And the Edgar Goes To...

You've probably read by now that Dennis Lehane is the winner of the 2013 Edgar Award for his novel Live by Night. It is the second of Lehane's historical crime novels (the first being The Given Day, which has a few of the same characters) and is set in the Prohibition era. The novel chronicles the (mis)adventures of Joe Coughlin, the outlaw son of a police officer. Lehane moves from his traditional Boston setting to Tampa, Florida, for most of the novel's exploits.

Lehane's novels have consistently been favored by Hollywood film-makers: Mystic River, Gone, Baby, Gone, and Shutter Island have all been made into movies. So it's not surprising that when Live by Night was released, it precipitated a bidding war for film rights. (Lehane sardonically commented that Hollywood started the bidding before it even read the book.) The film is currently in pre-production and is being directed by Ben Affleck, who also directed the film version of Gone, Baby, Gone starring his brother Casey. Both Ben Affleck and Leonardo DiCaprio, who was the lead actor in Shutter Island, are producers of the current project. Incidentally, Lehane is also writing the screenplay for a movie based on John D. MacDonald's novel The Deep Blue Goodbye, and starring DiCaprio as Travis McGee.

For a novel that earned its author his first Edgar Award in 18 years of writing, Live by Night has received mixed reviews. If you're interested, see the NPR review at http://www.npr.org/2012/10/02/161874829/details-weigh-down-the-drama-in-live-by-night and the New York Times review at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/books/review/dennis-lehanes-live-by-night-and-more.html.

But if you're a fan of Lehane's clipped dialogue and noir themes, you can judge for yourself.

One Shot at Jack Reacher

I think I'm as willing as the next person to willfully suspend disbelief when it comes to literature and the arts, but  I've decided to draw my line in the sand with the casting of Tom Cruise as Lee Childs' protagonist, Jack Reacher.

I like Tom Cruise and bear him no malice. After all, he was the unabashed hero of Top Gun, a movie I still like to watch, and it's hard to picture anyone else with that swagger and great s**t-eating grin.  But fans of Lee Childs' novels know that Reacher is a larger-than-life character who is 6'6” * (not to mention a blond) while Cruise at 5'7” is shorter than his previous two wives (Nicole Kidman is 5'10” and Katie Holmes is 5'9”).

So, being fond of research, I decided to have some fun and see what I could come up with through the wonders of the Internet.  Here's what I found out.  Many of the old-time leading men, adventurers, and dare-doers were well within Reacher's height.  These include John Wayne (6'4.5”), Rock Hudson (6'4'), James Stewart (6'3.5”), Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck (6'3”), Errol Flynn (6'2”),  and Cary Grant and Burt Lancaster (6'1”), just to name a few.  The closest contenders today would be Nicholas Cage, Christian Bale, and Leonardo DiCaprio, all at 6 feet.  (I should hasten to add that none of these actors would probably have been good casting for Jack Reacher.)  Brad Pitt and George Clooney are both 5'11”, while Robert Downey Jr. is 5'9”.

By the way, my own personal favorite for the role of Jack Reacher would have been Jim Caviezel (6'2”), who plays Reese on the CBS television series Person of Interest.

The first Jack Reacher movie, based on One Shot, has grossed $150 million thus far.  For a sequel to be considered, it would probably need to gross at least $250 million (according to industry insiders). Meanwhile, Cruise has bought the rights to all seventeen Jack Reacher novels (groan).  So we'll have to wait and see if Cruise will spin a franchise out of it.

* For those, unlike me, who prefer metric measurements, 6 feet equals 1.8288 meters.