MostlyFilm

Niall Anderson looks at the history of actors writing fiction

Would you buy a used Western from this man?

You can’t imagine Popeye Doyle writing a novel. Buck Barrow barely lived long enough to read one. Royal Tenenbaum wouldn’t write a novel, but he might pass off someone else’s as his own. Harry Caul, on the other hand, looks to have the necessary focus, but he’d need to put down that saxophone and stop going insane for a while.

Gene Hackman, the man who played all these parts, hasn’t made a movie in almost a decade, but he has used his relative leisure to write four novels. Gaunt, sparely told and resolutely unmodern, the first three are blown off-course every few chapters by excitable procedural interludes – long disquisitions on how to cast an anchor in a storm, for example, or dredge up a sunken chest from the bottom of the ocean. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to lay these passages at the door of Hackman’s co-author, Dan Lenihan, a retired marine archaeologist once charged with salvaging the debris from Pearl Harbor.

For his fourth novel, a western called Payback at Morning Creek, Hackman has done what all great gunslingers and novelists must do: he’s struck out alone. Gaunt, sparely told and unmodern like never before, Payback at Morning Creek does away with Lenihan’s antic boyishness and substitutes for it an epic manliness that is all Hackman’s own. Thus remasculated, Hackman turns his attention to the real business: that of rewriting Shane from memory.

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