When it comes to recurring on-screen protagonists, I don’t think there’s any archetype more enviable than the globe-trotting superspy. They engage in all of the larger-than-life, world-saving heroics that superheroes and cops do, but aren’t emasculated by colorful spandex or hampered by the limitations of the law. If you follow the statistics of global book sales and box-office trends, you’ll find I’m not the only one who feels that way, either.
Spy fiction accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for publishing houses and production companies. Some characters, like James Bond and Jason Bourne, are better known than others, but that doesn’t change the fact that consumers are going gaga for all kinds of international espionage — and studios are doing everything they can to capitalize on the craze.
But the buck doesn’t stop with spooks. Assassins, private investigators, federal agents and forensic psychologists are also getting loads of love from the public and from producers, who are snatching up film rights to characters with canons as quick as they can these days. With built-in audiences and years of published material to mine for movie premises, characters like Jack Ryan and Kay Scarpetta are almost guaranteed to garner healthy theatrical grosses. That’s why both characters are making their way to the big screen (or back to the screen, in Ryan’s case). Meanwhile, Paramount Pictures is preparing a new entry into its Mission: Impossible franchise and Fox is forging ahead with a Jack Bauer film.
This week, Anton Corbijn debuts The American, an adaptation of Martin Booth’s novel A Very Private Gentleman, with George Clooney starring as an assassin who has a change of heart. Clooney is a newcomer to the spy game and his character in The American isn’t necessarily sequel material, but there are plenty of fresh characters from the literary realm that could, if given the chance, headline the next blockbuster action franchise. Here are a couple of my favorites that are ripe for the picking, along with a few that are already preparing to go from page to screen:
Most Hollywood heroes tend to be born and bred in the USA. Though I’m as patriotic as the next guy, occasionally I want to follow a protagonist with a more worldly perspective. And that’s exactly what you get from Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon novels. Allon is a former Mossad agent who, in the series’ first entry The Kill Artist, is reluctantly drawn back into service by the Office’s far-beyond-driven director of Op’s Ari Shamron (Armin Mueller Stahl was born to play this role) to locate and eliminate Tariq al-Hourani, a terrorist mastermind who shares a bloody backstory with him.
The books features plot-lines that are ripped from the headlines of international news, making for an espionage film that could be more realistic and timely than most others – and more controversial as a result. Populated by a delightfully diverse cast of secondary and tertiary characters and jumping from one exciting locale to the next, Allon is the James Bond of Judaism. Adapt him, please!
Brad Thor is an author whose name is deserving of a character in The Expendables and whose rugged, All-American looks would make him a marquee name-movie star, but it’s his literary creation – ex-Navy SEAL Scot Harvath – who will likely end up on the big-screen one of these days. Harvath’s adventures began in The Lions of Lucerne, when the President was kidnapped by a deadly terrorist organization and it was up to him avenge the deaths of thirty slain secret service agents and rescue the Commander-in-Chief.
Since that 2002 novel, Harvath has fought the War on Terror across over the globe, defending America and her ideals even in the face of betrayal and execution. He’s a literary Jack Bauer, a bad-ass covert operative capable of whatever his country requires. I may not agree with all of Thor’s politics, but the man knows how to write a compelling thriller and Harvath is perfect for an action-packed motion picture.
Aloysius X. L. Pendergast Moviegoers should’ve already been introduced to Pendergast via the film adaptation of the first Preston & Child novel in which he appears – 1997’s The Relic. The character was a supporting player in that story (and was omitted from the Peter Hyams-directed horror-thriller), but took on the role of protagonist in the duo’s 2002 entry The Cabinet of Curiosities.
One of the FBI’s most brilliant minds, Pendergast works out of the Bureau’s New Orleans office, but frequently travels around the country for cases involving serial killers. I think that what makes him most interesting to fans is a wholly developed backstory that describes his unique personality, tragic family history and cultural discernment in detail throughout the course of ten novels. The grisly murders that he investigates often involve elements of the supernatural, which adds an interesting dynamic to the stories and heighten the suspense. In a recent campaign promoting the latest novel in the series, Pendergast was described as a man who “fights like James Bond and thinks like Sherlock Holmes,” so why the heck hasn’t someone put him in a film yet?!
Vince Flynn’s die-hard counterterrorism operative Rapp was once a fresh-faced Syracuse University undergraduate who followed his high-school sweetheart, Maureen, to the Upstate New York school. When she was killed in the December 21, 1988 bombing of Pan AM Flight 103 on her way back from a semester abroad, Mitch was left heartbroken, but not without purpose. He was recruited by the CIA a year after her death and trained by the agency’s top men, including a handful of Special Forces instructors, who taught him “how to shoot, stab, blow things up, and even kill with his bare hands.”
Now he’s the star player of the Orion Team, a highly secretive organization that is supported by the CIA but acts outside the Agency. Mitch runs around the planet under his international businessman cover identity and squashes terrorist cells on his own or with the help of various special-ops units including Navy SEALS, the FBI and the Delta Force. His work would make for a fantastic Mission: Impossible adventure, but Flynn’s novels are infused with real-life events and characters that Ethan Hunt never encounters, like Saddam Hussein and members of Al Qaeda. CBS Films has been developing a film based on Flynn’s sixth novel Consent to Kill with Antoine Fuqua attached to direct, but the project has reportedly stalled. I’d love to see Rapp get the kind of big-budget action film that he deserves, because there are a number of exciting storylines to explore, including one where he must liberate a horde of hostages held up in the White House and another that finds him racing against time to thwart a preemptive Israeli attack on Hussein-controlled Iraq, which has developed a nuke that is meant for Washington.
Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm is a tough-as-nails U.S. government counter-agent, a man whose primary job is to kill or nullify enemy agents. He has a personal history that casts him as a soldier in World War II who participated in many violent and dangerous missions. After the war, Helm took up a life as a peaceful citizen and family man until a former colleague turned rogue and kidnapped his daughter, thrusting him back into action.
The cinematic possibilities of Helm were always clear and in 1966, when just six years after the first set of novels (Death of a Citizen and The Wrecking Crew) were released, Dean Martin co-produced and starred in four adaptations. These films were watered down and turned into comedies, which grossly deviated from the cold-blooded killer described in the source material. In 2002, DreamWorks optioned the entire catalog of Matt Helm novels and Paramount Pictures retained ownership of the rights after the companies split. Currently, Steven Spielberg, Gary Ross and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are developing a Matt Helm film from an earlier iteration of the project by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas (Wanted) that is decidedly darker and closer to the wonderful works of Hamilton.
