The bite-size small-town tales from ?The Firm? author are diverting if a little too brief
IF THERE IS ANYTHING THAT John Grisham likes to do, it?s trying something new, a fascinating if unpredictable quality in a best-selling author. Aside from penning chart-topping courtroom dramas (everything from ?The Firm? to ?The Associate?), Grisham has also written nonfiction (the impressive ?The Innocent Man?), literary semi-autobiography (the even better ?A Painted House?) and even spy fiction (the awful ?The Broker?), to various degrees of success. He has even found time to successfully do some lawyering in his spare time.

For his 23rd book, Grisham now inaugurates ?Ford County: Stories? (Doubleday, New York, 2009, 308 pages), his first collection of short stories, all linked by its locale: the fictional Mississippi town of Clanton, which famously has only 51 lawyers and 10,000 inhabitants but enough interlocked narratives to fill this book?or maybe more. Not for nothing is the title county the same one where ?A Time to Kill,? Grisham?s first book, was set.

The seven stories in ?Ford County? are, on the surface, very similar, extremely Spartan incidents of rural Southern American life and what passes there for strife, such as the doomed late-night lifesaving attempt of ?Blood Drive,? the fateful matrimonial high jinks of ?Casino,? the tick-tock of death row prison rituals in ?Fetching Raymond,? the way one phone call changes everything in ?Fish Files,? an unsuspecting lawyer?s strangest night in ?Michael?s Room? and the increasingly suspicious nursing home ministrations afoot in ?Quiet Haven.?

Grisham?s stories are deceptively streamlined, so unadorned so as to seem simplistic, but each one is loaded, literally and figuratively. ?Ford County? boasts of many things swimming right under the stories? surfaces: sex, money, divorce, race, crime and greed, among others. The stories seem to run at the same, relaxed pace but also march in cadence to the finish, enough to take any reader along for the ride. Simple as the stories are, you will all want to see how they end. If anything, the stories come to an end a bit too easily. Grisham succeeds in piquing the readers? interests but then the stories?and ?Ford County? the book?ends.

The best story in the bunch is the final piece, ?Funny Boy,? which details the much-talked-about return of one of Clanton?s most unusual past inhabitants and the friendship he builds with an elderly black woman. The story, which works at the slowest of slow burns, deals with how Clanton, or any small American town, deals with the two things that electrify it: death and scandal.

?I?m not sure,? the titular protagonist of this story says. ?I?ve seen a lot of death recently, been to more than my share of memorials. I couldn?t stand the thought of being buried in a cold mausoleum in a faraway city. Maybe it?s just the Southern thing. We all come home eventually.?

What really comes home, in every story, is the irresistible power of story in a small town in all its various forms: gossip, reports, documents, family histories and civil war memories. The stories exert an inexorable pull on everyone around them. This is what Grisham harnesses and toasts. In ?Ford County,? Grisham returns to the scene of his first literary foray and finds new ground to mine. Readers hope the stories will transform into fuller, more extended forms in the future. Imagine: a novel featuring these newly introduced but memorable characters?and characters they all are. It?s a safe bet John Grisham will somehow find the time to do it.

Available in hardcover from National Book Store.