Noir of the Week nimmt sich diese Woche „Vertigo – Aus dem Reich der Toten“ von Alfred Hitchcock (Drehbuch: Alec Coppel, Samuel Taylor, nach dem gleichnamigen Roman von Pierre Boileau und Thomas Narcejac) in zwei Teilen vor.
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Die Juni-Ausgabe von The Big Thrill, dem Magazin der International Thriller Writers (ITW) ist online. Unter anderem mit Hinweisen auf die neuen Werke von James Patterson/Howard Roughan, Clive Cussler, Raymond Benson, Meg Gardiner, Heather Graham, Phillip Margolin und Mike Lawson (dessen Debüt demnächst auf Deutsch erscheint) und längeren Artikeln über Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, Jon Land und Kathy Reichs.
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Die Juni-Ausgabe der Krimi-Couch ist ebenfalls online. Dieses Mal werden unter anderen die neuen Werke von Ross Thomas, David Ellis, Ilkka Remes, Friedrich Ani (der zweite Seher-Roman), Egon Eis, Matti Rönkä, Patricia Cornwell, Donn Cortez (ein CSI-Miami-Roman) und Cornelia Read besprochen.
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Alan Furst redet mit der LA Times (Scott Timberg) über seinen neuen Roman „The Spies of Warsaw“. Er spielt wieder in den Dreißigern.
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F. Paul Wilson (zuletzt „Das Höllenwrack„) hat in den USA einen neuen Roman mit Repairman Jack (aka Handyman Jack) veröffentlicht. Allerdings widmet er sich jetzt der Jugend (oder der Zeit als Repairman Jack noch nicht Repairman Jack war) und es ist für eine jüngere Leserschaft. „Jack: Secret Histories“ heißt das Werk und F. Paul Wilson schreibt dazu:
It’s 1983. The Atari 5200 is the hot videogame console and Star Wars Death Star Battle is the hot game; the Apple ][+ with a whole 48K of RAM is state of the art in home computing; everyone’s twisting a Rubik’s cube.
And a fourteen-year-old boy is beginning to explore the talents that will lead him to become a man known as Repairman Jack.
Never saw myself writing for kids, especially since I already have a fair number of teen readers, mostly sixteen and up. But a motley array of forces converged to goose me into writing a novel geared toward the under-fifteen crowd – a so-called Young-Adult novel.
I say “so-called” because the writing process wasn’t much different from my adult work and the style is virtually identical. I’ve striven over the years for a clean, lean style, tailored to the pace of the thrillers I write. Now, to my delight, I find it fits a younger audience equally well. At least that’s what a focus group showed: Kids who often took up to a month to finish a book were polishing off Jack: Secret Histories over a weekend and looking for more.
But what surprised me most was how much fun I had. I delighted in peeking into Jack’s past and populating it with people who would play parts in his later life, or arranging cameos of characters from other novels. The books practically wrote themselves. I’d agreed to write three and I had drafts of the second and third done before the first’s pub date. Like taking dictation.
Best of all was looking at the world again through fourteen-year-old eyes. I remember my own last summer before high school as a turning point in my life, so that was where I chose to begin Jack’s story. Since I’d already established his birth year as 1969, I pretty much had to set the story in 1983. Not a bad year – lots of new technology, disco was dead, and MTV was on the rise.
As luck would have it, I’d already placed Jack’s hometown in Burlington County, which juts into the mysterious and fabled Jersey Pine Barrens. Perfect. It all came together in a glorious crash. I could work all sorts of magic in a million acres of wilderness with places no human eyes have ever seen, where strange lights jump from tree to tree and the Jersey Devil supposedly roams. I peopled his town with weird characters and places – like an old woman (with a dog) who’s supposedly a witch, and the town drunk who’s rumored to be able to heal with a touch but always wears gloves, and USED, the store that sells old…stuff.
From his start many years ago in The Tomb, I made of point of giving the adult Jack an Everyman background. He’s not an ex Navy SEAL or former CIA black-ops agent, just a guy from New Jersey who dropped off the radar and taught himself a few tricks. But he has an innate knack for manipulating people and situations to his advantage. (Of course, if that doesn’t work, he has his trusty Glock.) Here was a chance to show him discovering his talents.
As I said: Like taking dictation.
If comments on repairmanjack.com are any indication, adult Repairman Jack fans are lined up, waiting to dive in. As for the rest of you, no matter what your age, if you enjoy reading Jack: Secret Histories half as much as I enjoyed writing it, you’re in for a treat.
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Noch nicht genug? Hm, wie wäre es mit einigen Drehbüchern von pdfScreenplays aus der Abteilung „Exclusives!“:
Billy Wilder/I. A. L. Diamond: The Apartment (Undated Draft)
Dan Akroyd/John Landis: The Blues Brothers (Unspecified Draft)
Ernest Tidyman/William Friedkin: The French Connection (Revised Draft, 26. April 1971)
H. Seitz: Insomnia (Unspecified Draft, 2. Mai 2000)
Fritz Lang/Thea von Harbou: M (Undated, unspecified Draft – ist auf Englisch)
Andrew Kevin Walker: Se7en (Production Draft, 8. August 1994)
Graham Greene: The third man (Undated, unspecified Draft)
Kriminalakte 