![]() ![]() If the Cardinals were playing, everybody knew the score. "Growing up in Arkansas and Mississippi, every small town, every porch, every car, every kitchen had a radio. We all dreamed of being big league players. "Like all the kids on my street, we were going to play for the Cardinals. "I played baseball from the time that I can remember as a little boy, through little league, through high school," he said. "Calico" Joe Castle grew up in a small town in Arkansas before bursting onto the Major League scene, and Grisham drew upon his own childhood memories of playing baseball in the rural South. I'm not here to deliver messages or sermons or give morality tales, I'm here to tell stories." I want to tell the story, live the story. "I don't think about cliches," he said, "I think about the story, I think about the characters. Calico Joe isn't the first baseball book to feature a superstar rookie slugger, a complicated father-son relationship, and a wise newspaper man, but Grisham said he doesn't worry about covering old ground. See a list of our recent selections, hear the conversations, and read Bill Littlefield's book notes. Only A Game features interviews with top sports authors every week. Baseball is a game of endless statistics, and it was great fun messing around with some of those numbers." You want to tell a story that's never been told, and to do that, you have to jazz it up a bit. "You want to read about somebody exceptional," he said. Grisham told Bill Littlefield he felt Castle's extraordinary start was an important part of engaging the reader. The book's main character, "Calico" Joe Castle, jumps into the big leagues with improbable, perhaps even unrealistic, success during his rookie season. In his new novel, Calico Joe, Grisham sets aside courtroom drama to focus an another American pastime: baseball. Grisham join Only A Game from NPR's New York Bureau. Considering John Grisham's vast success writing novels about Firms, Pelican Briefs, and Runaway Juries, maybe they're right. The United States has been described by some as an overly litigious society. This interview originally aired on April 14, 2012 John Grisham has written more than 20 novels, but Calico Joe is his first about baseball. Facebook Email This article is more than 10 years old.
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