Charlie Price's "Dead Investigation"

Charlie Price lives in northern California. He is an executive coach for business leaders and has also worked with at-risk teens in schools, hospitals, and communities. His novels include Desert Angel and The Interrogation of Gabriel James, winner of the Edgar Award.

Here Price dreamcasts an adaptation of his latest novel, Dead Investigation:

Years ago I had a chance work with a parapsychologist in NYC who entertained and educated me with marvelous and incredible stories: a ghost that walks knee-deep in a Scottish castle, a clairvoyant woman able to help a family find a missing father, teenage girls who were so energetically upset that objects would fly off the warehouse shelves where they worked. (Poltergeist phenomena.) Later, a teenaged girl my daughter’s age was kidnapped in my community and I lay awake at night wanting to find her and bring her home. In the end, I needed a clairvoyant character like Murray to help me.

Making my book into a film I’d like Murray (the alienated boy who takes refuge in a cemetery and talks to the dead) to be played by Robert Sheehan. He knocked my spats off as the young lead with Tourette’s syndrome in The Road Within. In that particularly demanding role, Sheehan demonstrated an affinity for soulfully portraying “special” people. And I think I’d like to team him up with Chloë Grace Moritz, the tough, scrappy, never-give-up girl in Kick Ass. Ms. Moritz has the good comic timing and an impish quality that matches Pearl, the cemetery caretaker’s daughter. Her strong-willed intelligence makes for interesting but conflictual flirting! Either Destin Cretton of Short Term 12 or Glen Wells from The Road Within have demonstrated the nuanced capacity to accurately portray troubled teenagers and I think either would keep the movie real and not bend it into some hokey ghost mystery.

Visit Charlie Price's website.

--Marshal Zeringue