A few months back Stephen Cannell, prolific writer and TV producer passed away. Way back when, he created the show "The Rockford Files" which , of course, followed the adventures of Jim Rockford a less than heroic hero, played memorably by the great James Garner.
Cannell created dozens of shows, wrote hundreds of scripts and most recently had turned to novels. The current TV show "Castle" , which I didn't care for at first, but has since grown on me, features the character of Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) a successful mystery writer who helps out the NYPD. On a few of the early episodes there were some scenes that took place at a poker game. A weekly game played by some very successful mystery writers, Castle and playing themselves Cannell and James Patterson and.....someone else I don't remember. It was a neat little bit of business, lotsa fun.
The week that Cannell died , at the very end of the show they played the little "Tag" that appeared at the end of his shows , just a few seconds long, He's sitting at his typewriter and pulls out another finished page of script and tosses it in the air. A very thoughtful tip of the hat.
In an interview once Cannell said that he wasn't an artist, that he was a craftsman. He sat down everyday and wrote, didn't wait for inspiration or to be visited by his muse , he just wrote. If he was a carpenter he would have been making a picnic table but he was a writer so he sat down and wrote stories.
One of my favorite "craftsman" died a year or so back, Donald Westlake. There might have been a more prolific writer, but I can't think of who that might be- Westlake made Stephen King look like JD Salinger.
Fiction. non fiction, short stories, film scripts (he won an Oscar for "The Grifters"), and most impressively to me, he wrote not one, but two of the greatest mystery series of all time. The "Dortmunder" books, which followed a group of career criminals, journey men, or craftsmen, if you please, as they pull off a heist. In each book the original crime is somehow bungled and leads to a series of escalating crimes to finally resolve the first. A number of films have been made from this series, but none of them capture the hangdog tone of everyday criminals like the books. John Dortmunder has been played by everyone from Robert Redford to Martin Lawrence, quite a stretch.
Hmmmm this leads me, unexpectedly to the thought of who I would cast. I'll think about it.
He also wrote, under the name, Richard Stark, The "Parker" series, a whole different style of character. The Dortmunder books are wryly comic seemingly written with a shrug of the shoulders, While the Parker books are lean and mean and nasty. Both look at crimes committed by lifelong criminals but exist in two different worlds.
There have been a few Parker films as well, more successfully. Lee Marvin and Mel Gibson have both had a crack at Parker and did a convincing job bringing that nasty bastid to life.
Good stories , good storytelling, filled with details, you read them and think "I could pull a heist". you get so much info. The Parker books in particular are filled with realistic feeling details about how a crime is planned and committed.
I get a kick out of the Dortmunder books and a few of his comic novels because some of the action takes place on Long Island, he seems to have particular affection for Bay Shore and the Fire Island beaches.
In the past few weeks I've read his final two books (well until someone opens a drawer somewhere and finds 10 more) The final Dortmunder book; GET REAL, which pits Dortmunder and his crew against a reality TV show. Great fun , but bittersweet knowing that the old gang won't be meeting again.
And his final book, a stand alone novel called , MEMORY. this is published as an original paperback by, the publisher Hard Case Crime, a wonderful "label" which releases new and vintage "noir" style fiction every month. Oh dear god in heaven, this book is a masterpiece, i said it, you heard me. It has a simple premise; a man gets into a fight , gets hurt, and loses his memory, I can hear you shaking your head from hear, "Amnesia? Please!" This ain't your run of the mill amnesia story.
I will just tempt you with this, with barely any clues , Paul, has to try to put his life back together. A glimmer of hope! He was an actor, maybe he can go back to New York and get work, but what kind of role can an actor with no memory play. Day by day, page by page, the defeats and the dread pile on- I can't remember another book where I had such a physical reaction as I was reading it, It was horrifying (in a fascinating way) and I found it impossible to get ahead of the story, I had NO idea where this thing was going. And that's very entertaining.
Read Westlake, you can thank me later. And by all means track down MEMORY, for that one you might not thank me.
oh! who could play Dortmunder? Has to be a good strong character actor who seems to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, he's not flashy or overly assertive , but he is without question, the leader. The kind of guy that people under estimate, at some point in every story some one makes the mistake of thinking that they can take advantage of Dortmunder. Beware.
Here's an idea, Ricky Jay, about ten years younger than he is now. Don't know Ricky? Ask your ol' pal Google.
ps no producer would greenlight a movie with Ricky Jay as the lead, but I can dream can't I?
No comments:
Post a Comment