Like many Americans, despite a nagging sense of better judgment and the guilt that follows from ignoring that judgment, I succumbed to unseen societal forces and purchased one of those new fangled televisions—which, of course, requires some kind of connection to the grid with its multitudinous and maddening choices. Occasionally, there is some (real) value to be squeezed out of an otherwise sordid medium. FX’s new series Justified is one such.

The reason begins with crime-story maestro Elmore Leonard’s involvement. The series is based on Raylon Givens, a character who has appeared in two Leonard novels—Riding the Rap and Pronto—and a novella, Fire in the Hole. Dutch Leonard (as he is also known) is listed as one of the show’s numerous executive producers, which in the filmmaking world could mean anything from an honorary mention to being the money man to being the reason the money was raised. In this case, it seems that Leonard is the muse who inspires the series’ writers—e.g., Graham Yost (also an executive producer)—for the first two episodes.

Which is to say the writing and the plot arc is wonderfully Leonard-esque. Raylon Givens, a Deputy U.S. Marshall in Miami, opens the proceedings, meeting Tommy, a thug he has given 24 hours to leave town (or he would kill him). With the ultimatum having only minutes before its expiration, the two have a vintage Leonard exchange. It’s a fascinating two or three minutes executed with nimble precision. Tommy gets his, and although by all the legal protocols, the shoot was justified, Givens is transferred to Kentucky, which is where he grew up. His first assignment is to bring to justice Boyd, a white supremacist he happened to have mined coal with in their youth. This is a rich vein of drama and humor as Boyd and his cohort are both lethal and goofy—in a manner that Leonard has mined successfully throughout his fiction.

If you are one of Leonard’s fans and jonesing for his latest work (and have exhausted his substantial oeuvre of over 40 novels), his new opus, Djibouti, is scheduled for an October release. The story is set in Djibouti (on the Horn of Africa) with Dana Barr, an accomplished documentary filmmaker intending to film the seagoing pirates who occasionally make it into the news cycle. Leonard’s publisher indicates a cast of misfits and oddballs, which make reading one of his stories great, good fun.

P.S. You may be aware of the drums beating for David Simon’s new dramatic series Treme, set in New Orleans (with George Pelecanos and Tom Piazza part of the writing team). Here is HBO’s most recent teaser/trailer. —Robert Birnbaum, Mar. 17, 2010

The late and lamented Boston writer George V. Higgins wrote nearly 30 books, most of them pretty good. But none was better than The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Picador), which is being reissued in a 40th anniversary edition with a new introduction by Dennis Lehane.

Set in Boston, Eddie Coyle, a smalltime hood, is being squeezed between hood Jimmy Scalisi, cop Foley, and, of course, his friends. Higgins was a competent plotter, but his forte was as an almost unrivaled dialogist:

“No, I rent this place. I’m a bulldozer driver. I got seasonal work. The owner understands. He thinks I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

“Your wife understand?” Coyle said.

“What you don’t know,” Scalisi said, “it doesn’t bother you. She don’t know.”

“She think you’re off selling magazines,” Coyle said.

“I dunno what she thinks,” Scalisi said. “I told her I hadda go away for a while. She don’t question it.”

“Jesus,” Coyle said, “I gotta talk to you some time. I don’t know how you do it.”

“It’s confidence,” Scalisi said. “You look at them right in the eye and say: Hey, I gotta go away for a while. They’ll buy it.”

“You gotta meet my wife,” Coyle said. “You said that to my wife, she’d get this look on her face. Oh yeah? Like you was trying to sell her a used car. I got to take the time and watch you. That’s the only way.”

Actually, I liked the old introduction by Elmore Leonard, but that is another matter entirely:

What I learned from George Higgins was to relax, not to be so rigid in trying to make the prose sound like writing, to be more aware of the rhythms of coarse speech and the use of obscenities. Most of all George Higgins showed me how to get into scenes without wasting time, without setting up the scene, where the characters are and what they look like. In other words hook the reader right away. I also realized that criminals can appear to be ordinary people and have some of the same concerns as the rest of us.… My take on The Friends of Eddie Coyle, for example—which I have listed a number of times as the best crime novel ever written—it makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew.

By the way there was an excellent screen adaptation of Eddie Coyle by Peter Yates with Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle. If you have never read this great story by George Higgins, you are in for a treat. And if you have read it and you revisit the novel, you are also in for a treat. —Robert Birnbaum, Mar. 9, 2010

Octogenarian writer Elmore (“Dutch”) Leonard has published more than 40 books, mostly novels, and about half of which have been made into movies—none more credibly executed then Steven Soderbergh’s iteration of Out of Sight (1998) starring George Clooney as bank robber Jack Foley and Jennifer Lopez as U.S. Marshal Karen Cisco (and a great supporting cast including Ving Rhames and Don Cheadle).

The potent combination of Leonard’s original story/novel and the Soderbergh film makes Road Dogs (William Morrow) doubly potent. In this book, Foley (whose CV boasts robbing more U.S. banks than anyone in history), Cuban exile Cundo Rey from Leonard’s LaBrava (1983), and Cundo’s common-law wife, Dawn Navarro from 1995’s Riding the Rap, are thrown together in a psychic cage match that bends all the relationships at play: Jack and Cundo, former jailbirds who had each other’s back in prison; Cundo and Dawn, whose motives for waiting for the Cuban to serve his eight-year incarceration are not, uh, pure; and Jack and Dawn, based on what can be clinically labeled a primal attraction.

Among other things, Leonard’s writing has also spawned two TV series: one based on Judge Maximum Bob Gibbs (who makes something like a cameo in this new story) and Karen Cisco, who of course casts some shadows in Foley’s ongoing life. Both shows failed, but I’d love to see a third attempt, and Leonard certainly has proven Foley to be a character with ample reserve of charisma—though it could be problematic to cast a bank robber as the “hero” on TV. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 5, 2009

Last year, when word went out that Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio were once again sharing the silver screen in a film based on Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, I was pushed along a path of once again coupling films made from important or at least imposing novels. Yates, by the way, was a hero to a generation of young American writers (having mentored at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and other places) and Revolutionary Road is a novel that has a kind of exponential word-of-mouth that has kept Yates’s work in circulation and finally garnered him one of the accolades he pursued during his life: having a story published in The New Yorker.

At any rate, American classics have faired reasonably well in film: Grapes of Wrath and Moby-Dick (the Ray Bradbury/John Huston version), for example. The Last of the Mohicans and The Scarlet Letter—both with Daniel Day-Lewis—are equal to their textual origins. Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye was wonderfully realized by Robert Altman with Elliot Gould. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon had Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was wonderfully represented by Robert Mulligan with Gregory Peck (and Robert Duvall as Boo Radley).

Here are some more noteworthy film/novel couples:

• Our Man in Havana (auth. Graham Greene, dir. Sir Carol Reed): Alec Guinness is perfectly cast in the revolutionary rat’s nest of Batista’s Havana; Ernie Kovacs has a cameo.
• The Tailor From Panama (auth. John le Carré, dir. John Moorman): Spoof of Greene’s Our Man in Havana; Geoffrey Rush and Pierce Brosnan give the story some ballast.
• The Conformist (auth. Alberto Moravia, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci): A poignant, soul-searching story with Jean-Louis Trintignant playing the subtle title role with precision.
• Man on Fire (auth. A.J. Quinnell, dir. Tony Scott): Denzel Washington is the man, Christopher Walken lends a fine hand, and Mexico City is photogenic on many levels. Rachel Ticotin (seen all too rarely) and Giancarlo Giannini provide some nice support in minor roles.
• 92 in the Shade (auth./dir. Thomas McGuane): This movie was fun in 1975, which is the first and last time I saw it. Does it hold up as well as McGuane’s writing? Someone let me know.
• Out of Sight (auth. Elmore Leonard, dir. Stephen Soderberg): Does justice to Leonard’s finely tuned humor. The cast—George Clooney. Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, and Dennis Farina—are pitch-perfect.
• Catch-22 (auth. Joseph Heller, dir. Mike Nichols): My first contemporaneous viewing left me underwhelmed but subsequent auditions have raised the valence of this film with its all-star cast of Orson Welles, Alan Arkin, Jon Voigt, Richard Benjamin, Charles Grodin, and Art Garfunkel.
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (auth. Milan Kundera, dir. Phillip Kaufman): Juliet Binoche, Lena Olin, and Daniel Day-Lewis try to live in Soviet-violated Czechoslovakia. It’s a pathetic existence but all too real.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (auth. Ken Kesey, dir. Milos Forman): Kesey’s novel was perfect anti-authoritarian elixir. And what’s to be said about Jack Nicholson? Will Sampson does a nice turn as the big, quiet Chief Bromden.
• Before Night Falls (auth. Reinaldo Arenas, dir. Julian Schnabel): Everything about this film of Cuban writer Arenas’s memoir is perfect—casting, montage, music, lighting—I mean perfect. Javier Bardem is amazing: His credence as a gay poet in revolutionary Cuba is off any scale of measurement. Perfect.
• No Country for Old Men (auth. Cormac McCarthy, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen): An outstanding drama with Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Badem. No doubt you’ve heard of it.
• The Constant Gardener (auth. John le Carré, dir. Fernando Meirelles): Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz stumble into sleazy, globalized, racist exploitation just the way le Carré wrote it, sans any preachiness.
• The English Patient (auth. Michael Ondaatje, dir. Anthony Minghella): Pretty decent movie especially since it was considered almost impossible to cinematize the narrative of Ondaatje’s novel. Of course that impossibility resides in the premise that adapting must be parroting.
• The Quiet American (auth. Graham Greene, dir. Phillip Noyce): Michael Caine delivers one of his typically delicately nuanced performances as an ageing, circa 1954 British foreign correspondent in Saigon who doesn’t want to leave and whose love for his Vietnamese mistress is a skillfully dramatized dilemma—especially as a young Ivy League consultant played by Brendan Fraser complicates both the personal and the political.
• Spider (auth. Patrick McGrath, dir. David Cronenberg): This is a hinky, awkward story about a schizophrenic man who as a youth saw his father murder his mother. How could it not be off-center?
• In The Cut (auth. Susanna Moore, dir. Jane Campion): Moore’s novel about Manhattan homicide detectives bristled with primordial urgency. Meg Ryan woke up for this role and didn’t try to make it cute.
• The Razor’s Edge (auth. Somerset Maugham, dir. John Byrum): Rich people in Chicagoland (Lake Forest, Ill.) enter the Great War. Lives are lost. Lives change. Bill Murray plays a disillusioned American in search of himself—in Paris, India, and Nepal. This is a pretty good film with a wonderfully savvy performance by Murray.
• The 25th Hour (auth. David Benioff, dir. Spike Lee): Ed Norton and a dog dominate this Manhattan story. Brian Cox does an artful turn as a suffering father.

And yet, no one has yet done a film based on a George Pelecanos book. Why? —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 13, 2008