The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham

Published by Doubleday on October 18, 2022

The Boys from Biloxi reads like a true crime story that is strong on exposition but weak on drama. Characters are stereotypes of crusading prosecutors and the criminals they put behind bars. John Grisham writes at least one dud for every good novel he pens. Despite some interesting moments, The Boys from Biloxi resides in the dud column.

The novel begins with a brief history of Biloxi in the twentieth century, a city with a prosperous seafood industry that ignored Prohibition, welcomed gamblers, and turned a blind eye to prostitution. The history focuses on Croatian immigrants and their contributions to Biloxi, primarily with good deeds and hard work, later supplemented by vice.

Hugh Malco and Keith Rudy enter the story in the late 1950s as Little League players. Hugh’s father, Lance Malco, is a rising star in Croatian crime, assisted by the muscle and violence of Nevin Noll. Lance becomes known as the Boss of the Dixie Mafia.

Keith’s father, Jesse Rudy, is a World War II veteran who marries a nurse, has four kids while teaching high school, and earns a law degree at night. He eventually gets fed up with corruption, particularly the DA’s failure to go after the sheriff, Fats Bowman, who is paid to ignore the gambling and prostitution that has made Biloxi famous.

Noll teaches Hugh to box. Keith sticks with baseball until he decides that helping his father run for DA would be a more productive use of his time. The criminal forces that run Biloxi paint Jesse as “soft on crime” because he defended criminals as a lawyer, while proclaiming the incumbent DA as “tough on crime” despite his failure to challenge corruption. The public buys it because ignorance and slogans are the driving force of politics. Graveyard votes seal the deal for the incumbent. And then a hurricane and unscrupulous insurance companies turn Jesse into a community hero.

The story follows Jesse has he moves from a civil practice to a career as a crusading prosecutor who promises to clean up corruption in Biloxi. Eventually the story focuses on Keith as he follows in his father’s footsteps. Their targets are the Malcos, Noll, and Bowman. The book plods along at a steady pace, occasionally enlivened by a murder. A story with so many prostitutes and gamblers should be more interesting, but Grisham plays the role of neutral reporter more than storyteller.

The Boys from Biloxi develops a fuel leak as it enters its third act. It doesn’t quite run out of gas, but it starts coasting as it nears the finish line. Legal thrillers typically depend on the drama of trials, but the trial at the end of the novel is far from riveting and leads to a foregone conclusion. The rest of the story reads like a prolonged epilogue, recapping the lives of central characters following the trial.

The novel’s later chapters focus on the death penalty, a topic about which Grisham has written with passion. The Boys from Biloxi is pretty much the opposite of The Chamber. It alludes to the troubling issues that surround capital punishment but fails to explore them.

Without spoiling a major plot point, I can say that one of the most interesting issues involves a prosecutor’s potential conflict of interest in pursuing the death penalty against a criminal who killed a family member of the prosecutor. Grisham handles the conflict in a scholarly way but deprives the issue of its emotional force.

Grisham could also have done more with the personal conflict between Hugh and Keith, close childhood friends who become enemies in adulthood. The story fails to milk the inherent drama of that changing relationship. The relationship arises as a troubling memory at the novel’s end, but the absence of any buildup robs the conflict of its power. It nevertheless furnishes the novel’s most compelling moment. This is another consequence of telling the story from the standpoint of a dispassionate and slightly bored third person observer. I have no problem with novelists telling stories in the third person, but I have a problem with novels that read like dry history texts.

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