Word: novelizations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Oprah's charmed career has not been without a few snags. Her second film, Native Son, based on Richard Wright's novel, was a flop at the box office, and a prospective sitcom for ABC, starring Oprah as a talk-show host, was scuttled after a mediocre pilot. Most of her attention is now focused on bringing to the screen projects that are close to her -- like Beloved and Kaffir Boy, an autobiography set in South Africa. "I want to do movies that are about something, that move people and leave them feeling uplifted." Though most of them involve black...
...life's frustrations for aficionados of the crime novel is the discovery that there are loved ones or esteemed friends who, having sampled the genre, view it with boredom or disdain. The most irritating aspect of the belittlers' criticism is that it is often correct, at least as applied to the humdrum majority among the hundreds of mysteries, thrillers, police procedurals and spy stories published in the U.S. each year. Characters are frequently sketchy, plots more elaborate than coherent, dialogue archly unnatural, and exotic settings tacked on rather than integral to the narrative. Many authors seem to think that...
...best mystery of the year to date is in fact a splendid mainstream novel exploring a theme that links almost all good mysteries with the larger literary tradition: the burden of the past. Robert Barnard, a specialist in snide japery (Death of an Old Goat), turns deceptively gentle and affectionate in The Skeleton in the Grass (Scribner's; 199 pages; $15.95), which focuses on the subtleties of the relationship between the teenage daughter of a poor British clergyman and the aristocratic family she is sent to join, as something between servant and family member, during the fateful summer...
Probably the hardest kind of crime novel to write is the exploration of the criminal mind from within, the stream of psychotic consciousness brought to its peak in past years by Julian Symons (The Players and the Game) and Ruth Rendell (Live Flesh). That sort of book has been attempted unsuccessfully this season by Robert B. Parker, whose uninsightful Crimson Joy (Delacorte; 211 pages; $16.95) suggests that he would do better to return to slam-bang action. Symons and Rendell, meanwhile, are represented by more conventional fare resurrecting characters from some of their earlier novels...
There is also a true relic of the age of pulp: Dashiell Hammett's Woman in the Dark (Knopf; 96 pages; $15.95), overpriced and oversold as a "novel," but compelling on its terms as a sketchbook romance between two losers who share a fierce sense of their own integrity. Other notable reprints include Michael Gilbert's Young Petrella (Harper & Row; 222 pages; $15.95), a collection of magazine stories from the 1950s and '60s that display his trademark Scotland Yard detective with a deadpan precision of mood worthy of Simenon, and A Double Life (Little, Brown; 246 pages; $17.95), short gothic...