Dream Casting

Most writers, I suspect, occasionally daydream about one of their stories being made into a movie. I'm no exception. Today I found myself pondering what actors I'd choose if my spy novel, NOBODY DIES FOR FREE ever made it to the silver screen. Here's what I came up with.

First, a bit of perfect casting that can never be due to the limitations time places on reality. When deciding exactly what my main character, Richard Monroe, should look like on the book's cover, the face that came to mind was that of actor Iain Glen, best known for Game of Thrones. I imagined Monroe as a rougher, tougher version of Roger Moore, and Glen fits the profile perfectly. Unfortunately, now in his early fifties, Glen is too old to play Monroe, who is forty for most of the novel. 

So, with Iain Glen out of the running, who would I choose to portray Richard Monroe? That was a tough question, but the answer suddenly came to me today. It's an actor familiar to anyone who watches HBO's True Blood. He's handsome but can radiate toughness when necessary. Alexander Skarsgard.

Every spy novel of this type needs a femme fatale, a beautiful but dangerous woman who challenges the male hero. For my novel's most prominent female character, Winter Willows, I'd choose another star of Game of Thrones, actress Natalie Dormer, who first came to my attention as Anne Boleyn on The Tudors. She'd just have to dye her hair pure white for the part.

Richard Monroe wouldn't have any missions to go on if not for the fact that he works under the supervision of an old master spy, the mysterious Mr. Nine. As Monroe's boss, I'd cast an old favorite of mine, tough guy character actor Michael Ironside.

James Bond has always been able to rely on his American friend Felix Leiter, and Monroe has a similar ally in the heavy drinking, slightly goofy Arnaud LaFleur of the French Secret Service. This was an easy role to cast, with Gerard Depardieu

    

Another good friend of Monroe's, when our hero needs information on those in the Boston underworld, is Spencer Archer, head of a ring of car thieves. For this role, I'd choose an actor from one of my favorite spy TV shows, the British series Spooks (retitled as MI-5 when shown in the United States). He also recently appeared in the Tom Cruise movie, Jack Reacher. This is David Oyewolo.

And finally, we come to the main villain of NOBODY DIES FOR FREE, international crime lord Garrett Khan. Once again, I'm going to Game of Thrones for my casting choice (can you tell it's my favorite current TV series?) and choosing actor Pedro Pascal.

Those aren't the only characters I'd need to cast for a NOBODY DIES FOR FREE movie, but they're the most prominent and I'd be one thrilled writer if those talented actors ever portrayed the citizens of my imagination. 

Four Non-Bonds

It's been a great week since the release of my spy novel, Nobody Dies For Free. The book's availability met with enthusiasm, I've had some good feedback from several readers so far, and I'm anxiously awaiting reviews. With the book getting attention, I've been thinking some about my favorite fictional spies and how they've influenced my work in general, and, in some cases, specifically the character of Richard Monroe, protagonist of Nobody Dies For Free. I got into that subject a little in my last entry where I talked about the influence of Ian Fleming and his James Bond stories as well as the movies based on his books. But 007 certainly isn't the be all and end all of fictional spies who have caught my attention over the years. So, today I thought I'd list a few espionage and thriller characters who I'm a big fan of.

George Smiley
Appearing in several novels by John le Carre, Smiley is not an action hero. He's a sly, scheming, intellectual agent. The most famous Smiley story is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which has been adapted to film several times. Smiley has been played by such extraordinary actors as James Mason (though the character's name was changed in that instance), Sir Alec Guinness, Denholm Eliot, and, most recently, Gary Oldman. 

Jack Ryan
Tom Clancy's character, Jack Ryan, might best be described as an unintentional hero. Ryan, a CIA analyst, often wants nothing to do with the violence and gritty intrigue of the espionage world, preferring a peaceful life as a father and husband while serving his country from behind a desk. But he usually finds himself in the thick of things. Clancy has written many Jack Ryan novels. There have also been four major movies, with a fifth coming soon. If asked to choose a favorite film version of the Jack Ryan stories, I'd be forced to give a double-sided answer. My favorite in terms of plot and delivery is The Hunt for Red October, in which Jack Ryan was played by Alec Baldwin, with a superb supporting cast that included James Earl Jones, Sean Connery, Sam Neill, Tim Curry, and Peter Firth. But my favorite portrayal of Jack Ryan was by Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and A Clear and Present Danger, which are both excellent.

Adam Carter
Of the characters I'm discussing today, Carter might be the one most unfamiliar to American audiences, but I think my British friends will know who I'm talking about. From 2002 until 2011, a magnificent espionage series called Spooks ran on British TV. Lasting for 86 excellent episodes, the show was a smoldering, suspenseful joyride of spy thrills. It was a powerful show and had the guts to very frequently kill off major, well-liked characters. Nobody was safe on this show, which sometimes made me want to hate it as much as I loved it.  
Spooks revolved around MI-5 supervisor Harry Pearce (played by Peter Firth) and the team of agents who worked under him. At any given time, the squad was led in the field by a Section Chief. There were five different Section Chiefs throughout the show's run and all were interesting characters. The one that makes my list today is Adam Carter (portrayed by Rupert Penry-Jones). The second character to hold the post, after Matthew McFadyen's Tom Quinn, Carter was a dynamic, energetic, courageous agent who worked hard to balance his obligations to his country with his responsibilities to his family, often with mixed results. Carter also lasted as Section Chief longer than any of those before or after him.
If anyone reading this has never seen Spooks, I highly recommend it. It's available for streaming on Netflix, but you'll have to look for it under the title it adopted for viewing in the U.S. Here, it's renamed MI-5.

Bryan Mills
You really, really, really do not want to mess with his family. It's not a good idea. Just remember, he has a very particular set of skills that makes him a nightmare for people like you. 
On paper, Taken sounds like a mediocre, possibly somewhat entertaining action flick that might star someone like Steven Segal. Simple plot: retired spy's daughter is kidnapped to be sold as a sex slave, so he goes to Europe to find her and get revenge on those who perpetrated the crime.
But if you take that premise and give it to producer Luc Besson and director Pierre Morel, and cast Liam Neeson in the lead role of former special operative Bryan Mills, you end up with what I think just might be the best spy/ action movie of the last few decades! I absolutely loved it. I rarely watch movies more than once within a span of just a few years, but I've seen Taken at least a half-dozen times since its release in 2008.
The sequel, Taken 2, was a very good action movie and well worth seeing, but not on the level of the first. I'm happy to have recently learned that there will be a third installment. As long as Liam Neeson wants to keep playing Bryan Mills, I'm willing to go to the theater and watch him teach some very bad people some very harsh lessons.

Nobody Dies For Free

I once commented that being a writer is like having a big box of action figures and getting paid to play with them. It's also a profession that makes dreams come true, in the sense that we can "do" all the things we've wanted, in our imaginations, to do by living through the characters we put onto the page. In the years since I began writing, I've had many opportunities to write things that relate to ideas and concepts that have been very important to the development of my imagination. I've written, and seen published, stories featuring some of my favorite fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes and Allan Quatermain. I've also had chances to create my own characters and throw them headfirst into interesting situations in books and stories in various genres. I've had the chance to play with vampires and detectives and zombies.

Today, I'm happy to announce that another writing dream has come true. I am now officially the author of a published spy novel, Nobody Dies for Free, just released by Pro Se Productions. Nobody Dies for Free is the story of Richard Monroe, a former CIA operative pulled back into the world of espionage and intrigue following a personal tragedy. I'll let the back cover copy speak for itself:

And I'll give everyone a good look at the front cover too:

So now that the book has officially been thrust out into public availability, maybe I should talk a bit about how it came to be that I'd write a book in that particular genre.

I first became aware of the spy genre, as I suspect many people did, through the James Bond movies. I must have been six or seven when I saw my first one. I became a big fan of those movies and eventually of Ian Fleming's Bond novels too. As the years went on, I came to enjoy other spy fiction as well, some as fun and occasionally over-the-top as Bond or Mission: Impossible, some much more serious, like the novels of John Le Carre, and some in-between the two extremes, stuff like the Jason Bourne movies. Having long had an interest in that type of story, I suppose it was inevitable that I'd eventually write my own. The several stories I've written featuring my pulp hero, Hound-Dog Harker, are sort of in the spy genre, but are period pieces with elements of horror and science-fiction thrown in too, so I'm not sure if they really count. As far as a contemporary spy story, which is what Nobody Dies for Free is, it was the accidental creation of the book's title that finally set things in motion.   

My wife and I were in the car one evening--I don't remember what the topic of conversation was--when I spoke that phrase for the first time: "nobody dies for free." My wife's immediate reaction was to point out that it sounds like it could be one of Ian Fleming's titles. Of course, Fleming is long gone and so he'll never use it, but I decided then and there to jot it down for future use of my own. Then I forgot about it for a while.

At some point after that, I got a great deal on DVDs of the James Bond movie series, everything from DR. NO to DIE ANOTHER DAY for under a hundred dollars. I watched them all in order for the first time (I'd seen them all before, some many times, but never in order of production). I had a blast revisiting the early installments with Sean Connery and George Lazenby, but then I got into the Roger Moore years and thought it would be a bit of a chore getting through that era, as the 1970s and early 80s Bond strayed far from Fleming's serious spy fiction and went too far with its gadgets and jokes. But as I got into those films, I began to notice something. While those movies are quite silly much of the time, there are moments scattered in there where Roger Moore plays Bond straight and is, for brief scenes, as ruthless and deadly as the Connery and Dalton versions. In The Man with the Golden Gun, he very brutally interrogates the character played by Maud Adams. In For Your Eyes Only, he kicks a car off a cliff with people inside it!

Seeing those scenes for the first time in years, my mind began to wander and I started to think what it might have been like if Roger Moore had been in darker, more serious Bond movies. That was the beginning of Nobody Dies for Free. 

Now that's not to suggest that Richard Monroe is directly based on Roger Moore and this hypothetical Bond he perhaps could have played. That meandering of my mind was just the first little seed of Monroe. My character quickly grew into someone else as I started to write the book.

He has certain similarities to James Bond and many other fictional spies: he's handsome, brave, sneaky, ruthless, and enjoys the company of beautiful women. But he's his own person too. He rarely uses clever gadgets and is more likely to rely on just his wits, his gun, his car, and a cell phone. He's American, though his personality has also been shaped by the time he's spent in many parts of the world. He doesn't work for a large organization like the CIA or FBI, although he used to. Now he's much more a solo agent, taking on missions too secret or sensitive for the more official agencies.

It wasn't just Bond and the other fictional spy worlds I mentioned earlier that had an impact on my writing the book. I wrote Nobody Dies for Free at roughly the same time as I was discovering what quickly became one of my favorite TV series of all-time, the British spy drama Spooks (retitled MI-5 when shown in the United States, presumably because while "spook" is slang for spy in the UK, it has, unfortunately, been used as a racial slur in the US). If you happen to be a fan of spy series, you must check out Spooks. But be warned: this is serious stuff and no one is safe! Characters die, brutally and often. It's a wild ride. 86 episodes of edge of your seat entertainment.

Anyway, back to Richard Monroe. I wrote the novel, was very happy with the result, and submitted it to a publisher I've worked with many times before, Pro Se Productions. They accepted it and here we are about a year later with the book now available to readers, and I'm thrilled!

As with any book, an author can't do it alone. I want to sincerely thank everyone involved in this book's birth: Tommy Hancock and Morgan Minor of Pro Se, Perry Constantine, who did the brilliant editing, and Ariane Soares, who created a cover that is exactly what I wanted for this book!

And, speaking of that cover, if Richard Monroe looks slightly familiar to anyone, his face is loosely based on that (in a younger version) of actor Iain Glen of Game of Thrones. The first time I saw Iain Glen on screen, he reminded me of a rougher, tougher Roger Moore, so a face somewhat modeled on his fits Monroe quite well, I think.

So that's how Nobody Dies for Free came into existence. I hope everyone has as much fun reading it as I did writing it. I look forward to hearing what readers have to say once they've met Richard Monroe!

Nobody Dies for Free is now available at Amazon in a print edition or as an e-book.