The Pelican Brief is Grisham at his unmistakable best. The plotline itself is large, reaching as high as the Presidency of the United States, and it includes all of the ingredients that we have come to expect from Grisham—good lawyers, bad lawyers, assassins, people willing to risk everything for justice—all tied up together in a delightfully intricate plot. Writing a book of this scale is not an easy task, and the difference between success and failure depends on when and how each item of information pertinent to the climax is revealed. Too much information confuses the reader, and too little leads to boredom. Grisham releases his information with surgical precision; like a doctor prescribing medicine at the appropriate time and in the correct doses.

The story begins with the assassination of two Supreme Court Justices who have nothing in common but their history of environmentalism. While the country buzzes over the motive of their murder, a law school student, Darby Shaw, decides to research the backgrounds of these two judges and comes up with a plausible theory that reaches high into government circles. The only people to have seen the brief that Darby has written up detailing her research, which becomes known as the Pelican Brief, are mysteriously assassinated, and she realizes that she could be the next target. While on the run she joins forces with a newspaper reporter who vows to help her sort the problem out.

There are many writers out there who publish novels of a similar style and content, yet it is John Grisham who invariably hits the bestseller lists. Wondering why this is so, I took a deeper look at The Pelican Brief to see if Grisham adds an additional ingredient that makes his books more appealing, and what I discovered came as a great surprise: John Grisham is a poet!

In the same way as the Japanese language has a pleasant ring to it when haiku-style sentences consisting of 5-7-5 syllables are used, sentences consisting of fixed syllable counts in English also slip gently into the mind and rest there comfortably. Many of Grisham’s sentences consist of multiples of these specific syllable counts, and although it is impossible to say whether he is making a concerted effort to achieve this or whether he simply has a naturally rhythmical mind, the overall effect is extremely soothing. These syllable counts tend to concentrate on multiples of three and four. General rhyming prose, for instance, consists of 8-6-8-6 syllables, and limericks consist of 9-8-8-6, but most rhyming poetry has some sort of relationship with the same multiples.

However, using the same sentence length and rhythm consecutively becomes boring after a while, and Grisham is careful to use sentences of varying length at all times. This means that short, to-the-point sentences are used as regularly as long, convoluted sentences, and this makes each paragraph flow smoothly and comfortably. Many of the short sentences also consist of only five syllables, which breaks up the monotony of rhyme. For example, the third paragraph on the first page of the book contains seven sentences with a respective word count of 8-4-9-25-3-3-9, as follows:

“Biggest crowd ever!” Rosenberg yelled at the window. He was almost deaf. Jason Kline, his senior law clerk, stood behind him. It was the first Monday in October, the opening day of the new term, and this had become a traditional celebration of the First Amendment. A glorious celebration. Rosenberg was thrilled. To him, freedom of speech meant freedom to riot.

If we count the syllables in these sentences, however, two of the three sentences with four or less words contain five syllables, and the others consist of 12-12-39-8-12 respectively; all of which are multiples of three or four syllables. Poetry! Of course, this doesn’t happen all the time, but there is definitely a rhythm behind the writing style, and the short sentences that intersperse the longer sentences drill home the message that Grisham wishes to get across.

I haven’t carried this research any further to discover if similar rhythmic styles occur in other bestselling books, but it certainly provides food for thought; especially for a writer.

The Pelican Brief

By John Grisham

ISBN: 0-440-21404-1