No wonder John Grisham got excited when he found Ronald Williamson’s obituary in the pages of The New York Times. Here was a real person whose life read like one of Grisham’s best-selling legal thrillers: falsely accused of murder in the South, he was railroaded onto death row, only to be dramatically exonerated. Better yet, for the baseball-obsessed Grisham, Williamson had played in the minor leagues.

Within hours of seeing the obituary, Grisham resolved to write a nonfiction book — his first — about the Williamson case. “Not in my most creative moment,” he explains, “could I conjure up a story as rich and as layered.”

I think he’s selling himself short. Grisham isn’t the sort of writer whom Swedish foundations give big awards to, but he is a major talent. (If you think it’s easy writing wildly popular courtroom dramas, then you try it.) In “The Innocent Man,” however, he has shackled himself to facts that are less intriguing than he imagines, and he fails to use his creative gifts to help matters along.

Ron Williamson was raised in tiny Ada, Okla. Drafted by the Oakland A’s in 1971, he was stymied by injuries and returned home to a life of drugs, drink and escalating mental illness. Then things got worse. Williamson and a pal named Dennis Fritz were arrested and in 1988 tried separately for the brutal 1982 killing of a local cocktail waitress, Debbie Sue Carter.

In Grisham’s account both men are obviously innocent, but the legal system is so dimwitted and rigged against them that conviction is inevitable. Fritz received a sentence of life in prison; Williamson, death. More than a decade in Oklahoma’s medieval prisons followed — Williamson came within days of lethal injection — before they were freed by heroic lawyers using DNA evidence.

This is an interesting and important tale, and also a familiar one. The first inmate was freed by DNA evidence some 17 years ago, and similar cases have been well covered since. There’s even a shortish account of Williamson’s ordeal in “Actual Innocence” (2000), written by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld — who represented Fritz and assisted Williamson’s lawyer during their DNA appeal — along with Jim Dwyer (then of The Daily News, now of The Times).

No wonder John Grisham got excited when he found Ronald Williamson’s obituary in the pages of The New York Times. Here was a real person whose life read like one of Grisham’s best-selling legal thrillers: falsely accused of murder in the South, he was railroaded onto death row, only to be dramatically exonerated. Better yet, for the baseball-obsessed Grisham, Williamson had played in the minor leagues.

Within hours of seeing the obituary, Grisham resolved to write a nonfiction book — his first — about the Williamson case. “Not in my most creative moment,” he explains, “could I conjure up a story as rich and as layered.”

I think he’s selling himself short. Grisham isn’t the sort of writer whom Swedish foundations give big awards to, but he is a major talent. (If you think it’s easy writing wildly popular courtroom dramas, then you try it.) In “The Innocent Man,” however, he has shackled himself to facts that are less intriguing than he imagines, and he fails to use his creative gifts to help matters along.

Ron Williamson was raised in tiny Ada, Okla. Drafted by the Oakland A’s in 1971, he was stymied by injuries and returned home to a life of drugs, drink and escalating mental illness. Then things got worse. Williamson and a pal named Dennis Fritz were arrested and in 1988 tried separately for the brutal 1982 killing of a local cocktail waitress, Debbie Sue Carter.

In Grisham’s account both men are obviously innocent, but the legal system is so dimwitted and rigged against them that conviction is inevitable. Fritz received a sentence of life in prison; Williamson, death. More than a decade in Oklahoma’s medieval prisons followed — Williamson came within days of lethal injection — before they were freed by heroic lawyers using DNA evidence.

This is an interesting and important tale, and also a familiar one. The first inmate was freed by DNA evidence some 17 years ago, and similar cases have been well covered since. There’s even a shortish account of Williamson’s ordeal in “Actual Innocence” (2000), written by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld — who represented Fritz and assisted Williamson’s lawyer during their DNA appeal — along with Jim Dwyer (then of The Daily News, now of The Times).