Why am I passionate about this?
I’ve made my way in the world as a writer, mostly of TV and movies, mostly of comedy of one stripe or another. As a consumer, though, I’ve always been more drawn to cops and robbers than to material designed primarily to make me laugh. Then, in my 50s, I made an unexpected turn to detective fiction, with a series shaped like traditional, serious mysteries but with satirical undertones and, hopefully, plenty of smiles along the way. My new career made me start thinking more attentively about how comedy and crime worked together, how my work built on what came before, and how it differed from it.
Howard's book list on comic crime that inspired comic crime movies
Why did Howard love this book?
Tolkin doesn’t hit you with belly laughs so much as tickle the upper corners of your mind with his knowing take on the mores and follies of the Hollywood of the late 1980s. (Of special interest to me, as that’s the moment I arrived there to begin my own TV and film career.) The trenchant satire is exemplified by the crime at its center: studio exec Griffin Mill, badgered by threats from some anonymous screenwriter he’s mistreated, focuses his attention on a different C-list scribe and winds up strangling him to death. Get it? In a business full of writer-killing executives, Tolkin’s big-wig antihero literally kills a writer.
2 authors picked The Player as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Griffin Mill is senior vice president of production at a Hollywood studio. Obsessed with his career, dedicated to his success and riveted by paranoia, he is the ultimate player. But now he is in trouble. He has been getting postcards from a writer he rejected, who threatens to kill him.
- Coming soon!