Craig McDonald's "Print the Legend," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Print the Legend by Craig McDonald.

The entry begins:

Like many novelists, I’ve had my intoxicating near-brushes with film adaptation.

Based solely on its description in a Publishers Lunch announcement, my debut novel, Head Games, attracted quite a bit of film interest. My own secret choice to play my continuing character Hector Lassiter in that novel, bizarrely enough, asked my publisher for a look at the novel. My vision of Hector Lassiter almost came to me.

Like most novelists who get Hollywood nibbles, my chance to have my first-choice actor portray my ongoing character didn’t bite firmly enough to be reeled in.

Print the Legend, my third novel, again features crime novelist Hector Lassiter, who is popularly known as the “man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.”

Print the Legend explores the death of Ernest Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho, in the summer of 1961, and raises questions regarding the possibility that Hem’s death was something other than an act of suicide. The novel also explores J. Edgar Hoover’s crazed and too-often destructive surveillance of key American writers, including not just Hemingway, but Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and Dorothy Parker, among many others.

Hector Lassiter has centered two previous novels, both of which dropped Hector on to famous film sets: Head Games found Hector visiting the set of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Toros & Torsos placed Hector on the set of The Lady From Shanghai. Because my novels tend to spread over decades and to dart in and out of time, they present certain challenges in casting. In Toros & Toros, we variously encounter 35-, 37-, 47-, 59- and 61-year-old Hector.

Print the Legend, on the other hand, is set largely in the mid-to-late 1960s. Hector’s age ranges from 65 to 72 through this novel. I’ve long established that Hector bears a strong resemblance to actor...[read on]

Read more about Print the Legend, and learn more about the author and his work at Craig McDonald's website and blog.

Read "The Story Behind the Story: Print the Legend, by Craig McDonald," at The Rap Sheet.

The Page 69 Test: Toros & Torsos.

The Page 69 Test: Head Games.

The Page 69 Test: Print the Legend.

My Book, The Movie: Print the Legend.

--Marshal Zeringue