Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the Brett Halliday
tradition of comic detective novels
Lee Horsley
Warner Bros. synopsis of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
The mid-century American pulp writers continue to be a rich source of material for film adaptations. The latest to emerge is Warner Bros' Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, in which the comic detective stories of the '40s arrive on the 21st-century screen via a series of transformations. The film draws, in part at least, on a Brett Halliday novel, Bodies Are Where You Find Them (1941), one of the Michael Shayne novels that acquired enormous popularity from the late 1930s on. Brett Halliday was a pseudonym of David Dresser, who wrote some fifty Shayne novels (over two dozen more were written by Robert Terrall, published under the Halliday pseudonym as Dell originals). The first novel featuring the red-haired Miami detective Michael Shayne, Dividend on Death, was published in1939, and from then on the adaptations were legion.
In addition to dozens of novels published over the following decades, the series also inspired film, television and radio adaptations - the first film coming out in 1940 and a radio show starting in 1944, followed, in 1960, by a television series, with Richard Denning playing Shayne. The television show was so popular that Dell brought out a comic book as a tie-in, which went back to the original Halliday novels for its stories. As Thrilling Detective notes, the first issue adapted The Private Practice of Michael Shayne, in which Shayne first meets Phyllis Brighton; and the second adapted Bodies Are Where You Find Them,
wherein a woman ends up dead in Shayne's bed amid speculation on what she was doing there in the first place (They always claimed "Dell Comics are GOOD comics."); and the third issue featured Heads...You Lose, where Phyllis dies in childbirth. I've always wondered what made Dell choose to go this route. Those early Halliday novels contained material that wasn't normally found in "good" comics -- drugs abounded, adultery was rampant, and the shortages in America during World War II were noted. Dell made similar decisions with Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Comics.
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/shaynemike.html
The original Michael Shayne novels were a mixture of comedy and detective story - as L.J. Washburn says, "The first half-dozen or so Shayne novels are unlike anything else in the genre I've read, a cross between hard-boiled private eye, screwball comedy, and fair-play detection." Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, based in part on the fifth Shayne novel, is also characterized by this mixture of tones, described by Warner's publicist as "a film noir crime thriller with a heavy twist of comedy and romance". The earlier influences are brought together with more recent mixtures of comedy and action, most obviously the Lethal Weapons films (discussed in the "Cop Action Films" section of Crimeculture) - the Lethal Weapons films being written by Shane Black, who is also the writer/director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The Warner Brothers synopsis describes the new film as: "a breezy take on writer-director Shane Black’s trademark buddy action/comedy oeuvre, [in which] a petty thief (Robert Downey Jr.) is brought to Los Angeles for an unlikely audition and finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation, along with his high school dream girl (Michelle Monaghan) and a detective (Val Kilmer) who has been training him for his upcoming role."
I am grateful to Jenna Green of Warner Bros. for suggesting a link with their site. All film images are from the official Warner Bros. site for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Copyright © 2005 by Lee Horsley
Warner Bros. synopsis of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Harry Lockhart (ROBERT DOWNEY JR.) is basically a decent guy. Sure, he’s a petty thief who skates through life on a shaky cocktail of dog-eared charm and cockeyed optimism, but he wants to do the right thing. He just doesn’t know how, exactly.
Harry’s perpetual bad luck takes a turn for the better when he and his partner are doing some after-hours Christmas “shopping” at a New York City toy store and the security alarm breaks up the party. In making his frantic getaway from the cops, Harry inadvertently stumbles into an audition for a Hollywood detective movie, and faster than you can say Jack Robinson, the producer flies him to Los Angeles for a screen test.
Thrust into the cutthroat world of L.A.’s pros, cons, losers and wannabes, Harry is teamed with tough-guy private eye Perry van Shrike (VAL KILMER), AKA “Gay Perry,” to prepare him for his screen test. Gay Perry is ruthless, relentlessly tough and – you guessed it – gay. He also has little patience for Harry, who tries out his acting skills by passing himself off as a detective.
It seems like nothing short of destiny when the thief-trying-to-be-an-actor-impersonating-a-detective crosses paths with Harmony Faith Lane (MICHELLE MONAGHAN), an aspiring actress who needs his help.
Inspired by her hero Jonny Gossamer, a fictitious hard-boiled private eye featured in a series of pulp detective novels, Harmony moved to Hollywood to pursue her dreams...but a few years and a lot of rejections later, she’s facing the harsh reality that her best days may be behind her.
When the mysterious suicide of Harmony’s sister intersects with a seemingly unrelated case that Harry and Gay Perry are investigating, they suddenly find themselves embroiled in a real-life murder mystery. Bodies surface and re-surface...long-buried family secrets erupt in present-day mayhem...and what began as a free trip to L.A. may result in Harry’s one-way ticket to the city morgue.
If he’s going to stay alive and become the hero that Harmony needs him to be, Harry will have to convince a reluctant Gay Perry to help him solve the case. He’ll need to channel Jonny Gossamer’s tough-as-nails swagger. And a little dose of luck – or is it fate? – wouldn’t hurt, either.
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