Yours truly tripped the lights fantastic and briefly stumbled into the bright glare of showbiz yesterday morning, courtesy of TV3, which is due kudos for its coverage of Irish crime writing, which has pretty decent for quite a while now, but which has cranked up a considerable few notches ever since Ireland AM announced it was sponsoring the inaugural Irish crime fiction gong at the Irish Book Awards. Shortlisted author Brian McGilloway (yep, it’s Brian McGilloway week on CAP) was interviewed last week, when he revealed that BLEED A RIVER DEEP was titled for an Ed Harcourt song, while another shortlistee, Tana French (right, and shortlisted for THE LIKENESS), got a grilling on Tuesday, although I can’t pretend to know what she actually said, being too distracted at how radiant the lady was looking. Thursday morning’s interview lowered the tone a little, as The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman and The Artist Forthwith To Be Known as Some Dodgy Chancer gave it large about crime fiction and the movies, and the best book-to-movie adaptations of all time. My split vote goes to THE GODFATHER, a masterpiece derived from (if memory serves) a not particularly brilliant novel, and DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? / BLADE RUNNER, which is a novel of uneven pleasures, but a terrific sci-fi neo-noir movie, and genre-bending at its best.
Clickety-click here for Brian McGilloway …
… here for Tana French …
… and here for Bateman and S.D. Chancer. Roll it there, Collette …
DADES is a good novel. Not his best but good. A lot more philosophically complex than the film.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to hear yet another Irish crime writer talking about the inspiration he found in American crime writing. Interesting, too, your comment about the stripped-down dialogue in The Maltese Falcon. I went to a panel in New York last year about the book -- a strong panel, with people like Megan Abbott and Charles Ardai on it. Someone asked something like what the biggest difficulty a movie like the Bogart/Huston The Maltese Falcon would have today, and the answer was that no one today would be able to get away with such spare dialogue, with leaving so much unsaid.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
You're not wrong about THE GODFATHER - it's a pretty awful book. But I can't be the only one who thinks ANDROIDS is a better book than BR is a movie. As Adrian says, it's certainly more philosophically complex than the film, and I actually found it to have a lot more humanity, too. But then, I'm a complete PKD fanboy.
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