A few weeks ago my wife and I sat down to watch Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the movie based on John Berendt's book.  After about fifteen minutes, I couldn't take it anymore. The slow, plodding pace (not to mention the absence of gratuitous sex and violence) bored me to tears. I left the room. I came back twenty minutes later to find my wife fast asleep on the couch, so apparently she agreed with me.

Undaunted, I began reading the book, because my wife had raved about it. Two pages into the book, I was hooked - riveted. The story about the city of Savannah and its quirky inhabitants makes for fascinating reading.

Interestingly, the movie was very faithful to the book. The problem, I opine, is that good books generally make for terrible movies, because the things that make a book enjoyable - the slow, unhurried, pace as characters are introduced and developed - make a movie boring. I think the problem is that in a movie, you can only hear the lines the characters are speaking. There is so much more to a good book than the characters' spoken words - the description of the setting, the characters, what the characters are thinking, etc. And none of this comes across in the movie.

Some of my favorite books have been made into movies, and I have almost always been disappointed with the results. A few stinkers come to mind. Lawrence Sanders' The First Deadly Sin, a chilling account of  police captain Edward X. Delaney's hunt for a psychopathic murderer, made for a dreary, dreadful movie that even Frank Sinatra and Faye Dunaway couldn't save. Once again, the movie was faithful to the book. But the things that made the book interesting - the character development of the protagonist and antagonist and a detailed exposition of how a real police investigation is conducted - made for a very boring movie.

The same fate befell Peter Straub's Ghost Story, an incredible book, but easily worst movie that Fred Astaire and John Houseman every made.

Of course, there are exceptions. Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs was recently ranked in one survey as one of the 100 best films ever.

But my point is this: if you want to find a good book, look for a dreadful movie that was based on a book (not a screenplay). You may be pleasantly surprised.

Allow me to help you with my own subjective opinions  by pointing you towards my favorite authors. All of these authors have two things in common:

1. They are relatively unknown compared to the likes of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert Ludlum, and Stuart Woods to name just a few more familiar authors.

2. They are, in my opinion, much better writers than other, more famous authors who write in the same genre.

Here they are:

Robert Littell makes Robert Ludlum and John LeCarre looks like amateurs when it comes to espionage. Littell's latest book, The Company, is a riveting 50 year history of the CIA, told through the eyes and actions of fictional characters. 

John Katzenbach writes thrillers with more twists and turns than and old woman's arthritic fingers. His newest book, The Analyst, is to be savored like fine wine, read a few pages at a time. His other novels, Hart's War (which actually made a pretty fair movie), State of Mind, The Shadow Man, Just Cause, The Traveler, Day of Reckoning, and The Mean Season are all excellent reads.

David Bowker. David is a real mystery.  He has no web site, and no significant web presence. To my knowledge he has written only two books, The Death Prayer and The Butcher Of Glastonbury.   Neither made him a household name, but I will tell you this. The Death Prayer is far better than anything Stephen King or Dean Koontz have ever written. It's out of print, but you can buy a used copy at abebooks.com. I strongly urge you to do so.

Trevanian.  Any of his books - The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, The Main, Shibumi, Incident and Twenty-Mile, etc. are great, suspenseful reads. It's hard for me to pick a favorite here.

Noel Hynd.  Noel is another writer of horror novels who outshines Stephen King and Dean Koontz every time he puts pen to paper. Pick up Ghosts, Cemetery of Angels, and Rage of Spirits.

Never heard of any of these authors? Great! You have a wonderful year or two of reading ahead of you. Your welcome, I'm sure. Meanwhile, good luck on finding bad movies!

Wisdom By Alan Luber