boys From Biloxi – John Grisham

Since I started blogging/writing book reviews in 2013, I’ve read and reviewed 17 by John Grisham. That sounds like a lot, but it’s less than half of his literary output.  I’ve frequently commented in my reviews of his work that he writes too much and many of his stories don’t seem to get the refinement needed to make good books really great.  Many times, it seems as though he’s under the gun to get a project completed.  Even though his writing is always stellar, there have been too many times when it seems as though he’s metaphorically checking off a box so he can hurry up and move on to the next one.

This book is a refreshing change.  This book was excellent, and I would rank it among Grisham’s very best.  Since I read an e-version, it’s hard to judge the volume in comparison to most of his work, but this book seemed to be about 50% longer than his average output.  That’s a good thing when you’ve got a great story.  This book was packed.  If anyone wanted to make this into a movie, a movie wouldn’t do the story justice due to its density.  This book deserves a mini-series; perhaps even a season or two on Netflix.  Yes, it’s that good, and that detailed.

The story happens over a span of about 40 years.  We begin in Biloxi during World War II. It seems as though Biloxi is a pretty hefty military training base for soldiers during the war. Whenever you have soldiers far away from home and getting ready to fight, it’s not difficult for greedy capitalists to set up bars, gambling joints, and establishments featuring shady women performing illegal acts for lonely G.I.s.   It doesn’t take long for the unpleasant, unsavory criminals to move in and capitalize on such endeavors.  Pretty soon, the town of Biloxi is run by the “Dixie Mafia”.

The main focus in this novel is on two youths in the 1940s, their friendship, their love for baseball, and their families.  One of the families is sucked into the rabid criminal underworld.  The other family is passionate about law and order.  So even though these two boys are friends, their paths take them on radically different directions and, as you can imagine, eventually become hardened adversaries in such a sleazy town as Biloxi.  

The plot of this story is well told, but what makes this book so special is that Grisham manages to feature so much here.  We meet so many characters, witness so many atrocities, see so much litigation in the courtrooms, and are exposed to so much shady politics.  The reader never feels overwhelmed nor exhausted by the revolving door of events nor characters, which is quite the accomplishment.  Grisham is masterful in his juggling and delivery, and we’re engrossed with every aspect of the story.  There’s so much here, that once we get to, say, page 250, we may have forgotten a lot of the somewhat minor details that happened on page 100, yet this really isn’t a hindrance as Grisham does a great job to always remind the reader of the who’s, the when’s, and the why’s.

For those that were around and in the deep south in the late 1960s, they easily remember Hurricane Camile which, in many ways, was even more devastating than Katrina in 2005.   You can’t tell a 40-year old story about Biloxi from the 1940s to the 1980s without talking about Camile, yet Grisham uses this event masterfully within his story and the devastation caused by the hurricane serves as a catalyst in swaying the public’s minds and attitudes.  People suddenly realize that maybe there is more to life than the alluring elements of the underworld.

This is the book that I always wish that John Grisham would write every time.  Yes, he’s written several that are of equal caliber, and as I’ve mentioned here and in my other reviews, I’ve always felt that if he slowed down his output a bit and focused on, say, half of what he normally writes, he could make all of his books this strong.  This one should be remembered as one of his best of his best.