A crime novel written from Shane Black's film of the same name, set in the Los Angeles of the nineteen-seventies. It is a comedy as much as it is a crime story — the film pairs a bruiser and a private investigator in a city where neither of them is especially competent and nobody is especially honest — and the novel follows that material rather than departing from it.
Charles Ardai is a natural choice for the job. He founded and edits Hard Case Crime, the imprint built around pulp-styled crime fiction in the manner of the mid-century paperback originals: hard prose, fast plotting, painted covers. He writes crime fiction himself, so the novelisation comes from someone who works inside the form rather than from a hired hand writing to a screenplay. The result reads in that older paperback register, which suits a film already steeped in it.
Novelisations occupy an odd corner of publishing, and the appeal here is specific. If you know the film, this is the same story told in prose, with the room a novel gives for interior voice and description that the screen handles in a glance. If you don't, it stands as a Los Angeles crime story in its own right. Either way it belongs on the shelf next to the Hard Case Crime titles Ardai has spent his career putting back into print, and readers who collect that imprint tend to want his own writing alongside it.
Published by Titan Books, in English. Titan publishes widely in film, television and genre fiction, and its list includes a good deal of tie-in work of this kind alongside original crime and science fiction.
It suits readers of hardboiled and neo-noir fiction, followers of Shane Black's work, and anyone who enjoys the seedier end of period Los Angeles crime writing. It also travels well as a paperback for a flight or a long afternoon — short, brisk, funny, and violent in the way the genre expects.
Ordered from Sri Lanka through Lakpura, it is one of the international titles carried alongside our Sri Lankan list, for readers building a general crime fiction shelf rather than a regional one.
- Author: Charles Ardai
- Publisher: Titan Books
- Published: 2016
- Language: English
- Pages: 238
- ISBN: 1785652583
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