GRISHAM'S LAW

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John Grisham has shown a rare gift for creating suspense. But there's no suspense anymore about what happens when a new Grisham novel hits the bookstores. His latest, The Rainmaker (Doubleday; $25.95), has just made its debut at No. 1 on the best-seller list; its first printing of 2.8 million copies set an all-time record. When Hollywood offered a mere $6 million for the movie rights, the author temporarily withdrew his book from the market. After all, he got the same amount for his last movie sale, A Time to Kill, and the only direction Grisham can see is up. Each of his first three best sellers doubled the sales of the previous one. Total sales of his six novels to date: 55 million copies. Worldwide box-office take for the three movies (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client) made from his books: $572 million.

Writing even a single best seller is one of the few ways a person can generate riches solely by his own efforts, and Grisham is enjoying it to the fullest. At 40, he has little patience for the rites of celebrity. He gives few interviews and signs books mostly at stores that helped him out when he was driving copies of his first book around the South. He has even moved away, temporarily, from the dream house he built on a 70-acre spread in Oxford, Mississippi, because too many tourists were coming down from Memphis after buying a tour package that included Elvis' Graceland and Grisham's farm. He now hides away in an exclusive country preserve near Charlottesville, Virginia.

It's a wonderful life, almost too good to be true. Grisham is rich and handsome (the only novelist on PEOPLE magazine's list of the 50 most beautiful people this year), with a happy family (a wife and two kids), a religious faith (Southern Baptist) and the vast and varied world of entertainment at his feet. Too good, it seems, not to attract some criticism. Like most widely popular novelists, he has been pummeled by reviewers -- for paper characters, bad dialogue (not true; he writes realistic talk), disappointing endings. Ray Sawhill, in Modern Review, says Grisham's books "aren't Middle America as seen and expressed by an artist; they're Middle America entertaining itself. A Grisham novel is cousin to those catalogs you find in the seat pockets of airplanes."

There are rumbles too from the author's former Shangri-La. A rancid attack by Atlanta-based free-lancer Ed Hinton in January's GQ charged that Grisham is sullying the sacred ground where Faulkner once trod: "In a long line of Mississippi writers, Grisham is a singular aberration and paradox, the worst and the richest, the least distinguished and the most popular." The article outraged most locals, who point out that Grisham helped pay to repair the Faulkner estate and rescued a new literary periodical, the Oxford American. Says novelist Barry Hannah, who has a formidable reputation but not Grisham's millions: "I guess in America if a guy gets some fame and celebrity, he can't seem to do anything right."

Grisham's fame and fortune are based on the law. The son of an itinerant construction worker, he graduated from the University of Mississippi law school and practiced criminal law for nine years in Southaven, outside Memphis. The experience gave him his particular take on an age-old formula: little guy triumphs over big guy. Or over the feds, the Klan, the Mafia, the cia, the fbi-or, in The Rainmaker, the insurance industry.