Are There Any Movies Based On Robert Crais Books?

Question

Are any of the Elvis Cole & Joe Pike novels adapted for the big screen, or just TV? Heard mixed things about film adaptations of detective series.

Yryn Gico · Answer

While there have been a TV series (‘Elvis Cole, L.A. Private Eye’) in the 90s based on Robert Crais’s novels about the hard-boiled private-eye Elvis Cole and his friend Joe Pike, no film has been made yet. If you enjoy reading crime-novels about a detective (alone or in team) who is hard-boiled but still has a soft core, you might also like the web novel ‘Claws of Stone’ (Magasins de Pierres). The story follows a for-hire-mage and a taciturn ex-soldier while they are trying to make a living in a hard and gritty city. I saw some analogies in the way the two main characters work together and in the kind of jobs they choose and how they solve them while walking a thin line between right and wrong.

Vivienne · Answer

I said before that many of Robert Crais’s novels would make good films. To date only Hostage (based on his 2001 novel) has been made as a feature with Bruce Willis in the lead role. A well made thriller with all the traits you would expect from a Crais novel, i.e. fast pacing, moral complexity and a reluctant hero who gets in over his head.

The novels of Elvis Cole and Joe Pike have, to date, remained unadapted in movie or television form, a curious circumstance considering the great film characters that Elvis and Joe make. The film of even a single Elvis Cole novel – a PI and his lethal ex-Marine sidekick – would make a great buddy-cop movie and the exchange between Cole and Pike is likely to elicit great laughter in almost every scene.

Crais’s standalone novel The Two Minute Rule would make a great film too. Written in 2009 this is a moving, explosive and often humorous novel by a man who clearly loves film. A father’s quest for justice is a powerful subject that has been tackled many times on the big screen. Unfortunately none of his work has been optioned yet. Here’s hoping that one day someone will do his books justice and make a film of The Two Minute Rule.

Weston · Answer

I am easily entertained by crime novels. One of my favorite authors is Robert Crais, who transports his readers to the scenes in his novels. Only one of his novels has been made into a movie, Hostage with Bruce Willis as Steve Plog, a hostage negotiator. It is very tense and provides great insight to this writer.

I have also noticed that his Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series have not yet been made into movies. The books are so full of great dialogue, action and especially characters, that it would be very easy to adapt them into successful films. Pike is a brooding, intense character and Cole is a wise-cracking smart alec. They would make great movies.

It’s frustrating though as Crais’ work is crying out to be transferred to the silver screen. All of his stories are intelligent, fast-paced and full of emotion which is the mark of great writing. If you are a fan of crime on the screen then do yourself a favour and read Crais’ work of fiction – ‘Hostage’ gives you a good insight into Crais’ style for film.

Robert · Answer

Especially his Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novels. They are fast-paced, gritty and I get hooked every time. I enjoyed the movie “Hostage” with Bruce Willis. It is a suspenseful, exciting and fast-paced movie similar to Crais’ novels. Although this particular movie was not based on a Cole or Pike novel, it still captures Crais’ style of writing suspenseful novels with complex characters. I wish that more of his novels, especially the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series, would be adapted into a TV show or even a series of films. The novels contain a unique blend of humor, action and heart which I believe would translate well to the big or small screen.

Josselyn Danae Valencia Villavicencio · Answer

Adapted into a film by Crais and a co-writer, the screenplay differs from the novel. Not having the alterations made by some unknown and inept studio executive makes a big difference in how one views the film. The author was actively involved in rewriting his work for the screen, and so the differences between the novel and the film are of greater interest, to see why he chose to expand on certain parts of the story, perhaps to give more attention to the police work and its implementation. This would be a fascinating study of a writer’s approach to adapting his work to other mediums, perhaps not the best novelistic version of a story but it is an author-approved version and thus of particular interest as part of the complex issue of literary adaptations.

Ivy Bacal Ladaran · Answer

I remain hopeful that the ultimate adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novels would be a high-end HBO or Max series. Each book could comprise a single season, starting with The Monkey’s Raincoat, possibly with some reworking of the time frame. At its heart, Cheney’s friend Tokens is the deep, loyal almost wordless relationship between two wounded men and it must remain at the center of the adaptation. While plenty of comedies feature ‘buddy-cop’ relationships, that is not the heart of this novel and it would be easy to make it so by adding in comedic ‘blanks’ in the form of gags and quasi-witty one-liners. While a full realization of the novels would necessarily involve a lot of location shooting in Los Angeles, it is crucial that the city itself becomes a fully fleshed-out character. Furthermore, it would have to be a showrunner who loves the novels, as well as the concept, and can bring them to life. Such a series could be the next big thing in the detective genre. In the meantime, I shall just have to continue imagining my ideal series while re-reading the novels.

Martha Cuarenta · Answer

I've never been able to get into much of the ‘Hostage’ movie. It felt like a middle-budget thriller of the time – not bad, but generally unmemorable. This is very different from Crais’s novels, which are full of his unique flavor. I mean, the Elvis Cole humor is there, yes, and the Zen-like action-man Pike, and Crais’s obvious love for LA, all gritty and grubby on the seedy underbelly, but sunny too. The movies fail to bring any of that to life. Instead they offer up a standard, decent-sized budget for a competent man-in-a-crisis sort of story, which doesn’t offer much more than a quotable line or two at the end. That it is not awful is probably the best that can be said for it. Forgettable is the worst that a film adaptation can be, worse even than a really, really ambitious, but failing, attempt to grasp the soul of a novel. (Ambitious failures, I would argue, are worth it – a perfectly safe and middling film of this sort could have been based on any number of thriller manuscripts, anonymously written). The plot works, now it’s up to someone to get the characters right on screen.

Gonzalez Baudilio · Answer

I’m surprised these haven’t yet been scooped up by a streaming service as a fantastic ‘buddy detective’ series with depth to characters and storylines. Apparently the tone is tricky to get right though – it’s not as serious and ‘grit-noir’ as a lot of other crime series around at the moment, nor as humorous as Psych, for example. Elvis Cole’s Los Angeles based stories do read very well though – Elvis Cole and Joe Pike are his two main characters and their relationships are central to the stories. I got to see an unaired pilot featuring James Caan as Joe Pike a few years ago and although it had promise, it was not perfect. Hollywood generally does a terrible job of transferring great detective stories to screen with much of the essence of the original book getting lost along the way. So, no thanks – I’ll just keep reading the books and hope that someone makes a decent job of translating them to screen someday.

Moises Bang · Answer

Adapting these books into a TV series now would have a new and different appeal than when they were first written. We are currently in a golden age of character-driven genre television, and people are willing to follow very complex, very flawed characters over many, many seasons. The “will they or won’t they” doesn’t have to be romantic; it can just be two people who are very deeply and very strongly connected as if they were family. And the cases that Dodd solves are always very current and very relevant, whether it be corruption in Hollywood, human trafficking, military contractors, and systemic injustice in Los Angeles as it exists today. A smart TV series would be so much more than just another period detective show. It could be a great look at modern-day Los Angeles and all of the interesting characters that exist in the city today.

Jesus Fuentes · Answer

This lack of adaptations could be good. They would preserve the characters in the minds of readers as perfect creations of the author, undulled by realization of human failings. No controversy over casting would ensue, nor would there be the fan wars over seasons of TV adaptations that are so imperfect that they ruin the book. As it is, my mental pictures of Elvis and Pike are perfect thanks to the written word of Crais over decades. I would be terrified of a mediocre TV series adapting these characters but even a good one would fill me with apprehension. Perhaps it is best that these remain literary legends locked into the pages where the author has the final say.

Libby Salazar · Answer

One challenge to adapting the Elvis/PI novels is Joe Pike. Pike is an enormously extreme character: He is almost superhuman and almost completely without expression. He is seen through the eyes of Elvis by the reader, so he is almost mythic. But on screen, he is a danger to become either absurd or boring — all silence and no emotional history. Pike needs to be someone with immense physical presence and, with one glance, hint at an enormous and wounded history. Such a role could be filled by a young Clint Eastwood or, in today’s HOLLYWOOD, by someone like Driver or Bautista. But casting Pike is possibly the greatest single challenge of the whole novels. Elvis, the charming, fast-witted PI, is a much easier character to cast than Pike.

Siya Dessai · Answer

The book is an extremely claustrophobic single location work – a house. The film is essentially the same story, but much more varied and it focuses on the police and the hostage negotiators, who were not in the book at all. They are on the outside, trying to negotiate with the main character in the book. So the film is really a cross-cutting action movie, whereas the book is a single location, psychological suspense novel. So in terms of what I would prefer, I would prefer the book. As a casual viewer of films, I can see why the filmmakers would want to go in this other direction, because they have different goals for different mediums. But the book is a very, very focused novel, and I like that about it.

Are There Any Movies Based On Robert Crais Books?

12 Answers

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