Warner Options Brad Thor Spy Novels
This is sort of old news, but still relevant. Variety reports that Warner Bros., looking to get a spy franchise of their own off the ground, has picked up the rights to author Brad Thor's Scott Harvath series for producers Bill Gerber (Gran Torino) and Casey Wasserman. The deal also covers Thor's new novel, The Athena Project, which centers on a team of four elite female covert operatives. I haven't read any of these books (are they good?), but according to the trade, "the Harvath tomes center on a field agent who's a former Navy SEAL involved in counterterrorism ops in the world of underground intelligence."
Gerber told Variety that he's planning to develop Thor's 2002 novel The Lions of Lucerne first, as an origin story, adding, "We think that this could become something like the Jason Bourne franchise." I've got to say, I like the sound of it, judging from Amazon's plot description: "The story careers from the ski slopes of Utah to the top of Switzerland's Mount Pilatus and sets Scot on an impossible mission: recover the president, evade renegade Swiss spy Gerhard Miner and his cadre of trained agents, and elude the American conspirators who are hot on his trail."
4 comments:
You ask if Brad Thor's novels are any good. Personally, I couldn't even finish one, as I found it very poorly written. Doesn't mean they won't make good movies, though. After all, I love the Bourne films, but consider Robert Ludlum unreadable.
I picked up Lions of Lucerne at a discount bookstore while on vacation years ago. It started great and I was barreling along until it became very repetitious and began to lag. I got to the set-up for the big showdown finale and just... stopped. 40 pages from the end I had no desire to continue and the book still sits on my shelf unfinished.
Movies can do wonders with the skeleton of an idea though, so I remain optimistic for a feature film adaptation.
I began one of his books and stopped reading about 100 pages in, despite the intriguing premise of a virus that only kills Christians (from memory). The main character, and the writing itself, just came across as very cliched. Which would have been fine in the eighties when I was but a naive spy/thriller reader, but it just came across as flat for a book written in 2005. Ah that's it, it was called "Blowback".
Still, I suppose I can't be too harsh on Brad Thor. He's written fourteen books. That's fourteen more books than I've written.
Wow, not a lot of enthusiasm for Thor here! Three different people unable to finish his books is enough to dissuade me from putting much time into one any time soon. (Though I do indeed love the elements mentioned in the article of Lions of Lucerne!) Still, bad books can sometimes make good movies, so I'd be interested to see something happen with this... though that seems unlikely at this point several years later.
(I do disagree with Le Samourai about Ludlum though.)
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