Curriculum Vitae

Personal Details
Harry Hole is in his late thirties. Born in Oppsal, Oslo, he is unmarried, with one great passion and several smaller ones behind him. No children, but on occasion a kind of father to Oleg, Rakel’s son. Lives in Sofies gate in Bislet, Oslo.

Appearance
Tall, athletic, lean. Blonde hair, machine-cropped. Stands up one centimetre from large, bumpy skull. Skin white, nose large, with a network of thin veins. Pupils are blue with that faded look long-term alcoholics get. Harry’s mouth is his best feature and what women tend to fall for.

Career
Graduated from Police College and Law School, grades marginally above average. Special investigator for Crime Squad in Oslo. One-year course with FBI in Chicago, specialising in serial killers. Short stint with Politiets Overvakningstjeneste—POT/ Norwegian Secret Service—before returning to the Crime Squad.

References
Bjarne Moller, Head of Crime Squad and Harry Hole’s superior officer, describes Harry as the best investigator in the department and the worst public servant. By which he means Harry’s anti-authority, anti-sobriety, anti-rules-of-the-game attitude which makes him a danger to himself and those around him. Does his utmost to protect himself and his department. And Harry. Moller is Harry’s guardian angel, all that stands between him and dismissal.

Stig Aune, psychologist and police advisor. Has treated Harry for alcoholism and become a personal friend. The only one, except for Oystein.

Oystein Eikeland, taxi-driver and Harry’s sole childhood friend from Oppsal. Thinks Harry ought to have a more liberal attitude to amphetamines.

Rakel, the woman he loves. Single mother. She and Harry try to live with and without each other; neither works.

Sis, his younger sister. The person Harry loves most after Rakel. Down’s syndrome. Feels like a big sister.

Jim Beam, contains 4O% alcohol, a loyal friend since Harry’s early twenties.

Interests
Music: likes everything from Sex Pistols to Duke Ellington. From Neil Young to Slipknot.

Film: His all-time favorite is The Conversation by Coppola. One of very few who consider Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers a masterpiece and Mel Gibson’s Braveheart complete rubbish.

Substance abuse: Alcoholism runs in the family. Started drinking heavily in his late teens, has tried most types of drugs. Views all drugs as anesthetics. Dry and sober most of the time, but with a furious and constant urge.

Sports: Cycling and pumping iron occasionally, cause he likes the purifying feeling pain gives him.

Ambitions and future plans
Ambition: To understand what evil is. And what love is.

Future plans: The near future looks dismal. After that it gets darker. And then it all goes to hell.

Curriculum Vitae provided courtesy of the author. Visit his official website at jonesbo.com.

Writers have many different reasons for taking on another author’s characters. Some do it out of devotion to the original text, others do it out of an urge to revise a familiar story. Murder mystery maven P. D. James has done a bit of both in Death Comes to Pemberley, an inventive sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in which Darcy and Elizabeth’s happy marriage is interrupted by a brutal murder. James skillfully re-creates the world of Austen’s novel and sets within it a riveting detective story that Simon Brett of the Sunday Express called “as good as anything P. D. James has written and that is very high praise indeed.” The appeal for the reader is clear—who wouldn’t want to see one master take on another?—but what of the author? Writing in the Telegraph, James herself noted that “the greatest writing pleasure for me is in the creation of original characters, I have never been tempted to take over another writer’s people or world.” Still, as a lifelong Austen fan, she found she could not resist the urge. “Austen’s characters take such a hold on our imagination,” she says, “that the wish to know more of them is irresistible.”

Certainly, James is not the first to extend the lives of another author’s characters in an homage to their creator. Joe Gores’s Spade & Archer is a prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. The book—a mystery, of course—maps the origin of the partnership between Sam Spade and Miles Archer, notoriously bumped off in the early pages of The Maltese Falcon. An ardent Hammett fan, Gores told Stanford Magazine that the choice to write a prequel was primarily inspired by questions he had about The Maltese Falcon’s mysterious lead: “Spade says several times in Falcon, ‘This is my town. You maybe could have operated here if you hadn’t run across me but now you have to deal with me.’ And I thought, ‘Why is this his town?’” His words echo James’s wish to “know more” of Austen’s characters. By placing these familiar characters in new settings, James and Gores are able to both honor the original source material as well as provide the reader with a cracking new story.

Other authors choose to tell a well-known story from a new perspective, as Karen Essex did in Dracula in Love, a version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula told from Mina Harker’s point of view. “I want to state outright: I revere Bram Stoker,” she says in an essay for the Reading Group Center. But Essex indicates that she was less interested in writing a new story for these characters as much as she was in adding dimension the original. “My ambition for Dracula in Love…was to turn the original story inside out and expose its underbelly or its ‘subconscious mind,’” she writes. “I wanted to give Mina and Lucy rich, full lives, as well as plausible inner lives.” Essex is able to tease out a wholly original novel, in the same way Valerie Martin does in Mary Reilly, a retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “Not everything in my book is in [Stevenson’s], nor is any of his in mine,” said Martin in an interview with The New York Times. While both Dracula in Love and Mary Reilly were written in response to another work, each one stands alone as a discrete novel.

Each of these books provides new context for a classic, giving the reader an opportunity to re-examine his or her perception of the original work. In Death Comes to Pemberley, P. D. James has reworked the genre as well as the story. Uniting a murder mystery with Austen’s world, James creates a marriage as happy as that of Elizabeth and Darcy and proves once again her mastery of the written word. As Emma Lee-Potter of the Daily Express notes, “In another writer’s hands a plot that plunges Elizabeth and Darcy into the midst of a murder investigation could have been disastrous. James, with her writing skills and lifelong passion for Jane Austen’s work, takes the challenge in her stride. . . . She adds that if Austen had written this book she would have done it better. I’m not so sure.”

Those interested in conducting an independent investigation need only to read James’s book alongside Pride and Prejudice. Does James do Austen justice? Does Austen’s world support James’s deft plotting? Tell us in the comments!

A veteran television writer—she wrote for Cagney & Lacey, among others—April Smith penned the screenplay for the movie. We recently sat down with April to discuss the relationship between her screenwriting career and her career as a mystery novelist. Watch exclusive video from our conversation, plus get a sneak peek at Good Morning, Killer.

The Trailer For Good Morning, Killer:

April Smith on How Screenwriting Affects Her Books:

Read April’s behind-the-scenes look at Ana Grey’s journey to the screen, and find out more about the author at aprilsmith.net.

—White Shotgun
by April Smith

—California Fire and Life
by Don Winslow

Good Morning, Killer airs on TNT’s Mystery Movie Night on Tuesday, December 13 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

ANA GREY IS BORN

At two in the morning on a rainy night in an industrial park on the outskirts of Vancouver, B.C., a door blows open. Blinding light falls across the floor as silhouettes of an FBI SWAT team move swiftly. Flash-bangs explode. Special Agent Ana Grey appears through the smoke, gripping her weapon, shouting, “Ray! Freeze!” and the sexual predator who has assaulted seven women is surrounded, handcuffed, and led away.

“That’s a wrap, ladies and gentleman,” calls the assistant director. “See you seven a.m. Monday,” and the race is on to stow equipment and make a last stab at the Chinese food buffet that was brought in at midnight for the exhausted crew. We’ve just shot the slam-bang ending to the TNT television movie adaptation of Good Morning, Killer—but, ironically, you’ll find more action on the written page. In the novel, while Ana Grey is trapped in the den of the psychopath, helicopters circle, a crowd gathers, three law enforcement agencies conspire inside a high-tech mobile command center, and when SWAT attacks, the bad guy’s door is dramatically “ripped off its hinges by a cable strung between the doorknob and the winch of a truck lurching backward.” You won’t see any of that on the screen. This is because of budget constraints—something I became aware of early on as writer and executive producer during the making of the film for TNT’s Mystery Movie franchise.

You need to be of agile mind and small ego to write and produce your own material. You can’t dictate, only hope to effectively guide the process to creative satisfaction, as the imaginative world of the novel shrinks to fit real-life practicalities, and the writer’s vision is interpreted by craft professionals—wardrobe, set design, hair and makeup, props—whose job it is to create a world that will give actors the proper tools with which to bring their characters to life. What’s on Ana Grey’s desk? What bed linens would she choose? Everything the camera sees must be built, from the FBI war room to the complex video playback of the crime timeline, and when you have four weeks of prep for a shooting schedule of eighteen days (feature films prep for months and commonly shoot for fifty days), everything needs to be efficient, from creative conversations to the carpenters’ plans.

In overseeing these choices, I was impressed and grateful for how deeply everyone had read the script – and in some cases, even the book! Yes, it’s fun as writer/producer to pick out wardrobe and approve the make of the bad guy’s car, but as an author, at some point that moment must come when an actor is hired, and your fictional protagonist takes on all the imperfections of flesh and blood. Looking back on the long and careful gestation of your main character — your altered self — you are terrified that the process of book-to-film will turn her into an unrecognizable commercial entity, from which you must avert your eyes or suffer for all eternity.

FBI Special Agent Ana Grey first appeared in North of Montana in 1994. At the time, the idea of a half-Hispanic, half-Caucasian female FBI agent as the mainstay of a thriller was threatening. Although the manuscript sold to Alfred A. Knopf at auction in twenty-four hours, and the novel received rave reviews and national publicity, I was advised by well-meaning supporters that if I wanted my books to sell to film, I should create another mystery series featuring a male protagonist. Few actresses are powerful enough to “open” a movie (i.e., get financing and provide a built-in audience), and worse, according to Hollywood savants, the character of Ana Grey was simply not castable because there were not enough skilled, big-name Hispanic actresses to fill the role. At the time it was unthinkably un-PC to cast an ethnic person of the wrong persuasion to play another ethnicity. This never made sense to me (now we have females playing King Lear), but so it remained for eighteen years.

Ana Grey was born because the plot demanded it. I did not set out to make a statement about race and gender in the United States. I was working with a story about a specific neighborhood north of Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, where parallel cultures exist between wealthy white women and the Hispanic nannies who care for their children. I was interested in the betrayal of that trust and the resulting tragedy for both women. I needed to create a law enforcement agent with Hispanic roots to intervene on behalf of a murdered nanny. Once Ana appeared on the page, her voice took over. I rewrote the entire manuscript in first person and her personal journey, in which she discovers her true identity, became the heart of the book.

Over the years, while I wrote and produced TV movies and series as well as writing books and raising two children with my husband, there were several attempts to bring Ana Grey to the screen, but it wasn’t until TNT decided to revive the two-hour TV movie format with a new franchise based on mystery/thriller books that it happened; and then with lightning speed. I was in the middle of the book tour for the fourth Ana Grey novel, White Shotgun, stuck in traffic going to give a talk at the Redondo Beach public library, when I got the call that my script for Good Morning, Killer had been picked up to film. Four and a half months later, we were on the air.

TNT was wild about Catherine Bell for the starring role, and she was amazing on video, but because everything happened so fast there was no opportunity to meet her before we began shooting. I’ll never forget the first time I saw her, at the production office in a funky marina in Vancouver. “Catherine’s arrived,” everyone whispered, and there she was in a T-shirt and jeans, just off the plane after traveling with her one-year-old; tall, lithe, beautiful, with huge empathetic eyes and tousled dark hair, ethnically ambiguous (Catherine is actually half Persian), strength, leadership, and kindness just radiating. We hugged as if we’d known each other forever. Eighteen years later, Ana Grey was born again.

Find out more about the author at aprilsmith.net.

—Headhunters
by Jo Nesbø

For answers, we turned to the master of horror himself, Stephen King. In his original foreword to the classic short story collection Night Shift, King gets right to the point:

“Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about fear. The house is empty as I write this; a cold February rain is falling outside. It’s night. Sometimes when the wind blows the way it’s blowing now, we lose the power. But for now it’s on, and so let’s talk very honestly about fear. Let’s talk very rationally about moving to the rim of madness…and perhaps over the edge.”

For generations, horror, thriller, and mystery writers have been keeping their readers riveted by playing on their worst fears. That cold-blooded murderer in your favorite noir novel could be lurking around the corner. That monster from your favorite horror thriller might actually be hiding in your basement. Says King, “Fear has always been big. Death has always been big.” There’s a universality to fear—everyone’s got ’em. And our fears run the gamut, as King notes:

“Fear is the emotion that makes us blind. How many things are we afraid of? We’re afraid to turn off the lights when our hands are wet. We’re afraid to stick a knife into the toaster to get the stuck English muffin without unplugging it first. We’re afraid of what the doctor may tell us when the physical exam is over; when the airplane suddenly takes a great unearthly lurch in midair. We’re afraid that the oil may run out, that the good air will run out, the good water, the good life. When the daughter promised to be in by eleven and it’s now quarter past twelve and sleet is spatting against the window like dry sand, we sit and pretend to watch Johnny Carson and look occasionally at the mute telephone and we feel the emotion that makes us blind, the emotion that makes a stealthy ruin of the thinking process.”

When writers tap into our fears, they exploit us at a vulnerable point; they open the door to the most sheltered part of our inner lives. “The horror tale lives most naturally at that connection point between the conscious and the subconscious,” says King, “The place where both image and allegory occurs most naturally and with the most devastating effect.”

While not every book exerts such pull on its reader, all of literature can be placed somewhere on the spectrum of fear. Be it a zombie story or a coming-of-age novel, as King notes, “the subjects of death and fear are not the horror writer’s exclusive province.” He cites a list of “so-called ‘mainstream’ writers,” who have dealt with themes of fear, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Albee, John Steinbeck, Albert Camus, and even one of our favorites here at the Weekly Lizard, Ross Macdonald. Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels are more than just mysteries, they are psychological suspense novels: studies of the loathsome characters with whom Archer must deal. In these books, Macdonald plumbs the nature of human evil, or what King calls “the horrors that we all do believe in…. hate, alienation, growing lovelessly old, tottering out into a hostile world on the unsteady legs of adolescence.”

And yet, as the weather grows cold and the nights grow longer, we still find ourselves reaching for our favorite Stephen King and Ross Macdonald books, because ultimately, there is catharsis to be gained in what King calls this “rehearsal for our own death.” Allowing ourselves to believe in something frightening gives us an opportunity to drag our fears out of the closet, to examine them and, perhaps, to come to terms with them. A good writer can hold your hand and guide you through the unfathomable, and as King puts it:

“No waking or dreaming in this terminal, but only the voice of the writer, low and rational, talking about the way the good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unraveling with shocking suddenness. He’s telling you that you do want to see the car accident, and yes, he’s right—you do. There’s a dead voice on the phone…something behind the walls of the old house that sounds bigger than a rat…movement at the foot of the cellar stairs. He wants you to see all of those things, and more.”

Yes, we do, Mr. King, yes, we do.

—The Chill
by Ross Macdonald

—Spade & Archer
by Joe Gores