#A time to kill movie setting full

While it was not a hit on it original release, his second novel The Firm became a New York Times bestseller and was made into a hit movie starring Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman. The novel was rejected by 28 publishers by his count before a small press published a small run of 5,000 copies, which Grisham promoted by personally taking copies around to libraries and bookstores. The case stirs up racial tensions in town and brings the Klu Klux Klan out in force to threaten and intimidate the lawyer, Jake Brigance, defending the father, Carl Lee Hailey. And with that, a story was born.' He spent three years writing the novel, about an ambitious young white lawyer in the small town of Clanton, Mississippi, who defends a black man for the murder of the two men, both virulently racist white men, who raped his ten-year-old daughter and left her for dead. 'I remember staring at the defendant and wishing I had a gun.

'Every juror was crying,' he later recalled. A lawyer by profession, Grisham was inspired to write the novel while attending a trial (one that he wasn't involved in professionally) and hearing the heartbreaking testimony of 12-year-old girl who had been raped.

#A time to kill movie setting full

The small-town lawyer and former state legislator was successful enough to give up his law practice to write full time.Ī Time to Kill is the fourth film based on Grisham's books but it was his very first novel. He averaged a novel a year, his books were consistent bestsellers, and The Firm and The Client had already been turned into hit movies. By the time A Time to Kill was released in 1996, author John Grisham was a veritable name brand in legal thrillers.