New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.

And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.

Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.

One For The Money

Romance novelist Janet Evanovich had hit on the highly commercial idea of mixing contemporary romance with crime suspense genre fiction. It was 1987. It had been roughly half a decade since her first romance novel was published. The romance crime heroine Stephanie Plum debuted in 1994, promptly becoming very, very successful. A commercial novelist had found her heroine and Evanovich made her fortune.

Rather than making her heroine a detective of any kind, Evanovich was inspired by Robert DeNiro’s character in Midnight Run . . . so she became a bounty hunter. Eighteen novels later, the character has a huge following. It’s inevitable that a commercially successful novel series inspired in part by Hollywood action would eventually make its way back to Hollywood. A film adaptation makes its way to theatres. Starring Katherine Heigl, the film is helmed by longtime TV director Julie Anne Robinson.

This is Hollywood’s first interaction with Evanovich. If the movie is anywhere near as successful as the series has been, Evanovich’s work has a future in Hollywood. With a fan base that has supported a very, very long series of novels, Stephanie Plum has a dedicated fan following guaranteed to see the film. How well does the action movie capture the action movie-inspired novel?

The Book

Fully engineered to be fun, commercial fiction, Evanovich’s One For The Money is an exceedingly breezy 320 pages in paperback. It’s a rather delicate blend of different action and romance novel conventions tied together in just the right way to appeal to women… and potentially men at the same time. I don’t know exactly what the demographics on the readership for the Stephanie Plum novels are, but if one were trying to fuse a tough guy’s action story with a soft and squishy romance for the sake of joining the two audiences, you’d come out with something looking more or less exactly like One For The Money.

Being an action story, the novel is designed to follow the lives of extraordinary people, but it’s firmly grounded in day-to-day life that Evanovich is evidently very, very familiar with. The story is set in Trenton, New Jersey. As the story opens, protagonist Stephanie Plum has been fired from her job as a lingerie buyer. She’s desperately trying to keep her head above water financially, so she seeks work from her… um… her cousin, Vinnie (described as looking almost nothing like Joe Pesci at 5’7,” thin and weasel-like.) Vinnie Plum is a bail bondsman who is reluctant to give Stephanie work as a bounty hunter until she threatens him with blackmail. The assignment she gives him turns out to be a sleazy guy she went to school with - a dodgy guy who has turned out to be a big-named hero cop in Trenton - a guy named Joe Morelli.

Continued:       1       2       3