NEW YORK — It’s hard to shock John Grisham, the master of the legal thriller.
But even he was blindsided by something he came across on a recent trip to Italy.
It wasn’t a crooked lawyer or an on-the-take judge. It wasn’t even a greedy corporation. What he found was far more shocking: American football in a country crazy for soccer.
Grisham was in the northern Italian city of Bologna, researching his novel, “The Broker,” when he met an American expatriate who played for the Bologna Warriors.
“He starts talking about football. I thought it was soccer. He said, ‘No – pads and helmets.’ And he showed me their field,” Grisham recalls. “I thought, ‘This is too good.’ “How do you end up in Italy playing for a couple thousand bucks a month?” Grisham wondered. “I said, ‘There’s a story here.”‘
The result is his 20th book, “Playing for Pizza,” which focuses on a washed-up NFL quarterback who reinvents himself in Parma, Italy.
Equal part guidebook, sports drama and fish-out-of-water tale, the novel is what Grisham calls “a big, wet, sloppy kiss” to a city famous for its ham and opera.
It’s a vacation of sorts for the 52-year-old author known more for his page-turning thrillers, such as “A Time to Kill,” “The Firm,” “The Pelican Brief,” “The Client,” “The Chamber” and “The Rainmaker.”
“There are times when I deliberately set out to make a statement or tell a truth or fight an injustice,” he says during an interview in his publisher’s office. “And there are times when I just want to write the kind of book that I’d love to read by the pool or in the hammock on a Sunday afternoon – just a fun read that doesn’t tax my brain very much.”
The novel’s hero is Rick Dockery, a third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns who botches an AFC Championship game so badly that he must flee the city for his life. Faced with few job prospects, he makes his way to Parma. Grisham’s characters are all fictional, but he based the book on the very real NFL Italy, where a few Americans get small salaries while the part-time Italian players play for free pizza and pride.
The book comes wedged between Grisham’s first stab at nonfiction – an investigation of a prisoner freed from death row in “The Innocent Man” – and his next novel, a return to legal suspense that is due in January. (In early October, an Oklahoma district attorney and a former agent for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation filed a libel suit against Grisham, claiming “The Innocent Man” placed them in a false light.)
“Playing for Pizza” is “a light story that I had a lot of fun writing because after ‘The Innocent Man,’ which was a very heavy, dark thing that I struggled with for a long time, I wanted to write something that was very, very different from that,” Grisham said about his new book.
Grisham has veered off the thriller track before, with his fictionalized childhood memoir, “A Painted House” in 2001; “Bleachers,” about small-town high school football in 2003 and the comedy “Skipping Christmas” in 2001.
Before settling on Parma as the setting, Grisham interviewed former players, investigated the league and absorbed guide and food books on Italy. He settled on two potential cities he’d never visited – Parma and Bergamo.
“Every town claims to have the greatest food in all of Italy,” he says with a smile. “It’s fun trying to find out the truth.”
Much of the book was done by the time Grisham arrived in Parma on April 1, persuaded to go there by a former Sacred Heart University player who had played for the Parma Panthers. It was a decision Grisham never regretted: “The food, the prosciutto, the Parmesan, all the good stuff. It was easy,” he says.
He watched a Parma game, ate pizza and drank beer with the players, and took in an opera at the Teatro Regio – just as his hero does.
There’s already been interest from Hollywood to turn “Playing for Pizza” into a movie, something that has happened to other Grisham books, attracting such stars as Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise.
Grisham, a former lawyer and Democratic Mississippi legislator who made millions with his pen, says he has no regrets about leaving his old jobs and says he’ll continue writing as long as the work interests him.
“I can’t say I’ve ever been bored, but you start asking yourself, ‘Can I write something else? What’s my range? What can I do here?”‘ he asks. “There are a lot of stories I want to write.
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Fiction
Playing for Pizza
By John Grisham, $21.95
