Craig McDonald's "One True Sentence"

Craig McDonald is the Edgar®/Anthony nominated author of Head Games, Toros & Torsos, and Print the Legend.

Here he shares some ideas for cast, director, and music composer for an adaptation of his latest Hector Lassiter novel, One True Sentence:

There will come a time when George Lucas will deliver on his alleged promise (threat?) to cast movies using digitally resurrected, long dead actors. When that moment arrives, it would finally be feasible to cast the movie I see in my head when I think about One True Sentence, the fourth Hector Lassiter historical literary thriller — one peopled by pop culture titans who have left indelible images of themselves in readers’ heads.

The novel is set in 1924 Paris, but the characters who cross my pages left myriad photos — and even some grainy film footage — of themselves to posterity. We all know how Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and other City of Lights luminaries looked back then.

My series character, crime novelist and screenwriter Hector Lassiter, has always been personified by the actor William Holden for me. In fact, in several books, his resemblance to Holden is remarked on (in a still-to-be-published Lassiter novel, a key plot point revolves around a seventy-something Lassiter actually posing as Holden). So, in that George Lucas virtual world, Lassiter would be played by a young Holden. His love interest, the darkly enticing mystery writer, Brinke Devlin, would be portrayed by the silent-screen siren who largely inspired her, Louise Brooks.

But, for now (and to the possible chagrin of Mr. Lucas), we have to content ourselves to casting living actors. That being the case, for Texas-born Hector Lassiter I envision Texas-born actor Jensen Ackles, who has come into his own as the charming, charismatic and very gray character Dean Winchester on the cult-favorite television series Supernatural. Hector, too, is a charming, capable guy who can stray into some very dark behavior yet remain winning. It’s a tough tightrope to walk, but Ackles can do it with aplomb.

For Hector’s sidekick, a still largely unknown Ernest Hemingway, I envision actor Timothy Olyphant. He’s got a the bearing, the attitude and intensity to bring off the young Hemingway, a man whom even those who despised him in the 1920s agreed had the kind of rare charisma that robbed rooms of oxygen when he entered them.

Hector’s first great love, Brinke Devlin is a bit trickier to pin down. As Louise Brooks is no longer available, I lean toward another actress who was nearly as often in my mind’s-eye as I wrote the novel, fellow Columbus, Ohio native Alana De La Garza, probably best known for her work on Law & Order. Brinke, a smalltown Ohio girl who is a couple of years older than Hector, worldlier and a longtime expatriate amidst the capitals of Europe, requires the kind of American yet exotic presence Ms. De La Garza embodies.

In a prior piece for this site regarding my third Lassiter novel, Print the Legend, I mentioned my love for the films of Alan Rudolph, particularly his movies Trouble in Mind and The Moderns. The latter is set in 1925 Paris and features many of the same historical figures who appear in One True Sentence. The Moderns left a profound mark on me as a moviegoer and certainly affected my own sense of 1920s Paris. (I even crept a few mentions of characters from The Moderns into Lassiter #2, the surrealist-art focused thriller Toros & Torsos).

If I was in the position to “Zanuck” this sucker, I’d have Alan Rudolph directing — pushing these gifted actors through the labyrinthine dark of the One True Sentence plot, all of it set against a soundtrack composed by Mark Isham.

Learn more about the author and his work at Craig McDonald's website and blog.

Read "The Story Behind the Story: One True Sentence, by Craig McDonald" at The Rap Sheet.

The Page 69 Test: One True Sentence.

Writers Read: Craig McDonald.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig McDonald's "Print the Legend"

Craig McDonald's debut novel Head Games, was selected as a 2008 Edgar nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author. It is followed by Toros & Torsos and the newly released Print the Legend.

Here he explains which actors--and director--might be best suited to bring his characters to life on the big screen:

Like many novelists, I’ve had my intoxicating near-brushes with film adaptation.

Based solely on its description in a Publishers Lunch announcement, my debut novel, Head Games, attracted quite a bit of film interest. My own secret choice to play my continuing character Hector Lassiter in that novel, bizarrely enough, asked my publisher for a look at the novel. My vision of Hector Lassiter almost came to me.

Like most novelists who get Hollywood nibbles, my chance to have my first-choice actor portray my ongoing character didn’t bite firmly enough to be reeled in.

Print the Legend, my third novel, again features crime novelist Hector Lassiter, who is popularly known as the “man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.”

Print the Legend explores the death of Ernest Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho, in the summer of 1961, and raises questions regarding the possibility that Hem’s death was something other than an act of suicide. The novel also explores J. Edgar Hoover’s crazed and too-often destructive surveillance of key American writers, including not just Hemingway, but Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and Dorothy Parker, among many others.

Hector Lassiter has centered two previous novels, both of which dropped Hector on to famous film sets: Head Games found Hector visiting the set of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Toros & Torsos placed Hector on the set of The Lady From Shanghai. Because my novels tend to spread over decades and to dart in and out of time, they present certain challenges in casting. In Toros & Toros, we variously encounter 35-, 37-, 47-, 59- and 61-year-old Hector.

Print the Legend, on the other hand, is set largely in the mid-to-late 1960s. Hector’s age ranges from 65 to 72 through this novel. I’ve long established that Hector bears a strong resemblance to actor William Holden; Hector has a kind of Old Hollywood panache. As Holden is no longer available, my own choice to portray the Hector of Print the Legend would probably be Harrison Ford…a man of the right vintage, but still a physically imposing and vital masculine presence.

Print the Legend positions Hector between two formidable female foils. One is aspiring young fiction writer Hannah Paulson, an unhappily married, Scottish immigrant who is also nine-months pregnant. The other is Papa’s widow: the profane, alcoholic, sharp and salty tongued Mary Hemingway. Print the Legend might be the one of my novels that could actually present a potential acting role for Meryl Streep: she has the look, and the talent, to evoke all of the bombastic, alcoholic, larger-than-life, infuriating — and ultimately tragic — facets of Papa’s last wife.

Hannah is probably the most-challenging role to cast. She retains her Scottish accent; she is blond, pretty and has some very dark undertones. The woman I keep finding my mind returning to is the British actress Sophia Myles.

For the role of Donovan Creedy, rogue and racist FBI agent/paperback thriller writer — Hector’s bête noire and a character inspired by Watergate Plumber E. Howard Hunt — I favor John Hurt.

Head Games I have always have envisioned as a Robert Rodriguez-directed film (Sam Peckinpah being, well, very dead). Toros & Torsos I’ve privately imagined as a Guillermo del Toro film.

Print the Legend I’d love to see interpreted by director Alan Rudolph, whose film The Moderns partly inspired Toros & Torsos and whose blurring of art and reality informs all of the my novels published to-date, but none perhaps so strongly as Print the Legend.

Odds of any of this happening?

Damned near zero.

But as Hemingway wrote at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Read more about Print the Legend, and learn more about the author and his work at Craig McDonald's website, blog, and Crimespace page.

Read "The Story Behind the Story: Print the Legend, by Craig McDonald," at The Rap Sheet.

The Page 69 Test: Toros & Torsos.

The Page 69 Test: Head Games.

The Page 69 Test: Print the Legend.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig McDonald's "El Gavilan"

Edgar®-nominee Craig McDonald is an award-winning journalist, editor and fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in literary magazines, anthologies and several online crime fiction sites.

Here he writes about the actors he could see playing his characters in an adaptation of El Gavilan, his new novel:

El Gavilan is my first standalone novel following four entries in the Hector Lassiter series.

The Lassiter books are historical thrillers. El Gavilan is a novel about illegal immigration and a single murder committed in an Ohio town grappling with waves of undocumented workers.

The time is now.

The setting is, by-and-large, a re-imagined version of my hometown: Call it Main Street USA spilling over into an adjacent metro area-become-a-barrio.

The book—and any movie that might one day be made from it—is a kind of mash-up of a western and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. It’s an oater with Dodge Rams and vintage Impalas set to a soundtrack of sad border ballads and narcocorridos.

The novel tracks the investigations and conflicts of three very different brands of lawmen and the small town reporter who covers their efforts in the local weekly newspaper. Moving between the cops and the journalist—binding them in some ways—is a pretty young “legal” named Patricia whose family owns and operates the town’s favorite Mexican restaurant.

Here’s my dream cast:

I favor actor Timothy Olyphant of Deadwood and Justified fame to play the book’s “hero” Tell Lyon, an ex-Border Patrol agent whose family was murdered by a vengeful cartel chief.

In the part of Tell’s uneasy ally Able Hawk—the county sheriff whose nickname supplies the book’s title—I envision Jeff Bridges.

Rounding out the cast of key cops, I imagine a bark-knuckled and paunchy Russell Crowe as neighboring county sheriff Walt Pierce, a man given to escalating rather than diffusing tensions.

The plot of El Gavilan is fired by the murder of a widowed Latina mother named Thalia Ruiz. Thalia is not a mystery novel or potboiler’s throw-away crime victim: We get to know Thalia over the expanse of the novel, and we witness her family’s harrowing migration from southern Mexico across “The Devil’s Highway” and onto into the United States, and, eventually, to central Ohio.

In a perfect world, Thalia would be played by Salma Hayek. Her parents, Sofia and Francisco Gómez, would be played by the equally iconic Elizabeth Peña and Antonio Banderas. Those three famous actors would be tasked with embodying the deadly passage made—successfully and unsuccessfully—by generations of unknowable thousands of illegal immigrants.

My heavily compromised small town reporter Shawn O’Hara, the character whose story arc is arguably fiercest, would be personified by Chris Pine.

Patricia Maldonado, the young woman who is at points caught in a kind of crossfire between Tell, Able, Walt, Shawn and her larger Latino community—legal and illegal—is a pivotal and a harder piece of casting for me to settle on in my mind. One hour has me preferring one actress, the next another. That said, the actress I seem to return to most often when musing over this issue is Jessica Alba, so we’ll go that direction here.

That’s the cast, more or less, that populates the dusty, sun-drenched movie that runs in my head as I dip back into the book from time to time for a public reading or to prep for an interview.

Roll the credits…to the tune of Tom Russell warbling “Across the Borderline.”

Learn more about the author and his work at Craig McDonald's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue