The Big Book of Reel Murders: Stories that Inspired Great Crime Films

by Otto Penzler (Editor)

Overview

Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology rolls out the red carpet for the stories that Hollywood is made of. A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original.

Lights! Camera! Action! The latest book in the Big Book series takes us behind the curtain to uncover the stories that became some of the greatest films of the silver screen. There's the W. Somerset Maugham short story that inspired Hitchcock's Secret Agent; Robert Louis Stevenson's horrifying tale that was later turned into the iconic movie The Body Snatcher, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff; Sir Ian Fleming's "From a View to a Kill," later one of Roger Moore's greatest Bond films; and "Cyclists' Raid," the short story that formed the basis for the legendary Brando film The Wild One.

Otto Penzler delivers the director's cut on these classic short stories and the films they gave rise to. So grab your Sno-Caps and a jumbo box of popcorn and curl up with these cinematic tales from the likes of Agatha Christie, Dennis Lehane, Joyce Carol Oates, Dashiell Hammett, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525563884
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/22/2019
Pages:	1200
Sales rank:	636,503
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, now an imprint at Grove/Atlantic, and publishes classic crime fiction through MysteriousPress.com. Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, MWA’s Ellery Queen Award and the Raven. He has been given Lifetime Achievement awards by Noircon and The Strand Magazine. His new company, Penzler Publishers, launched its imprint American Mystery Classics in October 2018; it is devoted to reissuing classic American mysteries in hardcover and paperback.

Editorial Reviews

09/23/2019

Movie and mystery buffs alike will savor Penzler’s ninth Big Book anthology (after 2018’s The Big Book of Female Detectives), which includes more than 60 stories that were adapted for the screen. The selections include both the usual suspects, such as Conan Doyle and Cornell Woolrich, and surprising ones, such as Budd Schulberg. Schulberg’s 1954 short story, “Murder on the Waterfront,” was the inspiration for the Oscar-winning Marlon Brando vehicle On the Waterfront, and his crisp screenplay dialogue is mirrored by gritty noir prose (“The police department had made contact with Runt, by means of a grappling hook probing the soft, rotten bottom of the river”). Unsurprisingly, most of the source material was changed significantly for the movies, such as Robert Bloch’s “The Real Bad Friend,” which morphed into the novel Psycho, before being made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Spoiler-averse readers may want to defer delving into Penzler’s informative and insightful introductions for each entry, which give away plot developments in both the story and film adaptations. Penzler’s scholarship and expertise enable him to both expose modern audiences to now-obscure talent such as Charlotte Armstrong, represented by “The Enemy,” and to the origins of classic films such as Bad Day at Black Rock. This will be a welcome addition to many libraries. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-08-19
Indefatigable editor Penzler's latest 61-scoop sundae is a treasure trove of short stories that were filmed, though most readers won't care to sample more than a fraction of its contents.

Acknowledging that "most of the greatest mystery crime films were adapted from novels or were original screenplays," Penzler (The Big Book of Female Detectives, 2018, etc.) introduces seven sections containing suspense stories, crime comedies, thrillers, horror stories, stories about criminals, fatal romances, and detective stories. A significant fraction of the volume's 1,200 pages are devoted to the editor's story-by-story introductions, but these short essays, which are filled with anecdotes, breezy evaluations, information about the production histories of the movies based on these stories, and the occasional spoiler, are often more interesting than the stories they introduce. As for the selections themselves, some (Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Five Orange Pips," G.K. Chesterton's "The Blue Cross," Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game") are anthology chestnuts fans will already know. Most of these, along with Doyle's "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" and Dashiell Hammett's "The House in Turk Street," are better than any of the film versions that provide the hook for their inclusion. Other stories changed beyond recognition in filming—Edgar Wallace's "The Death Watch" and "The Ghost of John Holling," Sapper's "Thirteen Lead Soldiers," Hammett's "On the Make," Barry Perowne's "The Blind Spot," Stuart Palmer's "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl," Palmer and Craig Rice's "Once Upon a Train," Fredric Brown's "Madman's Holiday," Ian Fleming's "From A View to a Kill"—and will provide mostly bewilderment from readers familiar with their film versions. Only a handful—E.W. Hornung's "Gentlemen and Players," Agatha Christie's "The Witness for the Prosecution," W. Somerset Maugham's "The Letter" and "The Traitor," Daphne du Maurier's "Don't Look Now," Irwin Shaw's "Tip on a Dead Jockey," and several of the eight noir tales by Cornell Woolrich, a welcome minianthology within this anthology—are memorable stories made into equally memorable films. The happiest discoveries for most readers will be the mostly forgotten stories that provided the basis for Broken Blossoms, Brother Orchid, Smart Blonde, The Killer Is Loose, Possessed, Gun Crazy, The Wild One, On the Waterfront, Bad Day at Black Rock, and (even before Robert Bloch's novel) Psycho. Who knew?

The ideal audience: cinephiles who've never read any of these stories before. But everyone will find something to treasure.

Kirkus Reviews