In 1987’s Withnail and I, two down-and-out actors looking for a reprieve from their Camden squalor go to beg use of Withnail’s uncle’s country cottage. But before entering Uncle Monty’s (the late Richard Griffiths, now best known as Uncle Dursley), Withnail and I lay out an important bit of strategy: you don’t get good things unless you already look like you deserve and don’t need them. Or, as Withnail describes it, “free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those that can’t.” It’s only by pretending to be effete public school products that they’re able to secure the keys to the cottage.
We can argue how much Withnail’s wisdom can be generalized, but it certainly seems true in the book industry, where anyone with fame, wealth and/or name recognition can score a book deal. And so this week brings news that both Jessica Jones star Krysten Ritter and CNN TV Face Jake Tapper will publish thriller novels.
The announcements were featured in Publishers Lunch.
Tapper’s new book is called The Hellfire Club, joining all of the other books with that same title. It’s set in Washington D.C. in 1954, “where a mysterious fatal car accident thrusts a newly appointed young New York congressman and his zoologist wife into an underworld of secret deals, secret societies and a plot that could change the course of history.”
Ritter’s new thriller, Bonfire, also deals in conspiracy, with this an environmental lawyer returning to her Indiana hometown “to investigate illegal dumping of toxic chemicals,” exposing an immense conspiracy in the process. Amazon’s pre-order page has more:
“Tasked with investigating Optimal Plastics, the town's most high-profile company and economic heart, Abby begins to find strange connections to Barrens’ biggest scandal from more than a decade ago involving the popular Kaycee Mitchell and her closest friends—just before Kaycee disappeared for good.
Abby knows the key to solving any case lies in the weak spots, the unanswered questions. But as Abby tries to find out what really happened to Kaycee, she unearths an even more disturbing secret—a ritual called “The Game,” which will threaten the reputations, and lives, of the community and risk exposing a darkness that may consume her.”
The Game!? As in Surviving the Game? If this is about hunting people, I’m onboard.
Maybe Tapper and Ritter are both born thriller novelists and we’ll soon associate them more with beach reads than saying words into cameras. Maybe. At least they’ll write better fiction than Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.
