You gotta love a good detective story. Hollywood certainly does, and over the years some of the best fictional detectives have made their way onto TV and movie screens, played by actors ranging from Humphrey Bogart to James Garner. We've seen Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, and the troubled, broken men of James Ellroy's worlds. One classic gumshoe of the printed page who hasn't gotten his due in a while is Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, star of over a dozen novels, including The Drowning Pool and The Way Some People Die. Now Deadline reports that Archer will be returning to the big screen in The Galton Case, courtesy of Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver.
Lew Archer is an old-school Southern Californian private dick in the vein of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. The Galton Case is actually the eighth book in the Archer series, but the producers are clearly hoping to launch a franchise if this movie is successful. Published in 1959, The Galton Case has Archer hired by a wealthy old woman to try and find her long-missing son and heir to her fortune. There's no writer attached to the project yet.
I remember discovering Macdonald's books in college during a "Detective Literature" class, and I'd love to see Archer back and done well. Macdonald's detective previously graced the silver screen in two films -- Harper and The Drowning Pool, starring Paul Newman -- and in the TV movie The Underground Man, where the role was played by Peter Graves. Brian Keith also played the role in a 1975 TV series that lasted a mere six episodes.
