Having recently watched Netflix’s excellent adaptation of Lee Child’s The Killing Floor, I’m thankful that we have Netflix (Jack Reacher) and Amazon (Harry Bosch) along with Showtime and HBO to carry the mystery mantel now that Hollywood has essentially abandoned it in favor of endless comic book super heroes.
Where once we had The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, In The Heat Of The Night, Devil In A Blue Dress, and LA Confidential, we’re now left with never ending green screen stunts and super power films mostly devoid of suspense. As Janet Maslin of the New York Times once concluded about LA Confidential: “Curtis Hanson’s resplendently wicked movie is a tough, gorgeous, vastly entertaining throwback to the Hollywood that did things right.”
As in the examples above, mysteries are stories that revolve around a main character(s), often a detective, on a quest to solve a crime. A mystery/detective story reveals the identity of the antagonist at the climax of the story. And while there are thriller elements in a good mystery, in most thrillers the reader is aware of the antagonist and things unknown to the protagonist.
I’ll admit it’s difficult to satisfyingly adapt a lengthy mystery novel within the constraints of a 90-120 minute feature film. A Netflix, Amazon, Showtime, or HBO series allows for more character development while keeping the essence of the mystery novel in tack. But as the above films demonstrate, a terrific movie adaptation certainly can be done––and done well.
So what are some of the few mystery/detective novels of the past decade that have been adapted by Hollywood? Shutter Island (2010) comes to mind as well as Gone Girl (2014), though there were enough plot holes in the book and movie to drive a truck through. Kenneth Branagh has brought us Murder On The Orient Express (2017) and Death On The Nile (2022), though both films have been done before and done better.
Fortunately, we’ve also had some great foreign mystery films, though Stieg Larson’s trilogy beginning with The Girl With The Dragon tattoo and the original Argentinian and far superior The Secret In Their Eyes were released in 2009.
Unfortunately, a Hollywood adaptation of a mystery novel is a thin and ever shrinking number. Here’s to Amazon, Netflix, and the cable channels for giving audiences the opportunity to see some of their favorite mystery/detective novels on the screen.