In novels like Back Bay, City of Dreams, The Lost Constitution, The Lincoln Letter, and Bound for Gold, he has told stories of the great and the anonymous of American history, and he’s taken readers
from the deck of the Mayflower to 9/11. His work has earned him many accolades and honors, including the 2005 New England Book Award, the 2015 Samuel Eliot Morison Award, and the 2019 Robert B. Parker Award.
Here Martin dreamcasts an adaptation of his new novel, December ’41:
I started in Los Angeles as a struggling screenwriter. I wrote three spec scripts and a play before I turned to novels. And only once did I imagine modern actors in any of them, in a screenplay that would eventually become my eleventh novel, Bound for Gold. I imagined Robert Redford and Jack Nicholson as the staid Bostonian and the rebellious Irishman who partner in the Gold Rush and James Stewart as the old miner who befriends them. Considering that Redford and Nicholson were mega-stars in 1976 and Stewart was a legend, my hopes were a little unrealistic.Visit William Martin's website.
But the truth is that anyone starting out as a screenwriter or novelist must operate with hopes that are unrealistic. It's the only way to keep going, and if you're lucky enough and relentless enough, you might keep going for 40-plus years, as I have through twelve novels.
And for the first time, I've written a novel that I 'cast' even as I was writing it. However, I didn't imagine modern actors. I cast December '41 with actors who've all gone to that big studio in the sky, because a novel set in the 1940s should have 1940s stars, especially since the novel itself uses the tropes and motifs of a '40s movie, right down to the black-and-white book jacket.
On the day after Pearl Harbor, a German assassin evades an FBI dragnet and begins preparations for a trip. He's going to Washington to shoot Franklin Roosevelt on Christmas Eve, as the president lights the National Christmas Tree. A failed actress travels with him, playing his faithful wife and - unbeknownst to her - covering for him. A disappointed Hollywood screenwriter crosses paths with him and comes under suspicion himself. A dogged FBI agent pursues him. Meanwhile, a wisecracking female private detective teams up with the FBI agent.
So who did I imagine in the roles? Well, since the book opens in Los Angeles, where everyone uses the movies as reference points, I'm not the only one who imagines these characters as movie actors in the book. A lot of the other characters do, too.
The German assassin, Martin Browning, should have a strong presence but a slight and unthreatening appearance. Some of his Nazi friends call him "Ash" because they think he looks like the actor who plays Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. Before long, the FBI is looking for a guy who resembles Leslie Howard. So call Leslie Howard's agent.
The failed actress, Vivian Hopewell, has been told that she looks like a young Marlene Dietrich. So that's easy, even though one of the characters tells her that she reminds him more of Jean Arthur.
The screenwriter, Kevin Cusack, is the guy who does "coverage" on the source material for Casablanca, which arrives at Warner Brothers on December 8. He's a Boston guy gone to Hollywood. Like the city he comes from, he has a cultured surface, but he's good with his fists. At one point he says that people think he looks like Tyrone Power. I think so, too, especially since he's the protagonist.
Frank Carter, the dogged FBI agent needs to be someone who has a heroic look and a relentless drive but isn't above manipulating his friends. Think of Fred MacMurray. No, not the Absent-Minded Professor... the much darker MacMurray who played the role of Howard Neff in Double Indemnity.
The female detective, named Stella Madden, must be an actress who can play the tough-girl role, the gun moll who's both sidekick and love interest. Ida Lupino, fresh off her role as Bogie's girl in High Sierra, is my choice.
I filled out the rest of the cast, too: Dorothy Malone as the screenwriter's girlfriend: she played a bookstore proprietor with lust on her mind in The Big Sleep. Sidney Greenstreet as a jolly but dangerous German who runs an LA shop. Judith Anderson and Walter Slezak as a husband-and-wife murder team who help Martin Browning. Scatman Crothers, starting his career a few years early, as a Pullman Porter who plays an important part.
And of course, in a novel set in old Hollywood, there are cameos by Hollywood stars. We meet Humphrey Bogart and his wife, Mayo Methot, who are having an argument in famed Hollywood watering hole, Musso & Frank's. They weren't called the "Battling Bogarts" for nothing. John Wayne makes an appearance at Musso's later. He's having a post-coital lunch with the real Marlene Dietrich (Yes, they were an item.) We also meet producers Jack L. Warner and Hal Wallis, directors John Huston and Raoul Walsh.
OF course, the director who is the most important influence on the book isn't in it. But we feel him in the dark streets of LA, in cross-country train sequences, and in the suspense-filled final act, set around the national monuments of Washignton DC: Alfred Hitchcock. He's the Master of Suspense and I've been learning from him since before I went to Hollywood and started writing.
Q&A with William Martin.
--Marshal Zeringue
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