Andrew Klavan's "Werewolf Cop"

Award winning author, screenwriter and media commentator Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas. Klavan has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice.

Here Klavan dreamcasts an adaptation of his new novel, Werewolf Cop:

I put so much effort into not thinking about my novels as movies that it always takes me aback when someone asks me to cast them. Here’s the problem. Americans love the movies — less now than maybe a generation ago, but Americans still think of movies as the be-all and end-all of storytelling. When someone really likes one of my novels, almost the first thing he’ll say is, “This would make a great movie!” As if the book weren’t enough. And when my novels actually have been made into films, people have congratulated me as if now, at last, my story had reached fruition.

Me, I’m a novel guy. I’d much rather read a great novel than see a great film. So I actually feel when I’ve written a good book, I’ve done something pretty special. If someone makes it into a movie, swell. If not, not.

All the same, the attention — and money — that come along with a film are so huge that the temptation to write novels with an eye toward the screen can be pretty powerful at times. And it’s a mistake. I’ve written movies and I’ve written novels and the structures are very different. If you write a novel too cinematically you’re actually short-changing your reader. You’re leaving out the inner observations, the digressions, the depth of understanding that only a novel can really supply. All of which is to say, the question of who should “star” in my novel never occurs to me while I’m writing. And if it did occur to me, I would suppress it!

But of course now that you ask — and since the actual writing of Werewolf Cop is done — let me see... Timothy Olyphant would do an excellent job as the cursed Texas lawman Zach Adams. He plays a somewhat similar role on the TV show Justified, one of my favorite crime shows ever. Christoph Waltz could do nice work as the evil uber-gangster Dominic Abend, and would make a change from the usual British villain. Either Mark or Donnie Wahlberg would make a good Broadway Joe Goulart, the NYPD Detective who may or may not have gone bad. Mireille Enos always gets cast as the wifely wife — but then she’s really good at it, and Grace Adams, Zach’s wife, is just about the wifliest wife ever: a Proverbs 31 woman, as Zach calls her, after the passage in the Bible describing the perfect woman. Which means the femme fatale in his life, Margo, has to be irresistible. How about Alexandra Daddario: she’s the lady who did that nude scene in HBO’s True Detective that made many men who watched it spontaneously combust. That’s the sort of thing the part needs, though she’d also have a couple of great acting scenes.

So that’s my cast. But I’ll be plenty happy if Werewolf Cop is just read and appreciated as the novel it is.

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--Marshal Zeringue