The Boys from Biloxi
The Boys from Biloxi
By: John Grisham
[Fulfilled ‘Book with lawyers’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2023 Reading Challenge]
“Corruption never stays in a box. It spreads because greedy men see easy money and there is an endless demand for gratification and the promise of a quick buck.”
If you enjoy reading Wikipedia, you’ll really love this book because that’s the writing style of it. If I had to make a completely arbitrary guess I would say that only 10% of the book is dialogue and most of it was in the last couple chapters.
It feels like a narration, reporting, or documenting of everything that happened. We get a few ‘he thought this’ or ‘he felt this’ statements but overall I don’t think we really feel anything about the characters. We’re just walking through a museum listening as the headphones tells us everything we need to know about the events we pass by.
I enjoy Grisham books. I’m not a superfan, but I’ve read several (before I started reviewing) and this didn’t feel like his ‘typical’ writing.
There was some courtroom drama towards the end but it wasn’t very intense. There were no surprises or climaxes. It felt like one long continuous straight line.
Goodreads says this book is a ‘sweeping saga’ of two families whose trajectories lead them to a showdown in the courtroom.
Sweeping and saga are the right words. It’s a long book and it spans from 1948 to 1986.
We get chapters with background on Biloxi, Mississippi and all the corruption that settled into town. We get chapters that detail baseball games and tournaments. Some that detail boxing matches and cockfights. Chapters detailing the litigation involved in the insurance claims after Hurricane Camille. Chapters on a string of jewelry shop thefts.
It’s a very broad telling.
Really, I think a better title for this book would be ‘Biloxi Vice: Will the Corruption Ever End?’
It’s actually a pretty depressing read because most of the book we’re just privy to all the gambling, drunkenness, fighting, drugs, prostitution, stripping, bribes, etc that are rampant in the town of Biloxi and how the police chief and the DA are all corrupt and elections are rigged so there’s no hope for change.
“Journalists often found it difficult to believe that such illegal activity was so openly accepted in a state so religiously conservative. They wrote articles about the wild and freewheeling ways in Biloxi, but nothing changed. No one with authority seemed to care. The prevailing mood was simply: ‘That’s just the Biloxi.’”
This may be the story of good vs evil but it seems like evil has the upper hand for most of it.
The basic premise is this: Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco grow up together playing baseball, but Hugh follows in his dad’s footsteps and the father/son pair become the mafia in town. Keith follows in his dad’s footsteps and the father/son pair become lawyers— the beacon of justice and hope for change. They become enemies. Can the Rudy’s take down the Malco’s? And if they can… at what cost?
The book is divided into four parts:
The Boys
This part gives a ton of family context and background. Both from immigrant families and how they came to be where they are.
Keith “was a left-handed pitcher who threw hard but wild, and frightened batters with his lack of control.”
Hugh “was a right-handed pitcher who threw even harder and with more accuracy.”
It would be an interesting thing to ponder if these descriptions of their pitching style played out in other ways throughout their lives or if they are contradictory to their future personalities.
The Crusader
This is the part where Keith’s dad becomes the DA and goes on a mission to clean up the Coast.
“Jesse Rudy had an iron will and a strong moral compass and he played to win. he would battle the crooks to the bitter end, all the way to the ballot box. And his family would be at his side.”
But the mafia is not worried…
“‘You boys look worried. Need I remind you that the graveyard is full of politicians who promised to clean up the Coast?’”
The Prisoners
and
The Row
These last two parts are about putting key players in prison, some of the aftermath and the death row journey blah blah.
Death Row and Capital Punishment
Speaking of death row. While I’m still trying to figure out what the main moral of the story is, I can tell you that part of it has to do with capital punishment. Based on an interview Grisham had with someone he said he used to be pro-capital punishment but has since changed his mind. I think a lot of his books expose the failings of the criminal justice system and for him, this topic is one of them.
I would guess he is attempting to make the reader ponder their own views of capital punishment. There are currently 24 states with the death penalty. [This site seems like a good informational site per state if you’re interested.]
I was going to write my thoughts about capital punishment but it got long-winded real fast.
There is a ton of things I don’t know about how the criminal justice system works. I know there are a lot of failings and that people have been mistreated in a lot of ways. Alabama, I’m looking at you. Having read Just Mercy, I was exposed to more. I’m guessing Mississippi is probably similar to Alabama.
Pondering what you think about capital punishment is an important thing. I’ll just say that I think my view is heavily influenced by Wayne Grudem’s Christian Ethics book and the verses Romans 13:1-6 and Genesis 9:6.
The Real Victims
One thing that bothered me about this book was the way women were or weren’t incorporated into this book. This book is very male-centric. Which I get— the main characters are men. The criminals are men. The lawyers are men.
But there are women in this story. And they’re lost in it. We don’t even get to know most of their real names. We only know their hooker names. None of them are significant characters. We never know what led them to that life or the mistreatment they endure.
I know they’re not all completely innocent, but in this story it just felt like there were all these women who were part of this stripping and prostitution segment as if it was normal or expected. They were expendable. They were just hookers, whores, skin. Used.
And there was no redemption or hope for them in this story.
I’ve gotten on my soapbox about sex-work and pornography before, so I won’t go deep into it here. I just think if we’re going to talk about the objectification of women, this is a pretty obvious starting point. You can learn more about that by reading: Taking Down Backpage or The Porn Problem.
Historical Pieces
This story’s plot and characters are completely fictional. However some of the events or places are historical. Here were a few that I found interesting.
The Dixie Mafia is a vague ‘character’ in the book. Though the people Grisham wrote were fictional, the group as a whole was real.
“Its members— the FBI was never certain who was a member, who was not, and how many claimed to be— were a loose assortment of bad boys and misfits who preferred crime over honest work. There was no established organization or hierarchy.”
According to Wikipedia, the ‘unofficial’ kingpin of The Dixie Mafia was a man named Mike Gillich Jr., who was from Croatian descent, grew up on Cadet Point, and became an entrepreneur of all matters of illegal stuff, making a name for himself on The Strip. It is clear that Grisham’s character Lance Malco is loosely based off of this man.
Hurricane Camille made landfall in August of 1969 and is one of only four Category 5 hurricanes to make landfall on the contiguous United States.
“Her damage was so unbelievable that the National Weather Service retired her name.”
Second in intensity only to The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane, the damage in Mississippi caused by Camille was estimated at $950 million. In comparison Hurricane Katrina caused $30 billion.
Camille hit 20 miles east of where Katrina hit. Although Katrina wasn’t as intense as Camille, because the same area was more populated 36 years later, the damage was more.
In the book, of course, “Vice was perhaps the first industry to fully recover after the storm.”
Parchman jail seemed like a pretty bad prison so I looked up a little bit more about it. It is the only maximum security prison for men in Mississippi and the state’s oldest prison. It was the basis for the prison farm on the movie ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’. It is true that for many years the prisoners were essentially slaves again, working the fields.
Over the years some changes have been made, but sounds like there has always been a need for reform at that prison for conditions for the prisoners. Recently they finally installed A/C and updated some other things.
Recommendation
If you enjoy a really good Wikipedia rabbit hole about Biloxi and all its trappings, I would definitely recommend this book.
If you are looking for a heart-felt story of a decades-long friendship and its ups and downs, you won’t find that here. If you’re looking for a legal thriller with a couple twists and surprises, you won’t find that here.
It seems this book has garnered a lot of mixed reactions from Grisham fans and I think for good reason.
Personally, I didn’t find it super compelling and I felt so disconnected from the characters. We rarely heard their thoughts or even their voice. We weren’t down in the trenches, we were at a bird’s eye view.
Even when the ‘hero’ of the book died, it felt too matter-of-fact and I didn’t feel much emotion from any of the characters. The content was so broad and documentative.
At the same time, it’s a long book and I read it fast so in a weird way I must have enjoyed it to some degree or I think it would have taken me longer to get through. It could be that because of all the corruption I had to keep reading so I could get some sort of justice and see good win over evil.
All in all, if I hadn’t read this book, I don’t think I would have missed much. I think some people will still enjoy it, but just because you enjoy Grisham books, doesn’t mean you’ll like this one.
[Content Advisory: no f-words, 8 s-words; many instances of violence, sex, drugs, prostitution- no descriptions of sexual things]
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
This book released October, 2022. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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