Michael Gregorio's Hanno Stiffeniis novels, the movies

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Michael Gregorio's Hanno Stiffeniis novels.

The entry begins:

People (American friends, as a rule) often ask. “When can we see the film?”

We smile at each other and say, “They’re still thinking about it.”

To be honest, the thought of anyone making a movie featuring a country magistrate who works in early nineteenth century Prussia is so improbable that we decided to let ourselves go and have fun with the casting. Our novels are set in such a remote time (the Napoleonic Wars), and in such a forgotten historical context (Prussia, a country which no longer exists), that Hollywood would not be at all interested in the screenplay (written especially for us by the late Paddy Chayefsky, by the way).

Limited neither by possibility, probability or mortality, and given that our novels are gruesome crime tales, we feel free to range through a number of unlikely possibilities regarding the total improbability of anything ever coming of the project.

Please note, we pity the movie-maker (Federico Fellini? Fritz Lang?) who gets the job.

Prussia was home to the Brothers Grimm and E.T.A. Hoffman, the stamping ground of Immanuel Kant, the philosopher. It had a vast standing army that militarised the entire country until Napoleon turned up and walked all over it to the utter humiliation of all good Prussians.

How do you create a country and a time that no longer exist?

We would go for what we created, rather than what we managed to re-create.

So, our movie world would embrace the realms of serial murder, social satire and cartoon animation as much as serious...[read on]

Visit Michael Gregorio's website and blog.

Michael Gregorio is the pen name of Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio. They live in Spoleto, Italy. Michael Gregorio was awarded the Umbria del Cuore prize in 2007.

A Visible Darkness, their third novel in the Hanno Stiffeniis series was published in hardback by St Martins Press in 2009. Unholy Awakening, the fourth, was issued as an SMP-Minotaur original paperback in 2010. The paperback edition of A Visible Darkness was issued by the same US publisher on 26th April, 2011.

Read Michael Gregorio's Q & A with R.N. Morris at The Rap Sheet.

The Page 69 Test: A Visible Darkness.

The Page 69 Test: Unholy Awakening.

My Book, The Movie: Michael Gregorio's Hanno Stiffeniis novels.

--Marshal Zeringue