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The Ideas Factory Made Easy
14.09.06
Once again I find myself linking to How to Write Screenplays. Badly., which has fast become a favourite read of mine.
“But how do I give the impression of spontaneously spewing forth ideas?” I hear you mewl, like a rain-soaked cat trapped on a window ledge.
How? Here’s how.
1. Think of a movie that’s already been made.
2. Change one letter in the title.
3. The movie then writes itself. Pretty much.
Naturally, being someone with (a) far too much time on his hands, (b) nothing better to do with said time than sit around idly scratching his testicles and (c) perfectly happy to steal someone else’s hard-won idea rather than cobble together some manner of original dribble of my own, I wondered whether the same could be applied to a sample of the books on my shelves.
And while I may not have a ‘Citizen Kang’ or ‘You’ve Got Maul’, I have to say I’m impressed by the results. In fact, if I find myself scrabbling around for something to fill the ‘Book 5B’ slot, I could do worse…
Every Secret Thong
Who is the masked killer preying on Baltimore’s cross-dressing elite?
Pope
Life in Hell’s Kitchen takes a turn for the strange when reformed heroin addict Joe Flannigan is called in by a mysterious patron to track down Benedict IX. The rogue pontiff is in town with a hat full of plutonium and something far worse than fondling the juniors’ choir in mind.
The Billing Floor
Little did Jack Reacher realise when he got off the bus in the town of Baxter, Mississippi, that a wanted ad in the local paper would see him land a job with the local utilities company. Promised a corner office and a varied working life, he instead finds himself duped, trapped in a cubicle in the company’s billing department, fighting to retain his sanity in the face of overwhelming mundanity.
The Mercy Seal
He roams the ice floes, seeking out the sick and the dying in order to bring them a quick, dignified release. In an unforgiving landscape where death comes slow and painful, you too will pray for a swift end beneath the flippers of the Mercy Seal.
People Pie
Just what is in the delicious pastry foodstuffs coming out of Old Mrs Willis’s kitchen? Find out in this whacky cooking mystery where ‘having the neighbours for dinner’ has a whole new, whacky meaning!
Herd Rain
On a trip to Texas to kill a ice cream magnate, assassin John Rain becomes involved cattle rustling. When it becomes apparent that his old enemies at the CIA are behind the cow thefts, he realises the operation is part of a wider plot to secretly train American bullocks as hit-bovines designed to kill Castro.
Lark Hollow
Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker finds love, laughs and a new meaning to life when he stays in a Tuscan sanctuary for songbirds. A movie version is already in production, starring Hugh Grant and Diane Lane.
Private Bars
When Tara Chace walked away from MI6, she had nowhere to go and no idea what to do with her life. Like so many others before her, she finds herself caught up in the seedy world of Las Vegas’s strip clubs and VIP rooms in a book that’s great for fans of SHOWGIRLS and ANCHORMAN. Only, y’know, with people getting shot. And missiles.
Fight Clue
In the aftermath of a violent brawl at Mrs McKinney’s Pygmy Grill and Massage Parlour, only one piece of mysterious evidence can provide Detective Ron Harvey with the truth of what happened on that bloody night.
The Burping Girl
Tom Thorne’s niece Jessica suffers from terrible gas in this bittersweet family comedy in the great British musical hall tradition.
Why not have a go yourselves?
Books
A dozen people trapped in a roadhouse during a storm, three corpses buried in a field, and a good chance no one's going to make it through the night alive. Burial Ground is the last Alex Rourke novel.
One mistake. Seven years of a child's life. In The Darkness Inside, Alex finds out the missing kid in a case he worked on in his FBI days may not have been killed after all. And that the man he crossed the line to put away may not have worked alone.
A single bullet blows Alex's world to pieces. He finds himself in the strange Vermont town of Bleakwater Ridge trying to piece together what's happened, alone except for the dead and The Touch Of Ghosts.
A silent murder suspect, caught red-handed at the scene, draws former FBI agent Alex Rourke back to his home town of Winter's End in northern Maine. But it soon becomes clear that there's far more to the place, and to his own past, than he ever realised.
Short Fiction
Wish, featuring gay Nazis and the terror of living urban myth, appears in the Ken Bruen-edited Dublin Noir, as well as in 2008's Best British Mysteries anthology.
Twenty Dollar Future, about the tragic making of a child soldier in east Africa, appears in Jen Jordan's Expletive Deleted anthology.