Jim Fraiser

Jim Fraiser

A lawyer, actor, teacher, editor, and now best-selling author, Jim Fraiser is a relative newcomer to Mississippi’s literary scene, but his first novel, Shadow Seed, published in July 1997, has received solid reviews and sold out in hardcover after only two months on store shelves. The novel, which will be released in paperback in spring 1998, is southern fiction set in present-day Jackson, Mississippi, and the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century and is described as a “hair-raising psychological thriller, and a provocative study of the moral ambiguity in the modern day legal system and the society it seeks to protect.”

John James Fraiser III was born in New Orleans on October 27, 1954, the son of Chief Judge John Fraiser, Jr, of Greenwood, Mississippi, and Adelyn Gerald Stokes. He grew up in Greenwood, graduating from Greenwood High School in 1972. He went on to receive a B.A. in English and history at the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1976 and a law degree from Ole Miss three years later.

After serving as an assistant district attorney in Hinds County from 1980 to 1982, he went into private practice until 1995, when he became a special assistant attorney general in the Civil Litigation Division, a position he still holds today.

Even as he maintained his “day” jobs, however, Fraiser worked at his other interests, which include acting, writing, and teaching. From 1981 to 1991 he performed professionally with Jackson’s New Stage Theater. Several unpublished plays which he wrote have been performed, including adaptations of Walker Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins (1989) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Arises (1990), and the original plays Cosmos by Copernicus (1991) and The Judas Principle (1992). A member of the Screen Actors Guild since 1988, he had film roles in Good Ole Boy (1988), Mississippi Burning (1989), and Blind Vengeance (1992).

From 1988 to 1990, he was the philosophy columnist for Down South Magazine, which published his short story “The Plutonian Chronicles” in 1989. Between 1990 and 1993, he served as a paralegal instructor at the University of Mississippi and the Mississippi University for Women. He has written freelance articles for Greenwood Commonwealth, the Daily Mississippian, The Clarion Ledger, North Mississippi Business Journal, Down South Magazine, National Women Lawyers Journal, Mississippi Lawyer Magazine and The American Bar Journal. Today, he is a contributing editor for the Jackson Business Journal and a contributing writer for the Northside Sun.

His first book was the humorous M is for Mississippi: An Irreverent Guide to the Magnolia State (1991). Shadow Seed is his first novel, and while its subject matter and the profession of its author may bear some superficial resemblance to another, more famous Mississippi lawyer-turned-author, the reviews for the novel have been positive. A reviewer for the Delta Democrat Times wrote that its “layered story ... will both appeal to readers’ appetites for commercial thrillers and leave them thinking about the moral decay that plagues modern America.” Mississippi writer Charles Wilson says that Shadow Seed is “reminiscent of Cape Fear, but more chilling for its gritty realism. A great read!” Other reviewers have been equally enthusiastic.

Fraiser lives in Jackson with his wife and two daughters.