Books That Were Made Into Movies - April 2023
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2featherbear
Recently finished Crimson Lake by Candice Fox, & starting her Redemption Point. This after watching season 1 of Troppo on Freevee. Venue is a very tropical & rural North Queensland in the fictional town of Crimson Lake. The TV series opens with an addled dog walker devoured by a crocodile, and the book series notes that the lakeside homes all have riverside fences to keep out the crocs, which seems more prudent than Florida & its gators. Ted Conkaffey is a Sydney ex-cop charged with the brutal rape of a child & released for lack of evidence. He’s played by Thomas Jane in the TV series. He teams up with another outcast, Amanda Pharrell (Nicolle Chamoun in the TV version), a convicted murderer with a day job as a tattoo artist in the back end of a bar – her body is an active advertisement -- in an improbable private investigation enterprise (not much competition out in the boondocks). *
I preferred the TV version, since it focuses more on character building & development. The central mystery in the TV version is not in the book (at least the 1st novel; the Crimson Lake novels form a trilogy): it involves a Korean family, where the father’s remains turn up in the body of a crocodile. It’s a great enrichment, with the mother, daughter, & grandparents given complex, moving characterizations, made even more complicated by the father’s engineering work with an oceanic mining start-up. Against this we have the polyphonic interaction of the PIs dealing with the local vigilantes, where even the red neck cop is more interesting than the chump duo in the novel.
Crimson Lake reads a bit like a first novel, but Fox still gets props from me for imagining and tackling the difficult portrayal of her two loser protagonists, and her Amanda character is more amusing (& sometimes more scary) & less of a victim than the TV version. We know from the beginning of both the book & the TV series that Ted is not guilty, and while he has his allies, the world in general has certainly not exonerated him; whether Fox works this out in the trilogy remains to be seen. The second novel continues with Ted in first person mode, but then has a second thread with the diary of a pedophile who might be the one who has cast a shadow on Ted’s life. Very ambitious of Fox to try to get into this one’s head.
*Or check out Fox's words from Redemption Point in Amanda's voice, p. 74 on my Kindle: "Ted's the lumbering lughead, the basher and bruiser of villains, and I'm the spritely spider monkey, scaling back-alley walls in pursuit of baddies on the run." In fact, Nicolle Chamoun in the TV version is hardly the spider-monkey, though I prefer the book's Amanda not because of TV Amanda's mass, but because book Amanda is funnier & less emotional.
I preferred the TV version, since it focuses more on character building & development. The central mystery in the TV version is not in the book (at least the 1st novel; the Crimson Lake novels form a trilogy): it involves a Korean family, where the father’s remains turn up in the body of a crocodile. It’s a great enrichment, with the mother, daughter, & grandparents given complex, moving characterizations, made even more complicated by the father’s engineering work with an oceanic mining start-up. Against this we have the polyphonic interaction of the PIs dealing with the local vigilantes, where even the red neck cop is more interesting than the chump duo in the novel.
Crimson Lake reads a bit like a first novel, but Fox still gets props from me for imagining and tackling the difficult portrayal of her two loser protagonists, and her Amanda character is more amusing (& sometimes more scary) & less of a victim than the TV version. We know from the beginning of both the book & the TV series that Ted is not guilty, and while he has his allies, the world in general has certainly not exonerated him; whether Fox works this out in the trilogy remains to be seen. The second novel continues with Ted in first person mode, but then has a second thread with the diary of a pedophile who might be the one who has cast a shadow on Ted’s life. Very ambitious of Fox to try to get into this one’s head.
*Or check out Fox's words from Redemption Point in Amanda's voice, p. 74 on my Kindle: "Ted's the lumbering lughead, the basher and bruiser of villains, and I'm the spritely spider monkey, scaling back-alley walls in pursuit of baddies on the run." In fact, Nicolle Chamoun in the TV version is hardly the spider-monkey, though I prefer the book's Amanda not because of TV Amanda's mass, but because book Amanda is funnier & less emotional.
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