Grisham’s Camino Island Looks and Sounds Like Amelia

By Anne H. Oman
Reporter-at-Large
June 23, 2017 10:00 a.m.

The chief villain of the piece, a slick and super-smooth operator named Bruce Cable, moves to a Florida beach on “a ten-mile long barrier strip just north of Jacksonville.” The road along the beach is “lined with a mix of old and new rentals, budget motels, fine new homes, condos, and an occasional bed-and- breakfast” and “every eighth of a mile there was a small parking lot and boardwalk for public beach access.” And to the south were the big hotels, including the Ritz “sitting beside high-rise condos and the more exclusive residential enclaves.” Dog walkers, shell seekers and Turtle Watch volunteers comb the beach. There’s “a small airport for chartered jets.” The historic main island town features grand Victorian homes “built by turn-of-the-century railroad magnates and shippers and doctors and politicians” and “streets shaded with ancient oaks and Spanish moss.” There’s a Saturday farmers’ market, a Cuban deli, a fudge and ice cream emporium, a popular coffee shop, a café with a shaded courtyard, a harborside restaurant, and the oldest bar is called “the Pirate’s Saloon.”

Does all this sound familiar? Welcome to Camino Island, John Grisham’s latest automatic bestseller, and a thinly disguised Amelia Island.

So why the fake name?

That and other questions emailed to Mr. Grisham through his publisher drew only an automated, form-letter type response. But in a review of the book in The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote that “Grisham and his wife, Renee, dreamed up the idea for “Camino Island” on a drive from their home outside Charlottesville, Va., to their beach house in Florida. Its working title was the name of the place where they have a vacation home, but he eventually changed it for reasons of privacy. Its cover still looks just like the view from the Grisham’s boardwalk to the beach.”

Once he tires of “sleeping, drinking beer, strolling in the surf, staring at the Atlantic for hours and reading War and Peace”, the Cable character buys a book store in a hundred year old building “on the corner of Third and Main Street.” Like The Book Loft at 214 Centre Street, Cable’s Bay Books features comfortable chairs, cozy nooks, and author signings, but there are very real differences, according to Book Loft owner Sue Nelson. First of all, there’s no basement – where the fictional owner stores rare books and stolen manuscripts.

“I’d have to dig one, “said Ms. Nelson. “Nobody has a basement in Florida.”

She added that Floridians would know better than to store rare books or manuscripts in such a place. She said she has read the novel, which is selling briskly at the Book Loft, and doesn’t mind that the owner of the shop that resembles hers is a criminal.

“I think people know that I’m not,” she said.

Tired of sleeping above the store, the fictional book store owner buys the Marchbanks House “built in 1890 by a doctor as a gift to his pretty new wife.” The house “sprawled over four levels with a soaring tower on the south side and a turret on the north and a sweeping veranda,” plus “a variety of gables, fish-scale shingles, and bay windows, many of which were adorned with stained glass.”

Sounds a bit like the Fairbanks House at 227 S. 7th Street, built in 1885 by George Rainsford Fairbanks, who was a lawyer and newspaper publisher rather than a physician, as a surprise for his wife – a gift that was reportedly not well received. According to the National Register of Historic Places Inventory, the house is “the best example of the Italianate style in Fernandina” and “features a complex plan with a dominant tower, a loggia, a balcony, and a bay window on the second story,” It does not, however, have the “round tower room” where the caddish Cable sleeps with any willing female visiting author. The round cupola, plus the location of the house, “two blocks north and three blocks east” of the book shop, place it on N. 6th Street, Fernandina’s Gold Coast.

To furnish his newly acquired pile, the bookman hooks up – literally – with a dealer in French antiques who is so smitten with his reptilian charm that she opens a French antique shop adjacent to the bookstore. (This location is crucial to the denouement, for reasons we are duty-bound not to divulge. . And for the record, French Market Antiques was located at 203 Centre Street, across from, not next door to, the Book Loft. The antique shop is no longer operating.).

Far be it from the Fernandina Observer to reveal too many details of the convoluted plot, but it involves some hand-written F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts stolen from the Firestone Library at Princeton University that somehow end up in the basement of Cable’s bookstore. When the thieves who actually did the dirty deed come to the island to retrieve their booty, they hole up at a beachside motel and walk “a hundred yards to the Surf, a popular outdoor bar and grill” for sandwiches and beer.

The Surf’s Marketing and Events Manager, who did not want her name used, said she didn’t know whether the novelist had ever come to the Surf. But she thought the mention of her watering hole was “awesome and exciting” and added: “I’m going to go get the book.”

Will the book help or hurt Amelia Island tourism? Asked that question, Gil Langley, President and CEO of the Amelia Island Convention and Visitors Bureau, confessed that he hadn’t read the book but had “heard people talking about it.”

“John Grisham is a pretty famous author, and a lot of people read his books,” he added. “If they make the connection between Fernandina Beach and whatever he calls it in the book, it could bring people here.”

Editor’s Note: Anne H. Oman relocated to Fernandina Beach from Washington, D.C. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Star, The Washington Times, Family Circle and other publications.