John Grisham's personal account of his trek toward becoming the world's most popular writer of fiction enthralled an audience packed in the School of Education auditorium for the Law School's fall Matthews Lecture in Law.

Grisham told the audience that the name of the lecture, "Abusing the Law for Fun and Profit," was "sort of a joke."

"I picked that last week under pressure because the nice lady needed to print a brochure," he teased.

With over 110 million books in print in 34 languages, the best-selling author good-naturedly bared his soul to the more than 450 listeners, including several of his former law professors.

Soon after enrolling in the Ole Miss Law School in 1979 to become a tax attorney, he said he was "jolted" to reality. "I realized that that dense and chaotic world (tax law) was the last place I wanted to spend my career," he said.

Not to be dismayed, however, Grisham said he found he enjoyed moot court and ultimately decided during law school he would become "a courtroom lawyer."

Already mystified with court room proceedings, he began spending more time watching local trials - sometimes cutting his law classes due to his intense interest in certain cases.

"My literary career was born in a courtroom," he said. "I was inspired to imagine and to create courtroom drama. You write about what you know, and when you watch lawyers and study legal issues, as I do, the material is endless - it's endless."

Actually, the plot for Grisham's first book A Time to Kill, is somewhat autobiographical, said the writer. It chronicles some of his experiences during the 10 years he practiced law in his hometown of Southaven.

Winding down his 11th book, and "dreaming about" No. 12, Grisham said each book generates a lot of mail. "Some of it's nice, some of it's nasty. All of it is read by a secretary and very little by me, except for the letters from lawyers. A lot of lawyers write, and those penetrate the barriers and eventually end up on my desk, and they make for fascinating reading.

"About half of the lawyers who write chastise me for abusing the law for profit. They deplore the negative portrayal of lawyers in my books. The fact is most lawyers are honest, hardworking people who don't make a lot of money. Nobody wants to read about those lawyers - the title lawyer or the school board lawyer. I could probably get it published but I couldn't give them away.

"It's more fun to read about the strange lawyers and the weird lawyers. And when you aspire to write popular commercial fiction you have to necessarily portray lawyers oftentimes in bad ways."

The other half of the lawyers who write "say nice things," he said. "They're glad I'm exploring the issues. The lawyers love the issues books - The Chamber, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury."

A common thread in all of his letters from lawyers, Grisham said, is they ask, "`What do you really think about lawyers, the legal profession?'"

"I am happy that I no longer practice law," he said. "After five or six years...I was thinking about doing something else.

"So I don't miss what I used to do. This is not to suggest that I dislike the profession, because I do like it. I'm still a lawyer. My license to practice is still current in Mississippi...I am still proud to be a lawyer. I now hire a lot of lawyers."

"We were taught in law school here that the law was and still is an honorable calling. We were taught that lawyers are supposed to use their sense of justice and fair play to protect people, to protect the rights of individuals, and I think that is still true. Despite all of the excesses in the profession, they're more important today than they were 20 years ago."

Explaining why he thinks this to be true, Grisham said, "Our society has gone wildly capitalistic. Money is being made faster than ever before, and it's often the lawyers who do the checks and balances. It's the legal system that has to ensure that folks are protected."

The speaker cited four examples that, he said, were "taken from the headlines in the past 11 days," including the tobacco case brought against Philip Morris, State Farm's nationwide scam to use defective replacement parts in auto claims, the ongoing law suit against American Home Products for the health hazards of the diet cocktail Fen- Phen and the recent alleged unfair consumer practices by HMOs.

"This is what I do for fun," he said. "I watch trends in litigation. I'm always looking for a setting for a book, one with an issue, and I realize that lawyers are much more important now because there's less regulation. There's more money changing hands, and fewer people are watching.

"One of the fun things in writing fiction," he continued, "is that you can get back at people. The books I enjoy writing are the ones in which I have real good bad guys. And when I tell these stories, I often use lawyers who are less than perfect; I often use lawyers from both sides of the street, who have flaws, and I use their bad behavior often to illustrate the point of how dangerous it is if the law is abused, and the abuse runs unchecked. And that's part of the challenge that you have as future lawyers, and all of us lawyers - to make sure that we understand how important it is to protect the law.

"For example, if the law is changed by the rich and the powerful, and the big corporations, then access to courtrooms is going to be severely limited, and juries are going to be limited in what they can do. And many innocent victims will have no recourse, and individual liberties will be curtailed. If that happens, the law shifts, the balance of power shifts, and the law becomes weaker. "

On the other hand, if the excesses of our litigious society are not curtailed, then the law can be abused by a very small handful of lawyers, who are doing nothing but seeking personal gain.

"That is the challenge that we all have in the very near future - you as future lawyers, and myself as still a lawyer," he concluded.