Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch may not be the only crime fiction character making it to the big screen.
James Lee Burke's (left) New Orleans mystery novels featuring Dave Robicheaux have been optioned by Hutch Parker, a Fox producer who is packaging a series for cable TV, reports Deadline.com.
Robicheaux has made it to the screen twice before.
Alec Baldwin did a credible job in Heaven’s Prisoners (1996).
I only saw snippets of Tommy Lee Jones as Robicheaux in the 2009 film In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (2009); I was not impressed.
Parker seems to be on a roll with mystery fiction. He is working on a project to bring Don Winslow's early novel California Fire and Life to the screen.
Brad Pitt and George V. Higgins
If the trailers for Killing Them Softly, the upcoming Brad Pitt vehicle look familiar, then you must be a fan of George V. Higgins.
Killing Them Softly is based on Higgins’ novel Cogan's Trade.
Killing Them Softly, written and directed by Andrew Dominik, features Pitt,left, as a hit man. It is set to open October 19.
Higgins’ novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a personal favorite, also was filmed in 1973 with Robert Mitchum.
Stieg Larsson and his heavily tattooed Lisbeth opened the floodgates for unusual women characters and an insider's view of Europe. Larsson showed the real Sweden, making us feel as if we had actually walked those neighborhoods and visited the countryside.
But Larsson wasn't the first to make a splash with a contrary, asocial heroine or show us a part of a country even the well-traveled tourist may not have seen.
That would be Danish writer Peter Hoeg and his Smilla's Sense of Snow.
It seems hard to believe that Hoeg's story about his complicated, unlikable heroine celebrates its 20th anniversary.
Published in 1992, Smilla's Sense of Snow was named best book of the year by Time, People and Entertainment Weekly magazines and won the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger Award. The 1997 movie starred Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, Robert Loggia and Richard Harris.
Smilla's Sense of Snow was one of those books that has stuck with me. I hadn't quite seen such an unusual heroine or been taken to such exotic lands before Hoeg's novel.
The woman with the sense of snow is Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a glaciologist living in Copenhagen. For her, the snow and ice are more important than the sun.
The daughter of a wealthy Danish doctor and his first wife, an Inuit hunter, Smilla is a stranger to all. She is uncomforable living among the Danes. She also doesn't fit into the Inuit community due to her dependence on her father's generous checks and her fondness for stylish clothes.
Depressed and alone, Smilla's only friend is her 6-year-old Inuit neighbor, Isaiah, who is neglected by his alcoholic widowed mother.
When Isaiah is found dead, face down in the snow with his footprints on the roof of a neighboring warehouse, Smilla's "sense of snow" kicks in. The snow patterns show, to Smilla, that Isaiah was not alone. But neither the police nor Isaiah's mother seem to care.
Like Lisbeth, Smilla often is discounted by others. "My weapons have always been the small details that no one knows about. My identity, my intentions," Smilla states.
Smilla's investigation of Isaiah's short life leads to his dead father, a thwarted expedition of a Danish mining corporation, and an uninhabited island near Greenland.
In the review I wrote for the Sun-Sentinel, parts of which I have quoted above, I said that Smilla's Sense of Snow "dramatically explores alienation, the loss of identity, cultural diversity, exploitation of the environment, science and the intricacies of love."
More excellent crime fiction is coming out of Europe and I highly recommend The Absent One by Jussi Adler-Olsen (Danish); Midwinter Blood by Mons Kallentoft (Sweden); Frozen Moment by Camilla Ceder (Sweden).
But let's also remember what started it all and Smilla's Sense of Snow.
Is Philip Marlowe’s comeback really a good thing for crime fiction?
I tend to think not.
This past week it was announced that Raymond Chandler’s creation, who is one of the world’s most identifiable private eyes, will return in a novel to be written by John Banville; publication date is slated for 2013 by Henry Holt. (Chandler is at left.)
The novel will be published under the name of Benjamin Black, the psydenum that Banville uses when he is writing a mystery. The Chandler reboot will be set in the 1940s in Marlowe’s fictional town of Bay City, Calif.
My first question was, “Why?” And that also was my second, third and fourth question.
Chandler left us seven solid novels that looked at society and the ills that men do through the eyes of Philip Marlowe. These are iconic novels that never go out of style and are still read by crime fiction fans.
Those books are: The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye and Playback, his final novel published in 1958, the year before Chandler’s death. I have read each of them several times and each time I have found something new I hadn’t noticed before.
Chandler’s prose was lovely, crisp, to the point and his characters believable.
Snippets from Chandler’s novels continue to inspire us, amuse us and entertain us:
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”
“To say goodbye is to die a little.”
“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”
In his essay The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler gave us a wonderful template for the detective novel.
“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid….
"He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.”
That template has been read, studied and, thankfully, completely ignored by future generations of writers. I say thankfully ignored because the crime novel has gone places that Chandler could never have imagined with even richer stories, more in-depth characters and a view of contemporary society.
I doubt Chandler ever envisioned the rise of the female detective and how women would change the face of crime fiction for the better. I doubt he ever envisioned detectives who are African Americans, Asian, gay or even from other countries. The authors who write about these detectives and amateur sleuths have made the genre so much richer by their contributions.
We have all we need of Chandler’s work, and done by the master himself.
Trying to recreate Chandler’s novels has been done before and not that successfully. In 1989, Robert B. Parker was asked by the estate of Raymond Chandler to complete Poodle Springs, a novel that Chandler had started the first four chapters but was unfinished when he died.
Poodle Springs is not a favorite of mine by any stretch. Parker, who admired Chandler, should have been able to deliver a seamless Poodle Springs but the novel never gelled.
Conversely, Ace Atkins, at left, has been able to pick up Parker’s Spenser with ease and grace, as witnessed in the novel Lullaby.
Perhaps Atkins’ Lullaby worked because Parker’s death in 2010 was so sudden and Parker’s novels were so fresh work in our minds.
This generation of readers hasn’t been without a Parker novel since 1973 when The Godwulf Manuscript was published.
More likely, Lullaby worked because Atkins is a skilled writer who was up to the challenge of continuing Parker’s novels.
I make no predictions whether Banville/Black is up to the challenge. Yes, I know he is a Booker Prize-winning author but his mysteries written as Benjamin Black really are not in the style of Chandler, whose estate has authorized the new Marlowe novel. As Black, the author’s latest novel is the newly released Vengeance, from Holt.
Besides, we already have enough mystery writers who are turning out excellent crime fiction.
Let’s let the master’s work stand on its own.
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