IP Picks🔎: Two Series-Ready Procedurals & the Next ‘Perfect Storm’
➕ Do gentlemen still prefer blondes?
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This is a pretty big year for literary centennials. Among the splashy titles hitting the milestone are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. As the icing on the proverbial birthday cake, there’s also the 100th anniversary of the founding of The New Yorker. Somewhat lost in the shuffle, though, is a book that outsold them all. In fact, it was the second-bestselling book of the year after a Zane Grey Western, and it was celebrated by everyone from Edith Wharton (“the great American novel”) to William Faulkner (“I wish I had thought of [it] first”). I’m talking about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the biting satire about love and relationships during the Jazz Age by celebrated screenwriter Anita Loos.
If all you know about this tale of free-spirited flappers on the make is the 1953 movie-musical starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, Loos’ comic novel will be a revelation. It’s darker, sharper and more cynical (in a good way). Gentlemen is essentially a road-trip story that finds Lorelei, the titular blonde, and her best pal Dorothy, a brunette, traveling to Europe on the dime of Lorelei’s fiancé, the Chicago Button King Gus Eisman. He wants to get her out of NYC, fearing that she’ll leave him for a British novelist who’s pursuing her. Along the way, she sweet-talks a British aristocrat into buying her a tiara, becomes involved with a moralizing film censor, who she’s both repulsed by and attracted to, and gets analyzed by Dr. Froyd, who is mystified by her straightforwardness and lack of inhibitions. Somehow, Lorelei manages to keep getting men to foot the bill without ever handing over control.
Even if you’ve never read the novel, that brief plot summary alone should tell you just how powerfully Gentlemen has endured, whether it’s in the form of Clueless’ Cher Horowitz or Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods. Candace Bushnell’s book Sex and the City riffed on Loos’ vignette structure, skewering men (usually oblivious or creepy or both) for sport and toying with tension between love and financial comfort when it comes to marriage.
Having just read it, Loos’ novel seems as fresh today as it must have been 100 years ago, especially in light of the limp and pointless finale of And Just Like That. There haven’t been many stories in recent years that offer as smart and as sharp a take on the battle of the sexes as Gentlemen. Lorelei might be dumb, but she’s not stupid. She understands that every man is trying to get something out of her, and she wants something in return, on her terms. This has made her cynical about true love — something that the novel’s most famous line really gets at: “A kiss on the hand may make you feel very nice, but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever.” It’s a shrewd, funny, feminist gem.
Someone should adapt Gentleman, which is in the public domain. An earlier (and more faithful) film adaptation of Loos’ novel was made in 1928. That silent version is now lost to the winds of time. The 1953 movie deviates significantly from the book and loses a lot of its bite in the process. I’d make a period version that leaned into the novel’s satirical take on relationships and its disdainful view of men. The mix of period glam and jaundiced attitude about romance would resonate with the young women who want both equality and a trad-wife lifestyle. As Loos later said about feminists, “They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept very quiet, or it ruins the whole racket.”
🔒 This Week: An epic disaster and a promising pair of procedurals
On to this week’s picks! I’m kicking things off with one of the best disaster tales I’ve read in a long time, something that’s both thrilling and heartbreaking. Best of all, it’s one of those stories that everyone has heard about, even if the juiciest details will be entirely new for them. I’ve also got a pair of new(ish) procedural series — both are just two books in — that are ripe for series adaptation.
The full lineup for paid subscribers:
🚢 A heartbreaking naval disaster in the vein of The Perfect Storm.
𝐐 A Dept. Q-like procedural, but set in the rural Midwest.
🔪 A slasher thriller that updates I Know What You Did Last Summer for the age of social media.
🏞️ A procedural/treasure-hunt series following a homicide detective and a park ranger.
🏅 A true-crime thriller about a former Olympian who becomes a drug dealer for the Sinaloa Cartel.
