I understand that V.I. Warshowski was based on a successful series, but didn’t hit it off.
I understand that Lawrence Block’s novels were very popular, but they changed way too much when they made Burglar a vehicle for Whoopi Goldberg, and it flopped:
Of course, my all-time favorite of the non-successes is Robert H. Von Gulik’s Judge Dee series. There was a six-episode British Tv version that I’d love to see.
Nicholas Meyer made a made-for-TV movie Judge dee and the Haunted Monastery that is very good, and with an all-oriental cast (except, curiously, Dee himself, who’s played by African ancestored Khigh Deigh)
There were rumors that Paul Verhoeven was going to make a theatrical Judge Dee movie but, if so, it never materialized. His next was Starship Troopers. (I’ve often wondered, by the way, if the strip Judge Dredd might not have been influenced by Judge Dee, right down to the name.)
Not all the Hercule Poirit movies were gems. I haven’t seen it, but The Alphabet Murders plays it for laughs, instead of doing it straight. Some people seem to like it, but Poirot purists hate it:
By the way, the Meyer movie of Judge Dee was to have been a pilot for a series. The execs didn’t buy it, unfortunately – maybe they were put off by the idea of a weekly costume drama. They retooled the idea as a modern detective, still played by Khigh Dheigh and called it Khan!*
It flopped. Khigh Deigh, interestingly, took no credit.
*The series came out in 1975. If they’d come out with it only seven years later the theme song could’ve been William Shatner shouting, from Star Trek II. They even had the exclamation point in the title!
Thayer David made the best Nero Wolfe of all, but had the bad luck to die before the movie aired.
The oddest omission I can imagine is the case of John Dickson Carr. He was one the half dozen top mystery writers of the 1930s, with two major series, one with Dr. Gideon Fell under his own name, and one with Sir Henry Merrivale under the name of Carter Dickson. Both series ran over 20 books. He was an American who wrote in England, so he was equally popular in both countries. In addition, he wrote literally hundreds of radio mysteries during the war years when he had to return to the U.S. from England, so he was of the few mystery writers who could have handled their own screenplays.
Yet there has never been a single movie, TV or theatrical, in the US or the UK or any other country, about either character in the 75 years since their debut. It’s baffling.
I seem to recall two Travis McGee attempts — one absolutely awful, the other pretty good with good casting and role-appropriate acting and pretty close to the original plot… perhaps The Empty Copper Sea, maybe?
Anyway, one thing I’d like to see is a serious drama-styled adaptation of the original Nancy Drew series, perhaps filmed in black and white and set in 1930 or thereabouts. Not a kids’ movie but a movie for adults who read the things back when we were kids. The Horner sisters on their farm, the deserted boathouse out on the lake, the snooty Topham family, inside the old furniture van, etc.
They’re both nominally “judges”, but both live in a society unlike our own where the Judge must often go out and help detect a crime, or even confront the criminal himself (at least Dee is portrayed as doing so sometimes). Not to mention act as prosecutor as well.
I may have overstated it, I have been flawed in the thread time and again it seems (Shute instead of Upfield for the Bony character, really!) but a key plot point of von Gulik’s story always seemed to be tied up with some sort of sexuality; a concubine doing this or that, a prostitute servicing a client, some woman bathing at a pivotal time or the like (which now that I write them, don’t really sound like huge “sex parts”). It could have been the naked lady art that the author always included.
Just in passing, I understand that the author of the Kinsey Milhone series (A is for …) absolutely adament about not letting a movie or TV series be made about her character because of the treatment of some of her contempraries’s characters.
Another detective they have unsuccessfully tried a number of times is Rabbi Small (it is “Small” isn’t it? My batting average is pretty bad today). I have seen two or three versions and none of them really work.
On the other hand Ellery Queen has work a number of times. As has the Saint although modern versions goes more spy than detective/criminal. Well, I think that happened with Mr. Moto, too.
Yep. A 1983 TV movie; they moved Travis to California for some reason, and the “Busted Flush” was turned into a sailboat, but other than that it wasn’t bad.
I hadn’t noticed that TVtime mentioned Dee before me – I duspute that it “didn’t work” – it certaibnly got me hooked on van Gulik’s novels, and I thought it extreely well done. van Gulik was a collector of Chinese erotic art, and published a book of it (try and find it, though!)He generally included at least one erotic picture in T’ang style in the book. Invariably that picture ended up being on the cover of the paperback – even if they had to alter it.
As for the “sex stuff”, much of it was background material, or the reasons people did what they did. As such, it was well-represented in the Meyer TV movie (watch it again, if you can. I have a VHS dubbed from TV. To my knowledge, it’s never been commercially released in any format)
Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen could make a transition to the silver screen.
Quirky detective, lots of opportunity to show Italian countryside, lots of opportunity to show lots of hot Italian women (or men I guess) , random gory scenes to shock (man tied down over burning gas hot plate springs to mind, surprised Mr Tarantino hasn’t picked up on that yet) and some good plots to keep the mind on the go.
I’m sorry, but you’re quite clearly grasping at straws here, Meacham. Pettifogging details aside, did Judge Dee ever:
a) ride a huge motorbike?
or
b) shoot a perp in the face?
I think you’ll find that he did not.
Exapno, you’re quite right about the Prince Buster connection, and what’s more, I knew that myself – I simply got diverted by childhood memories of listening to “Big Six” in my Dad’s car, when he thought I didn’t know how dirty the lyrics were.
Somehow Sam Elliott is not my idea of Travis McGee. Then again I have a tough time thinking of an actor who would have fit the role.
Two detective tandems who I don’t mind not having seen in successful feature films: Spenser/Hawk and Elvis Cole/Joe Pike.
Spenser had the mediocre TV show and besides, the novels have gone on way too long. Cole and Pike are copycat characters though some of the Crais books have been at least mildly entertaining.
I’ll have to check out “The League of Frightened Men” if it ever makes it onto AMC. Funny thing: Rex Stout and Agatha Cristie had writing careers roughly spanning the same period. Stout was still churning out Nero Wolfe novels at least well into the '60s. So how come there have been relatively recent Poirot movies and nothing featuring Wolfe since the '30s?
No – “grasping at straws” is what you do when you haven’t got an argument and you try for whatever you can get, however flimsy. These are the thoughts that actually prompted me to ask the question. Knowing that the Judge dee series had run on TV in Britain prior to the Judge Dredd series, which featured a police-like character utterly unlike any sort of Judge I’d known except Judge dee, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the germ that started the idea of Judge Dredd. If this was the case, the creators of Dredd didn’t keep much except the hands-on approach.
