Binita Brahma

Binita Brahma edited the bio of John Grisham Tuesday, April 29, 2008.

Binita Brahma edited the summary of John Grisham Tuesday, April 29, 2008.

• Biography and career
  John Grisham, the second oldest of five siblings, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Southern Baptist parents of modest means. His father worked as a construction worker and a cotton farmer; his mother was a homemaker. After moving frequently, the family settled in 1967 in the town of Southaven in DeSoto County, Mississippi, where Grisham graduated from Southaven High School. He played as a quarterback for the school football team. Unlike the main character in his 2003 novel, Bleachers, he wasn't an All-American football player. Encouraged by his mother, the young Grisham was an avid reader, and was especially influenced by the work of John Steinbeck whose clarity he admired.
  
  
  Education
  In 1977 Grisham received a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting from Mississippi State University. While studying at MSU, the author began to keep a journal, a practice that would later assist in his creative endeavors. Grisham tried out for the baseball team at Delta State University, but was cut by the coach, who was former Boston Red Sox pitcher, Dave Ferriss. He earned his J.D. degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981. During law school Grisham switched interests from tax law to criminal and general civil litigation. Upon graduation he entered a small-town general law practice for nearly a decade in Southaven, where he focused on criminal law and civil law representing a broad spectrum of clients. As a young attorney he spent much of his time in court proceedings.
  
  
  Political life
  In 1983 he was elected as a Democrat to the Mississippi House of Representatives, where he served until 1990. During his time as a legislator, he continued his private law practice in Southaven. He has donated over $100,000 to Democratic Party candidates. In September, 2007 Grisham appeared with Hillary Rodham Clinton, his choice for U.S. President in 2008, and former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, whom Grisham supports for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican John Warner (no relation). Grisham himself had considered challenging former GOP U.S. Senator George Allen, Jr. in the 2006 election in which Allen was narrowly defeated by the Democrat James Webb. After a harrassment suit and several corruption charges he was forced to resign from public office.
  
  Inspiration for first novel
  In 1984 at the De Soto County courthouse in Hernando, Grisham witnessed the harrowing testimony of a 12-year-old rape victim. According to Grisham's official website, Grisham used his spare time to begin work on his first novel, which "explored what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants."  He "spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it in 1987. Initially rejected by many publishers, the manuscript was eventually bought by Wynwood Press, who gave it a modest 5,000-copy printing and published it in June 1988."
  The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on another novel, the story of a young attorney "lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared." That second book, The Firm, became the 7th bestselling novel of 1991. Grisham then went on to produce at least one work a year, most of them widely popular bestsellers. He is the only person to author a number-one bestselling novel of the year for seven consecutive years (1994–2000).
  
  Beginning with A Painted House in 2001, the author broadened his focus from law to the more general rural south, while continuing to pen his legal thrillers.
  
  Publishers Weekly declared Grisham "the bestselling novelist of the 90s", selling a total of 60,742,289 copies. He is also one of only a few authors to sell two million copies on a first printing; others include Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling.Grisham's 1992 novel The Pelican Brief sold 11,232,480 copies in the United States alone.
  
  
  Courtroom re-appearance
  Grisham returned briefly to the courtroom in 1996 after a five-year hiatus. According to his official website, he "was honoring a commitment he made before he had retired from the law...representing the family of a railroad brakeman killed when he was pinned between two cars...Grisham successfully argued his clients' case, earning them a jury award of $683,500—the biggest verdict of his career." Another tie to the legal community that he continues to hold is his seat on the Board of Directors for the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to exonerating the innocent through DNA testing after they have been convicted.
  
  Named in libel suit
  On September 28, 2007, Grisham was named in a civil suit in a US District Court, claiming Grisham libeled Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, District Attorney Bill Peterson and Gary Rogers, a former Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent. Peterson and Rogers claim that Grisham, along with two other authors, conspired to defame their character through their books. The suit is based on Grisham's sole non-fiction effort, The Innocent Man, a book about the investigation of the murder of a cocktail waitress in Ada, Oklahoma, and the exoneration by DNA evidence of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz more than 12 years later.
  
  John Grisham Room
  The Mississippi State University Libraries, Manuscript Division, maintains the John Grisham Room, an archive containing materials generated during the author's tenure as Mississippi State Representative and relating to his writings
  
  Grisham's lifelong passion for baseball is evident in his novel A Painted House and in his support of Little League activities in both Oxford, Mississippi and Charlottesville, Virginia. He wrote the original screenplay for and produced the baseball movie Mickey, starring Harry Connick, Jr.. The movie was released on DVD in April 2004. He remains a fan of Mississippi State University's baseball team and wrote about his ties to the university and the Left Field Lounge in the introduction for the book Dudy Noble Field: A Celebration of MSU Baseball.
  
  Grisham is also well known within the literary community for his efforts to support the continuing literary tradition of his native South. Grisham has endowed scholarships and writer's residencies in the University of Mississippi's English Department and Graduate Creative Writing Program, and was the founding publisher of the Oxford American, a magazine devoted to literary writing and famous for its annual music issue and copies of which include a compilation CD featuring contemporary and classic Southern musicians in genres ranging from blues and gospel to country-western and alternative rock.
  
  In an October 2006 interview on the Charlie Rose Show, Grisham stated that he usually takes only six months to write a book and that his favorite author was John le Carré.
  
  
  Family life
  Grisham describes himself as a "moderate Baptist", and has performed mission service for his church, notably in Brazil; that country provides the setting for one of his novels, The Testament, which has a strong religious theme. He lives with his wife Renée (maiden name: Jones) and their two children, Ty and Shea. Grisham's website states that the "family splits their time between their Victorian home on a farm" outside Oxford, Mississippi, "and a plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia." Grisham operates a Bombardier Challenger 600 executive jet, registered as N581TS

Binita Brahma edited the bio of James Hadley Chase Tuesday, April 29, 2008.

Binita Brahma edited the summary of James Hadley Chase Tuesday, April 29, 2008.

• James Hadley Chase is a pseudonym for British author Rene Brabazon Raymond (December 24, 1906 — February 6, 1985) who also wrote under the names James L. Docherty, Ambrose Grant, and Raymond Marshall. Chase, a London-born son of a British colonel serving in the colonial Indian Army who intended his son to have a scientific career, was initially raised at the King's School, Rochester, Kent and later studied in Calcutta. He left home at the age of 18 and became at different times a broker in a bookshop, a children's encyclopedia salesman, and a book wholesaler before capping it all with a writing career that produced more than 80 mystery books. In 1933, Chase married Sylvia Ray, who gave him a son. Following the US Great Depression (1929-1939), the Prohibition, and the gangster culture during this period, and after reading James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), he decided to try his own hand as a mystery writer. He had read about the American gangster Ma Barker and her sons, and with the help of maps and a slang dictionary, he composed in six weeks No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The book achieved remarkable popularity and became one of the best-sold books of the decade. It was a stage play in London's West End, was filmed in 1948 and in 1971 was remade by Robert Aldrich as The Grissom Gang.
  
  During World War II he served as a pilot in the RAF, eventually achieving the rank of Squadron Leader. From this period dates Chase's unusual short story 'The Mirror in Room 22', in which he tried his hand outside the crime genre. It was set in an old house, occupied by officers of a squadron. The owner of the house had committed suicide in his bedroom, and the last two occupants of the room have been found with a razor in their hands and their throats cut. The wing commander tells that when he started to shave before the mirror, he found another face in it. The apparition drew the razor across his throat. The wing commander says, "I use a safety razor, otherwise, I might have met with a serious accident—especially if I used an old-fashioned cut-throat." The story was published under the author's real name in the anthology Slipstream in 1946.
  
  In 1946, Graham Greene, who was a very good friend of Chase's, selected a Chase novel, More Deadly Than the Male (written under the pseudonym Ambrose Grant), for publishing under the Bloomsbury logo.
  
  Chase wrote most of his books using a dictionary of American slang, detailed maps, encyclopedias, and reference books on the American underworld. Most of the books were based on events occurring in the United States, even though he never really lived in the United States, save for two brief visits to Miami and New Orleans. In 1943, the Anglo-American crime author Raymond Chandler successfully claimed that Chase had lifted whole sections of his works in "Blonde's Requiem".<1> Chase's London publisher Hamish Hamilton forced Chase to publish an apology in The Bookseller.
  
  In several of Chase's stories the protagonist tries to get rich by committing a crime—an insurance fraud or a theft. But the scheme fails and leads to a murder and finally to a cul-de-sac, in which the hero realizes that he never had a chance to keep out of trouble. Women are often beautiful, clever, and treacherous; they kill unhesitatingly if they have to cover a crime. His plots typically centre around dysfunctional families, and the final denouement justifies the title!
  
  Unlike Agatha Christie's novels, in almost none of his novels, do the readers have to guess the killer. The reader knows who the killer is from the very beginning, yet the beauty of his books were that Chase always kept the reader on their tiptoes, guessing "what happens next?". This was actually the byword in most of this novels.
  
  In many of his novels, women, treacherous as they are, play a significant part. The protagonist falls in love with them and is prepared to kill someone at her behest, so he could get her. Only when he has killed, does he realize that the woman was actually using him to get someone killed.
  
  He was wildly popular in Asia and Africa. He also enjoyed success in France and Italy where more than twenty of his books were made into movies. Joseph Losey's film version of Chase's thriller EVE (1945), made in 1962, was cut by the producers, the Hakim brothers. In the story Stanley Baker played by a British writer, Tyvian, who is obsessed by a cold-hearted femme fatale, Eve (Jeanne Moreau). "Do you know how much this weekend's going to cost me?" he asks Eve. "Two friends, thirty thousand dollars …and a wife." He was also extremely popular in the Soviet Union during and after the perestroika years around 1990–1993.
  
  Chase moved to France in 1956 and then to Switzerland in 1961, living a secluded life in Corseaux-Sur-Vevey, north of Lake Geneva, from 1974. He eventually died there peacefully on February 6, 1985.

Binita Brahma changed Unknown Name's author image Tuesday, April 29, 2008.

Binita Brahma edited the bio of Christian Richter Friday, April 25, 2008.

Binita Brahma changed Evildead's author image Thursday, April 24, 2008.

Binita Brahma changed Evildead's author image Thursday, April 24, 2008.