THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY: ONE TRUE SENTENCE

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

Although my series centers on Twentieth Century crime novelist and screenwriter Hector Lassiter, as many critics and readers have noted, the novels sometimes seem nearly as much about Lassiter’s longtime friend, Ernest Hemingway.

In the first Lassiter installment, the largely 1957-set Head Games, Hem was a kind of off-camera presence. Yet Hemingway cast a long enough shadow in my debut that considerably more than one reader or critic mistakenly left Head Games believing Hemingway to have been an actual character in the book.

In Lassiter #2, the decades-spanning Toros & Torsos, Hemingway was Hector’s sidekick across years of the story’s action.

2010 brought Print the Legend, a novel turning on the possibility that Hemingway’s death in the summer of 1961 might have been something other than the suicide history records.

Hemingway loomed over Print as a kind of restless ghost, and, at key points, Hem was seen in flashback.

In 2011 came One True Sentence. In a more traditionally structured series, this novel would originally have been a series launcher from the get-go. The novel is set during one week in Paris, in February 1924.

Paris. The 1920s. We all have firm and fixed notions about how it must have been. I’m wagering most of us have had those notions set for us by at least some of the writings of Ernest Hemingway.

As OTS opens, Hector Lassiter and Ernest Hemingway are in their early twenties. They’ve had some short stories printed, but neither has yet published — hell, even completed drafting — a proper novel. It’s the youngest we’ve seen Hector and Hem together in the Lassiter series.

The questions began coming my way quickly from early OTS interviewers and newcomers to the books: Why Hemingway?

Partly it’s because I intended the Lassiter series to be as much about key artistic movements — modernism, surrealism, post-modernism and so on — as about solving mysteries. Hemingway was a key figure who straddled or helped to define all those pesky -isms.

Blame it, too, on young, overlapping reads of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. Mostly the latter.

From biographies and letters, I see now how contrived or even disingenuous much of Hemingway’s posthumous memoir truly is.

Doesn’t matter. I’m a trust-the-art, not-the-artist kind of guy. The work is the thing. I was seduced, early and powerfully, by Hemingway’s portrayal of what it was like to be a young journalist and aspiring fiction writer in Paris in the 1920s; the place, Gertrude Stein famously said, “Where the Twentieth Century was.”

As a young journalist drafting novels in the evening and on weekends — albeit doing all that writing in Ohio — my life was changed by A Moveable Feast. I wanted to live that book. Hemingway became my master and kind of the literary equivalent of what Elvis represents to rockers — the goal and the cautionary example.

Knowing I couldn’t really live Hem’s memoir, I promised myself to write my own Paris novel that I could live in — to put my own vision of the City of Light on the page. The question was what would that novel be about? Who would anchor that book? Years passed.

Between January 2005 and December 2007, as a fiction writer, I had what Hemingway used to term “a belle époque.” I wrote most of the Lassiter series, the standalone novel El Gavilan and the nonfiction book, Rogue Males. The pages were piling up.

Simultaneously, I was re-reading a lot of Hemingway. I came back to A Moveable Feast with a grown man’s eyes.

I wrote Toros & Torsos between Halloween and Christmas of 2006. On January 1, I began to write One True Sentence (then traveling under the working title of City of Lights). Unconsciously, my own 1920s Paris novel was unfolding in my head even as I was in the early going of composing Toros.

From the jump, OTS was envisioned to be a noir turn on A Moveable Feast and a kind of post-modern dark comedy about the mystery genre itself.

GERTRUDE STEIN

Gertrude Stein was an unabashed mystery fan (more on this in a post yet to come). She called her favorite mystery writers her “mystifiers.” In an early meeting, Stein urged on a young Hemingway a copy of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Jack the Ripper tale, The Lodger.

I envisioned a series of murders of literary magazine editors along both banks of the Seine — crimes that would hit a commercially unviable writer like Gertrude Stein where she lived. In desperation, Stein — fixed in the Nero Wolfe-like comfort of her favorite chair in her salon — gathers to her a collection of Paris-dwelling mystery writers to stop the killings.

The detectives in One True Sentence include an Agatha Christie-esque British writer of locked-room mysteries who has long been established as Hector’s bête noire. We meet a fetching American female mystery writer named Brinke Devlin who looks like Louise Brooks and writes like Craig Rice. Representing the hard-boiled school, we have Hector (and, in his way, Hemingway). Bouncing up against this collection of unlikely amateur detectives is a Simenon-like French inspector. 

LOUISE BROOKS

As One True Sentence unfolds, we meet characters and witness events that will inform the early novels of Hector Lassiter and Ernest Hemingway. We’re a party to a secret history of events living between the lines of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

We’re afforded a glimpse of the portion of the iceberg lurking below the water line to put it in Hemingway’s own artistic terms.

For Hemingway, particularly, February 1924 was a kind of pivotal moment in time. Intimations of a tipping point being reached for the young writer were just being felt.

Hem was newly returned to Paris after a disastrous return to daily journalism in Toronto. He came back with one small press collection of his writings behind him, and another pending in the fall. He became a subeditor to Ford Madox Ford’s literary magazine, The Transatlantic — a plot point in OTS. Despite no novel to support it, Hem’s reputation as a fiction writer to watch was just beginning to spread.

All of those key literary and artistic figures who appear in A Moveable Feast were in Paris that winter — crowding in some last good food and wine before abandoning the city to an expected influx of tourists anticipating Paris’ role as host city to the Summer Olympic games.

And then there were the suicides.

Paris always had its share of men and women intent upon killing themselves. The always-suicide-preoccupied Hemingway even wrote an early, undistinguished poem about all that.

Yet as the winter of 1924 unfolded in a haze of snow and freezing rain, the suicide rate in Paris spiked, particularly in artistic circles.

Handwringing journalists and the like blamed the young artistic community for the spate of self-inflicted deaths (“Terror Sweeps Latin Quarter” one 1924 French headline read). All those deaths suggested to me the key plot point for OTS. They inspired a Dada-like artistic clique called “Nada” — a dark cult embracing murder and suicide.

This, then, is the milieu of One True Sentence: A single week in Paris in all of its winter 1924 glory. Murder, sex and all those great writers and painters colliding, many of them treacherously bent upon screwing one another in something other than a carnal sense.

It’s Hector Lassiter and Ernest Hemingway at ground zero. It’s the key romance in Hector’s life with the woman who makes Hector, well, Hector.

It seems appropriate that Papa have the last word on the time and the place: “But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight."

NEXT: A Passport to France

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

BRINKE DEVLIN: THE WOMAN WHO 'CREATED' HECTOR LASSITER

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

"Oh, how the ghost of you clings..."

A few years back, I was in New York City chatting with the person who casts voices and selects readers for Recorded Books’ unabridged audio treatments of novels and nonfiction titles.

We’d finished touring the Recorded Books studios and offices and had settled in to discuss my recurring character, crime novelist Hector Lassiter, and how Hector and all those real, now-gone people who populate the Lassiter series of historical literary thrillers might best be transitioned to audio.

Tom Stechschulte was already a virtual lock to “be” Hector. But when I mentioned there would be shifts in point of view from book to book in the latter going — some presented in third-person, others narrated by Hector — it raised the issue of whether a second reader might be in order. Say…an actress.

“If Hector was to have a recurring love interest,” she said, “well, then…”

I assured the Recorded Books studio director that was not the case; that each novel would likely have a different female character playing against Hector.

That was true up to a point. But across the several novels in the series, there are two women in Hector’s life who potentially hang in there for more than a single book or even two.

There was this one formidable woman, in particular, whom I had already committed to paper.

In original publication sequence, ONE TRUE SENTENCE is the fourth novel about Hector Lassiter, a man variously known as “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives,” as well as, “the last man standing of the Lost Generation.”

If, as noted, OTS is the fourth novel in publication sequence, it was actually conceived to be number three. But it doesn’t stop there in terms of “backward time.”

Long before OTS' original 2011 publication, but with several of the Lassiter books already written or in my head, I figured after just two previous installments, readers would likely form a fairly strong and fixed notion of Hector Lassiter, the man.

In this cycle of novels that has never taken the direct, chronological route that ninety-nine percent of other mystery series hew to, it seemed to me that around book three the time would be ripe for a major change up.

Through newspaper articles and magazine profiles excerpted in the first Lassiter novel, HEAD GAMES — through other characters’ asides and Hector’s own admissions — a kind of informal biography of Texas-born Hector Lassiter emerges through the first three published books.

But most of that biographical material is confined to the late 1920s and beyond.

We know little, if any, about Hector’s childhood. We haven’t been afforded a glimpse of how Hector became Hector.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE is the first of two, back-to-back books that supply those answers.

While previous novels have sprawled across continents and decades, ONE TRUE SENTENCE occurs across a single week in Paris, circa February 1924.

OTS introduces the woman in Hector Lassiter’s crowded life, the fetching and bewitching mystery writer Brinke Devlin.

Brinke was name-checked in PRINT THE LEGEND (Lassiter #3 in original publication sequence), but she’s always been lurking in the background. Hell, I’d fully written her story before my debut, HEAD GAMES, ever saw print.

It is Brinke, who, at base, “created” the Hector Lassiter his readers know. Brinke is a darkly creative woman who moves Hector from the path of a struggling, often-blocked literary writer to the pulp-frenzied, dark-end-of-the-street, crime fiction novelist Hector is fated to be. As the series continues to unfold, it becomes clear that Brinke becomes a kind of dark template for the women who will attract an older Lassiter.

But there's even more of a lingering effect Brinke exerts on Hector that goes to his core as an author.

Years before Hector is tagged with his designation as a novelist who writes what he lives and puts his turbulent life down on the page, slightly older and much more worldly Brinke is already pioneering the dark art of living one’s life to feed one’s fiction.

From conception, Brinke was formulated to be très formidable. Visually, and more than a bit biographically, Brinke was modeled on silent screen siren Louise Brooks, a globe-trotting woman who eventually left acting and became a writer of sorts.

I put at least as much effort into shaping Brinke and her back-story as I did Hector’s. Though I never envisioned writing a series about her, I approached the task with the notion that I actually intended Brinke to stand as her own series character. (Some nights, I still think about writing novels about her, pre-Hector. Like Hector, I've come to miss her company.)

At the same time, ONE TRUE SENTENCE also casts Brinke as a potential villainess — a complication that further kick-starts the evolution of Hector’s own eventual, shades-of-gray persona and sets him up for the still-rather controversial and Goodreads debated-over love affair(s) depicted in TOROS & TORSOS.

If, as the saying goes, the boy is father to the man, then equally true, I think, is the fact that a bewitching, dark muse arriving at the right wrong moment in that man’s life makes him the author he’s fated to be.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE charts the beginning of Brinke's shaping of Hector; a process that is completed in its sequel, FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND, also available (but for the first time ever) on Aug. 21. More details on ordering coming soon. 

NEXT: The story behind the story of ONE TRUE SENTENCE.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

How I Came To Write ONE TRUE SENTENCE

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

The cover for the new
Betimes Books' release of
ONE TRUE SENTENCE.

In terms of original publication sequence, ONE TRUE SENTENCE, is the fourth in my series centered on a crime novelist and sometimes screenwriter named Hector Lassiter. Chronologically, however, it is the first — depicting Hector as a young writer searching for his voice.

Hector first appeared in long form in my debut novel HEAD GAMES (2007). I thought I’d written a standalone novel. I next moved onto a contemporary thriller about illegal immigration eventually published as EL GAVILAN (2011).

But then I soon revisited Hector for a novel called TOROS & TORSOS.

At the time that T&T was freshly completed, HEAD GAMES wasn’t yet published, wasn’t even sold — dwelling in a kind of limbo and stubbornly unread by its eventual first publisher Ben LeRoy.

Despite that fact, when the manuscript for Lassiter #2 was completed, my then-agent and I agreed T&T, written in a pulp-frenzy style of less than three months, represented a kind of artistic corner-turning and leap forward: it demanded a follow up novel with Hector that would build on the mood and dark literary and metafictional undertow established in T&T.

Looking for ideas, I took a week and dusted off a manuscript about the suicide of Ernest Hemingway I was then calling PAPA’S LAST WIFE. With my agent’s blessing and encouragement, I quickly rewrote what was then a novel about a young writer named Hannah Paulson to insert Hector Lassiter into the book (a novel subsequently published in 2010 under the title PRINT THE LEGEND). To my mind, PTL was a novel I’d publish toward the end of any Hector Lassiter series, if we ever got that far. For me, PTL didn’t seem quite the proper follow up to T&T. I wanted it to be the next-to-last novel featuring Hector.

With New Year’s Day looming, I continued to cast around for what I could regard as the one true follow up to TOROS & TORSOS. I spent those closing days of the year revisiting favorite books and biographies; listening to old favorite music and surfing the net for odd scraps of history nobody had yet plundered for plot lines. Call it prospecting for inspiration: I needed a dark, enticing muse for this new, still unthought-of novel.

On TV, in the background, Country Music Television was playing. Typically that channel just pours out videos by the usual suspects who’ve made contemporary country music feel too much like a wasteland. But that hour’s program was something different — a fleeting leap into cutting edge music in which up-and-coming or avant-garde folksingers and country musicians, quirky singer-songwriters, were showcased.

This particular music video bounced for me: The song was entitled “Passenger 24.” It opens with a driving piano, then quickly brings in some drum work. Then its story unfolds: A rider on a bus with a bag stuffed with cocaine who’s “Left a girl in Amarillo, about as sweet as rum.”

The singer/songwriter was this siren songstress named Melissa McClelland. As her song unreeled against images of Old Route 66 — a tune rife with noir undercurrents — I swung by Melissa’s website. Seemed she’d trucked with Sarah McLachlan for several years. The tune that so engaged me was from Melissa’s new album called, “Thumbelina’s One Night Stand.”

I grabbed that album; took the plunge.

HEAD GAMES grew out of obsessive listening to select Tom Russell songs and albums — an influence so key to that novel’s creation I ended up dedicating HG to Russell for “providing its soundtrack.”

“Thumbelina’s One Night Stand” fulfilled the same function for me. What I regarded as Hector Lassiter number 3, a book I was then calling CITY OF LIGHTS, grew directly out of the inspiration of Melissa’s album — a cycle of songs about unrequited love, self-destructive passion and, ahem…suicide.

The cover for the original U.S.
release of
ONE TRUE SENTENCE,
painted by
Echo Chernick

Song’s like “Solitary Life,” sung from the perspective of a woman in her coffin (“brooding just beneath the varnished pine/wicked smell of death and turpentine”) and “You Know I Love You Baby” (“You look like me/I look like hell”) suggested characters and motivations that wove their way into the plot of a book I saw as a study of 1920s Paris and its rampant artistic nihilism, a novel in which we would observe Hector Lassiter move from aspiring literary writer to crime novelist; a novel in which Hector would engage the most compelling and influential woman in his storied life.

Some writers are inspired by other writer’s books.

Some find their muse in movies.

For me, music has always been the touchstone for creation.

Other novelists have certainly influenced me, even inspired me, but forced to point to those who truly shaped my own writer’s voice, I’d point in directions other than the usual crime and mystery fiction suspects.

I learned more about the craft and strategy of putting words together from Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury and Jimmy Webb than Hammett and Chandler.

For better or worse, Hemingway certainly left his mark on me as a writer, but to an arguably greater degree, so did Kristofferson.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE may read like A MOVEABLE FEAST recast as a crime novel, and in a way that’s true, so far as it goes. But OTS wouldn’t exist without the inspiration of a certain Chicago-born singer songwriter sometimes likened to a “female Tom Waits.”

Gracias, Melissa.

COMING NEXT: The woman who "created" Hector Lassiter.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

OFFICIAL HECTOR LASSITER RELEASE DATE SET: AUG. 21

In just a few weeks, Hector Lassiter returns from a three year hiatus with the first five novels set to release between now and the end of September.

Three of these novels are appearing for the first time; two are repackaged and slightly tweaked versions of previously published Lassiters. Each of these titles will be available in trade paperback and eBook formats, with new introductions and reader group discussion questions.

On Aug. 21, Betimes Books will present the definitive editions of ONE TRUE SENTENCE, FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND and TOROS & TORSOS. A few weeks after that, two more brand new Lassiters will appear: the World War II-era novels THE GREAT PRETENDER and ROLL THE CREDITS, (the latter is Hector's first-person account of his World War II experiences as a correspondent and secret OSS member).

As previously announced, Betimes Books will be presenting the novels in something like chronological order for the first time. Although some of the novels jump from year to year or decade to decade in the telling, the novels will now be published in the order in which the main action starting the novel is set.

Here, for the first time, is the full list of Hector Lassiter novels coming your way this year and their (new) proper publication sequence:

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Opens in Paris, in February 1924.

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Opens in Paris, December, 1924 before moving on to Key West, in February 1925.

TOROS & TORSOS: Opens in Key West, September 1935.

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Opens in New York City, October 1938.

ROLL THE CREDITS: Opens in occupied France, 1940.

After a brief holiday break, the remaining novels and a short story collection will soon follow.

Stay tuned for more ordering information and first cover glimpses of THE GREAT PRETENDER and ROLL THE CREDITS, coming soon.

Check in here for more about Betimes Books—a groovy new house doing some interesting things by the likes of my Borderland Noir compadre Sam Hawken and a new literary thriller by the mysterious Hadley Colt. Also please consider liking Betimes on Facebook and following the house on Twitter. You're going to be seeing and hearing more about this publisher in days to come.

Here's a look at Betimes very slick trailer for Colt's PERMANENT FATAL ERROR. Like I said...a very intriguing new publishing house.

JAMES GARNER, 1928-2014: REMEMBERING ROCKFORD

 Note: This article originally appeared in Crimespree Magazine in 2010.

I recently spent the winter weeks revisiting The Rockford Files.

It’s a little tough, now, to grasp what a radical, quirky show Rockford represented in the early 1970s.

James Garner was known to me: I’d recently seen him in Support Your Local Sheriff (an ABC “Movie of the Week” or the like). My mother had told me about Maverick — had nearly named me “Bret” after Garner’s character before opting for “Craig” Stevens of Peter Gunn fame.

Friday night, October 11, 1974: twisting channels (pre-remote days, don’t you know), I saw, “James Garner in…”

The first episode I caught was one called “Tall Woman in Red Wagon,” scripted by Stephen J. Cannell from a story by Roy Huggins.

Befitting the series title — but not typical of the show’s overall format — this episode was framed in flashback.

It opens with Jim Rockford digging up a grave — you wouldn’t catch Mannix, McGarrett or Cannon doing that.

In the course of the episode, we get Rockford’s déclassé digs — a house trailer with a million-dollar Malibu view. We meet his hectoring but loveable old man and we see that sweet tan Firebird (license #853-OKG).

We’re introduced to the slick mini-printing press Jim uses for cranking out on-the-spot business cards. We see a frustrated Rockford back his Pontiac into a suspected tail — at speed. Something else Barnaby Jones would never have the stones to do.

Case solved?

Requisite T.V.-P.I. closure?

Yes and no. From the get-go, Rockford didn’t toe the party line.

As the series evolved, we got a floating pool of recurring characters that gave weight and novelistic scope to Jim’s world.

The writing, featuring some early, brilliant work by David Chase, was sly, knowing and rarely risk averse.

The tone of the show deftly merged comedy and drama, suspense and parody and even some unexpected, powerfully mounted social commentary (season three’s “So Help Me God”) in a way precious few series have come close to matching.

Even the clunker episodes are never less than amiably watchable, and a couple of truly radical episodes are, in their strangeness, charmingly jaw-dropping.

Of the latter ilk, I personally favor “Irving the Explainer,” scripted by David Chase.  It’s a wild concoction of art treasures stolen by the Nazis, a sinister German chiropractor, agents of the Sûreté, a vintage and sleazy 1940s-era Hollywood murder and two men who share the name Irving.

The result is a dizzyingly convoluted thicket of suspects, motives and crimes, so complex Rockford resorts to hiring a UCLA logic student to flow-chart the case.

About once a season, in a wink at Maverick, Garner would unleash the persona of cowboy-hat wearing tycoon Jimmy Joe Meeker (think Brett Maverick with a car). These episodes, perhaps attempting to cash-in on the early 1970s’ success of The Sting (which in turn plundered the classic Maverick episode “Shady Deal at Sunny Acres”), turned on big-store con games:

Jim sold natural gas rights back to crooked real estate agents and mounted a phony King Tut exhibit among other bunko schemes run in the name of (cockeyed) justice.

By the time The Rockford Files reached its fifth and final full-season, the show was arguably at the top of its game.

Of course it had to end sometime.

Rockford’s end was more bittersweet than most.

A frankly uneven sixth season was suspended abruptly when its star’s health collapsed.

Garner — an intensely loyal man — had exacted a heavy toll on an already beaten-up body by increasingly doing many of his own stunts, partly it was reported, to spare his longtime and ailing stunt double.

When Garner’s illness lingered, NBC cancelled the series, and, in time, studio suits and Garner found themselves in litigation over accounting practices. (Legal entanglements with studios is a kind of running motif in Garner’s career: He also wound up in legal battles decades earlier regarding matters related to Maverick.)

The series went into heavy syndication…remained a fond memory.

In the 1990s, quite unexpectedly, the first of what would prove to be eight Rockford Files reunion movies debuted. The first four of these are now available on DVD.

Although a couple of the films feel slightly padded to fill their running time, for the most, the movies work extremely well. The chemistry is still there among the key players (although Noah Beery, Jr.’s “Joseph ‘Rocky’ Rockford” is sorely missed).

Returning writers Cannell, Chase and Juanita Bartlett used the movies to pick up dangling threads from the series and round out some story arcs lingering from the old days, bringing back, among others, Rita Moreno’s Rita Kapkovic and Rockford’s memorable ex-flame Megan Dougherty, played by Kathryn Harrold.

In the purest sense, the movies are a gift to longtime Rockford fans left frustrated by the series’ sad and jagged end.

While the movie cycle also didn’t end definitively — the last movie sat on the shelf for nearly two years before finally being aired — it was, on balance, a strong note to end on. It felt, for the most part, some capstone had been fit.

Years passed.

Everything, it seems, gets (or receives talk of) a remake.

Eventually, someone had the audacity to suggest a Rockford relaunch.

Lord knows, from Doctor Who to the latest Star Trek film, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by many a reboot.

But the idea of a wholly new Rockford goes down hard and thick.

If somebody want to mount some homage and slap a different name on the title character, well, go for it, I suppose.

But the personas of Jim Garner and Jim Rockford are too inextricably bound for any passing of the baton. (Granted, the same might have been said of Maverick’s leap to film, but Garner was very much a player in that one, and, from a character standpoint, could easily have been playing the Bret Maverick we recalled from the original).

Some things just shouldn’t be done (take shot-for-shot remakes of Psycho, for instance).

At this writing, it looks like NBC is plunging ahead with this mad scheme; I’m crossing my fingers the situation reverses and saner heads prevail.

Why spoil a wonderful memory?