Author Robert Crais, a former TV writer for the series Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey and Miami Vice, is adamant that he'll quite possibly "never" option his Elvis Cole novels to Hollywood. Crais told the Associated Press, "I stopped counting at 50 offers....I'm very protective of those characters." He went on to add, "As much as I love television and movies, books are special. My concern is if I allow a film to be made of those guys, that somehow those will have an adverse impact on the collaboration I have with my readers, that somehow Elvis and Joe will be changed in their eyes. I don't know if that's real or not, but so far I've been saying no to all the offers coming my way."
Richard Stark (a/k/a Donald Westlake), on the other hand, is allowing Darwyn Cooke to adapt the first four "Parker" books as a series of graphic novels for publisher IDW. The first title, according to Cooke, is targeted for a late 2009 release, with the successive three titles coming out in two year-intervals after that.
In other melange-y news, Chris Grabenstein, creator of the John Ceepak/Danny Boyle series, was recently featured in the Shelf Awareness "Book Brahmins" corner. When posed the question "What book have you faked reading," he replied, "About half the Oprah books. Anything on that book club table. They just look important. The stuff about geishas and cedar trees and how it affected relationships between overweight twins who used to be in the circus with elephants but were also hermaphrodites in their spare time."
Florida mystery author C.S. Challinor will be donating 15 percent of her royalties from the upcoming book Christmas is Murder to Soldiers' Angels for use in supporting the war wounded who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And a University Daily Kansan article asked, "Why aren’t people afraid of reading books about murder?" The author writes, "Author Agatha Christie recently lured me into the genre, and after devouring her I moved on to others without pause. It took about 120 murders or so before I realized how I was entertaining myself. I was whiling away time with death."
Comments