Blog From The Bench

This new fall TV season saw three TV series that were inspired, each very loosely, by books: the now-closed Kitchen Confidential, based on Anthony Bourdain's biographical book of the same title; the more successful Bones, based on Grave Secrets and other Temperance Brennan novels by Kathy Reichs, and The Night Stalker, which I suspect will be either reworked or retired soon (a suspicion raised by ads that announced a resolution to this Kolchak's MacGuffin -- his wife's murder -- next episode), based on a Jeff Rice thriller.

I just found a used copy of Rice's Edgar-winning The Night Stalker. Flipping through, I noticed in the prologue that Carl Kolchak does move to L.A. after the events of the novel, by the way. Since I've already read Bourdain's excellent Kitchen Confidential and Reichs's Grave Secrets, an OK read that loses its best element, the bilingual Montreal setting, in the TV translation, I'm feeling a rush of couch-potato pride because I'll soon have read one of the original books behind each of the "literary" new fall shows.