John Grisham's Biloxi — The Boys from Biloxi

John Grisham owns a beachfront home on Amelia Island in Florida, but the Mississippi Gulf Coast claims two of his novels. *The Runaway Jury*, published in 1996, follows a tobacco trial inside a Biloxi courtroom. *The Boys from Biloxi*, published in 2022, traces the Dixie Mafia through gambling dens and contract killings. Both novels use real Biloxi geography — the courthouses, the strip, the harbor. Grisham practiced criminal law for about a decade and served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990. In 1984, he heard a twelve-year-old girl tell a jury what had happened to her — about having been raped and beaten. He later wrote that he remembered staring at the defendant and wishing he had a gun. Over the next three years, he wrote *A Time to Kill*. The case was not his own. The Mississippi Gulf Coast that surfaces in Grisham's fiction is the one the casinos replaced: seafood factories, bootleggers, corruption allowed at certain resorts when gambling was still illegal. The coast gained prominence in the early 1900s as a gambling and tourist destination. Gaming became legal in Harrison and Hancock counties during the early 1990s, bringing Vegas-style casino hotels and condo towers. The courthouses still stand. The poker rooms are gone. *The Runaway Jury* was adapted into a film, one of seven Grisham novels to reach the screen.