Holy Shit, Courtney Love Starred in a Lifetime TV Movie!

A notorious 1990s murder case AND
Courtney Love? Yes, please.

I was pretty busy in 2017, so I missed the news that Courtney Love—the answer to the hypothetical question: What if Nancy Spungen lived?—was appearing in a Lifetime movie based on one of the most notorious murder trials of the 1990s (not the O.J. case, the other one). 

And ignorant I might have remained were it not for a subscription to the Lifetime Movie Club purchased last Christmas. I was scrolling through the “Ripped from the Headlines, and Beyond” category when I encountered MENENDEZ: BLOOD BROTHERS. The title didn’t grab me but the name above it did: Courtney Love. Oh, hell yeah!

Love is cast as Kitty Menendez, the wife of entertainment executive José Menendez, both of whom were murdered in 1989 by their sons Lyle and Erik Menendez. Casting her as a murder victim tracks. After all, who hasn’t heard the name Courtney Love uttered in a news broadcast and waited for the phrase “found dead today”? But Love—who, among other things, revealed in a 1992 Vanity Fair interview that she used heroin while pregnant (vehemently denied at the time the article was published, then Love later confirmed that yes, she did); was arrested on drug charges in 1994 on the same day her husband Kurt Cobain shot himself; was arrested for an “air rage incident” at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2003 and subsequently banned from Virgin Airlines; was arrested on her 40th birthday for failure to appear in court and later taken to Bellvue Hospital in NYC; had a temporary restraining order issued against her in 2009 prohibiting any contact with her daughter Frances Bean Cobain; and was evicted from her Manhattan townhouse in 2011—as a Beverly Hills housewife? This has got to be seen.

“I’m not a woman. I’m a force of nature.” — Courtney Love

While it is kind of jarring to see Love, now so surgically altered she looks more like Tori Spelling in The Courtney Love Story than Courtney Love, wearing tie neck blouses, tending to the flowers in her greenhouse and using a treadmill, there is little in her performance that pushes Menendez: Blood Brothers into the Valhalla of camp TV. She has her moments, though, like when she tries to defuse the tension between her husband José (Benito Martinez, appropriately menacing) and their son Erik (Myko Olivier) by blurting out, “I can’t believe Lucille Ball died. I really did love Lucy.” 

The taming of Courtney Love.

Later, she suggests she and her sons could go see When Harry Met Sally, approximating the same level of eagerness she might display if responding to an invitation to do a couple lines with Tarantino while at Sundance. The delightful weirdness of Love feigning enthusiasm for a romcom is dashed, however, when the boys mockingly suggest their mother instead go see that movie with her girlfriends. I actually felt sorry for Love at this moment, imagining this was the same response she got from her castmates when she asked if she could tag along with them for lunch.

With his bad toupee removed, Lyle Menendez
is transformed into a young Peter Boyle
in Young Frankenstein.

Love’s most Lifetime TV moment comes a couple scenes later, when she tears off Lyle’s (Nico Totorella) toupee. Lyle storms off, leaving his mother to confront the cold, judgmental glare of Erik, who witnessed the whole thing. “He’s my son,” she sobs. “He’s supposed to love me.” Oh, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about! Then I considered that Love has probably cried something similar in open court when she lost custody of Frances Bean, and felt shitty for enjoying the scene ironically. But only a little bit.

I had zero remorse for the shit-eating grin on my face while watching Love’s desperate struggle to find her inner Shelley Winters during her death scene.

Evidently it is possible to under- and over-act at the same time. Her bug-eyed approximation of terror borders on parody, while her unconvincing screaming had me wondering if she thought they were still in rehearsal. Love sticks the landing, though, sounding genuinely terrified as she pleads for her life. Still, I found it hard to separate Love from the character she was playing. You know if Courtney Love were ever staring at the end of a gun barrel (Wait, has she? A quick Google search tells me no, not yet) she’d go down fighting, screaming words not suitable for Lifetime TV. 

We’re not even 30-minutes in before José and Kitty are murdered, but don’t worry, the producers aren’t done with their high-profile cast member just yet. Throughout the rest of the movie, we get Ghost Kitty — and, on occasion, Ghost José — who appears to Erik, sometimes to beg his forgiveness for not helping him (“I was weak”), sometimes to comment on the love letters he receives in jail (“I’m glad to see you like a girl. I never thought you’d have a normal relationship.”)  She even sings a few lines of “Beautiful Dreamer,” her raspy rendition making me think she could pull off an album of Marianne Faithfull covers (🤞).

The specter of Courtney Love haunts the Menendez trial.

As for the movie as a whole, Menendez: Blood Brothers is pretty much what you’d expect from a Lifetime movie. It’s cheap looking (the sets for the Menendez’s home look pretty cramped for a Beverly Hills mansion), and the 90-minute runtime means we don’t get more than a Cliff Notes account of the murder and sensational trial. Consequently, the movie has little patience for nuance and subtlety, often at the expense of good taste. At its ickiest are the scenes where José is sexually abusing Erik. Not content to just show José entering his son’s room and closing the door behind him, Menendez: Blood Brothers takes us inside the bedroom. And though the action does take place offscreen (there are still some lines you can’t cross on basic cable), the Foley artist leaves little doubt as to what Erik is doing.

As does the closed captioning.

Not quite as uncomfortable but still questionable are the scenes that seem to exist solely to show off Olivier’s hot bod, such as when he’s strip searched upon being booked into jail or working out in the yard. Ordinarily I wouldn’t object to gratuitous man-ass (you go, Lifetime!), but do you really want your audience thinking I’d hit that while watching your docudrama about sexual abuse and murder? I guess one could argue that co-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (yes, the same team behind the documentaries The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Inside Deep Throat) are simply acknowledging that the physical attractiveness of the real-life brothers played a part in the nation’s fascination with the Menendez trial, but, no, sorry, it’s strictly for audience titillation.

Am I being a hypocrite, showing screen shots of Myko Olivier
nude after calling the scene out for being exploitative? Yes.
Do I care? No.

Olivier, BTW, is quite effective in the role of Erik, and a good thing, too, as most of the movie is told from his POV. Totorella doesn’t fair quite as well in the role of Lyle, that awful hairpiece distracting us from his performance. Speaking of wigs, the one Meredith Scott Lynn wears as defense attorney Leslie Abramson is reminiscent of Barbra Streisand’s perm years, and though Scott Lynn’s performance is perfectly adequate I couldn’t help thinking it would be worth the sacrifice of a testicle to see Barbra as Abramson, never mind that’s she’s too old for the part. Barbra Streisand and Courtney Love in the same cheesy Lifetime movie—Oh! I just came.

Meredith Scott Lynn is fine as defense attorney Leslie Abramson,
but the thought of Barbra in this role is positively moisture-inducing.

If you have a genuine interest in the Menendez case, you’d do better to check out the 1994 mini-series Menendez: A Killing in Beverly Hills or, even better, Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders, released the same year as Menendez: Blood Brothers. There are also numerous documentaries, including a couple currently streaming on Hulu. If, however, you want to see the spectacle of Courtney Love impersonating a functioning adult, well, you know where to go.

The prosecuting Karen demands a word
with the Menendez brothers’ manager.

What if Tyler Perry Directed a Male Stripper Movie?

“Y’all seen Magic Mike, right?” Michael Jai White asks an audience of screaming women during the opening scene of CHOCOLATE CITY (2015). “Now we’re gonna add a little chocolate.” 

Consider that bit of dialog Chocolate City’s thesis statement. You’ll be reminded several more times throughout the course of the movie that this is supposed to be the Black Magic Mike. Writer-director Jean-Claude LaMarre even went so far as to name his movie’s protagonist Michael. It’s good to have goals.  

The story is pretty boiler plate. College student Michael McCoy (Robert Ri’chard) is trying to focus on academics, but he can’t ignore his family’s financial struggles. His mother Katherine’s hours have been cut at her job, and Michael’s part-time job flipping burgers at a local diner doesn’t even net him $150 a pay period. Not helping matters is Michael’s older brother, Chris (comedian DeRay Davis, quickly wearing out his welcome), who lives at home but doesn’t work. “You’re thirty and still living under my roof,” snaps Katherine (Vivica A. Fox, a long way down from Kill Bill but leagues above Cool Cat Saves the Kids). “Get a J-O-B! What’chu waitin’ on?”

“’Til I’m forty?” replies Chris, his first and only line of genuinely funny dialog. 

“Hey, weren’t you in Cool Cat Finds a Gun?”

A solution to the family’s financial woes comes in the muscular form of Princeton (White, phoning it in yet still too good for the movie), who sizes Michael up — in the men’s room of a strip club, no less — and hands him a business card, suggesting Michael contact him if he “ever thinks about making some paper.” Were this a different kind of movie I’d think Princeton was coming on to Michael, and that would be a movie I’d very much like to see. But this is a movie from the creator of the Pastor Jones films, so we just get a few lame gay panic jokes instead.

Michael Jai White literally phoning it in.

Michael, with Chris tagging along, pays Princeton a visit at the club he manages, the titular Chocolate City, discovering that — gasp! — it features male dancers, the brothers seemingly baffled by the very concept. Conveniently, it’s amateur night, and Michael, predictably, refuses the offer to get on stage, then just as predictably reconsiders. Before he performs the house DJ (a pointlessly cast Carmen Electra, but then, isn’t she always?) asks for a stage name. Unfortunately, she asks Chris, and hence Michael becomes Sexy Chocolate.  

And so a star is born. In no time Michael is taking home gym bags full of cash, paying off the family’s debts and buying himself a new Merc. Pretty impressive when you consider that the Chocolate City dancers seldom take off their pants, the ladies in the audience lucky if the dancers bare their asses. And you can just forget about seeing any dick in this movie.

This is as close as you get to seeing a cock in Chocolate City.

Robert Ri’chard tries to make the White Man’s
Overbite sexy.

Life as Sexy Chocolate does have its share of problems. Michael falls behind in his studies, specifically in his French class, the only class he’s ever shown attending (presumably so action movie never-was Xavier Declie has some screen time as Michael’s professor). His girlfriend Carmen (Imani Hakim, uncredited for some reason) is starting to ask questions, which he deflects with a lie about working with children. His God-fearing mother suspects he’s dealing drugs.

On top of all these pressures in his personal life, Michael has to deal with the resentment of Chocolate City’s one-time headliner, the aptly named Rude Boy (Tyson Beckford). While Rude Boy is an unpleasant character, I have to say I was in his corner. Michael’s young and cute, sure, but he isn’t all that. Adding an uneasy subtext to his stardom is that Michael is lighter than all the other dancers. In lieu of exploring this uncomfortable nuance, the movie chooses to have Rude Boy enlist a few guys to beat the shit out of Michael and steal his gym bag of money. 

At least Rude Boy knows why we watch male stripper movies.

It takes more than a beating to keep Sexy Chocolate off the stage, however. But then Carmen joins her friends DeeDee (Eurika Pratts, who should be informed she’s not as endearing as Rosie Perez when she talks like that) and some other chick for a night out at Chocolate City, on the exact same night Sexy Chocolate performs with his face covered by a gladiator helmet to insure a more dramatic/contrived unmasking. Rest assured, neither Michael inadvertently revealing his secret identity to his girlfriend nor his unsatisfying confrontation with Rude Boy is going to stand in the way of Chocolate City’s happily-ever-after. 

A puzzled Carmen watches her boyfriend Michael
fellate a soft-serve cone.

Chocolate City is nowhere near being a Black Magic Mike, coming off more like Magic Mike XXL if it were directed by Tyler Perry, only not quite that awesome. LaMarre employs Perry’s same approach to storytelling, mixing lurid subject matter, religion (LaMarre shoehorns his Pastor Jones character into the story), broad comedy, melodrama, racial stereotypes, and regressive sexual politics, and then throws a wet blanket over the whole thing. The movie is too tame to be titillating, too by-the-numbers to be engaging, too competent to be so-bad-it’s-good, and yet it somehow made enough money to justify a sequel.

Less Nudity, More Assholes

I don’t want to make generalizations, but I think the quality of a movie is automatically suspect when the writer and director is listed by their Instagram handle, as LaMarre is in the opening credits of CHOCOLATE CITY 2: VEGAS (a.k.a. Chocolate City: Vegas Strip, as it appears on Netflix; or Chocolate City: Vegas, as it’s listed on IMDb). Most of the principles reprise their roles in this 2017 sequel, which finds the Chocolate City nightclub struggling to keep its doors open (no reason is given, but I’d hazard a guess that it has something to do with their strippers not really stripping). Princeton’s financial troubles are compounded by his ailing father’s mounting medical bills. Foreclosure is imminent. In the face of all this adversity, Princeton does what any man would do: turn the whole mess over to Scary Spice.

Mel B. let’s the boys know they’re fucked.

Ernest Thomas is allowed one more moment
of dignity...

...before doing whatever this is, because comedy.

All is not lost, however. If the guys enter the upcoming National Male Exotic Competition in Las Vegas, they have a shot at winning a problem-solving — and highly improbable — $500,000. Securing sponsorship from Michael’s former employer, diner owner Mr. Williams (Ernest Thomas, his role expanded to the actor’s detriment), Sexy Chocolate & Co. head to Vegas, a city teeming with assholes.

After a run-in with some racist rivals (“Obama really got y’all believing anything is possible, huh?”), the Chocolate City guys discover that one of their former dancers, Pharaoh (Ginuwine), has become a celebrity exotic dancer in Vegas, even though his physique, undoubtedly the best in his bowling league, is not exactly jacked. Interestingly, Pharaoh’s troupe, the Hippz—which, because a poor font choice in the group’s advertising, I thought were the Nippz—includes the very same racist white guys who taunted the Chocolate City team earlier. Our protagonists aren’t all that concerned about Pharaoh gyrating with the Alt-Right, but they are seriously pissed that he stole their moves, which I can’t say looked all that unique. Now they have to re-choreograph their entire act.

But first they avail themselves of all a green screen Vegas has to offer. The next morning, hungover and still half asleep, they seek out the help of—I’m not making this up—Best Valentine (Mekhi Phifer), the “player who shows other players how it’s done” (i.e., he’s an arrogant asshole), who in turn and puts them in touch with former dancer Carlton Jones (Marc John Jeffries). Carlton isn’t as big of an asshole as Valentine, at least, and hearing Jefferies’ delivery of the line, “The women associate your sexual prowess with buuuulge and definition,” almost justifies the movie’s existence.

And the award for Best Cinematography goes to...

Michael/Sexy Chocolate squanders a night in Green Screen Vegas.

Rattling around elsewhere in the movie, Pastor Jones’ chubby son wants to pursue a career in exotic dancing; Michael’s ex-girlfriend Carmen, now an insufferable bitch, heads to Las Vegas, accompanied by DeeDee, their gay friend Kevin, and some other chick, to become Sexy Chocolate’s manager now that his brother Chris is out of the picture; and Michael’s French professor goes to great lengths to ensure his failing pupil takes his “state exam” (in this movie’s universe, not even France values the French language as much as much as Michael’s home state, which turns out to be Georgia, the same place that put this crazy bitch on the national stage). With the exception of the pastor’s son’s ill-chosen career aspirations, these subplots have no purpose beyond giving actors from the first movie another paycheck and letting the audience know that, even though it looks like it’s set in Los Angeles, Chocolate City was set in Atlanta all along (but filmed in L.A.). 

Pharaoh stands amidst his Alt-Right dancers and proudly
displays his one-pack.

Much of Chocolate City 2 is padded with footage of that male exotic dancing competition, which achieves the rare feat of making scenes of hunky men suggestively undulating boring. We already know who will win, anyway, so why stay awake until the end? There’s certainly no reason to start watching Chocolate City 2. Its predecessor, while not an example of masterful filmmaking, at least showed some technical proficiency. Chocolate City 2 is worse in every way, and on top of all that it has even less nudity. Clearly, @JeanClaudeLaMarre needs to stick to his Pastor Jones franchise and stop trying to make inspirational sexploitation a thing. 

One of only two scenes of gratuitous nudity in Chocolate
City 2: Vegas, a movie allegedly about male strippers.

I’m suddenly in the mood for kielbasa.

The Chocolate City saga didn’t end with this shitty sequel, however. LaMarre went on to executive produce Vivica’s Black Magic, a reality show in which, per IMDb, “[r]enowned actress and icon Vivica A. Fox starts on a new project: creating the first all-male exotic dance group.” (Really, the first one?) The show only lasted a season, ending with lawsuits and accusations of homophobia. LaMarre continues the Chocolate City franchise — sans Fox — with Chocolate City 3: Live Tour, in post-production as of this writing. I’m just going to stick with This One’s for the Ladies, thank you. At least those guys know what I want to see.

Pharaoh — but most likely not Ginuwine—flashes the crowd.

If You Lived Here You’d be Dead by Now

The cover to Condominium’s
1978 paperback edition. Nice
illustration, blah typography.

For all of Florida’s selling points—sunny weather, beautiful beaches, no state income tax, (relatively) affordable housing, plentiful cocaine—there are just as many reasons to avoid the Sunshine State: too fucking hot, hurricanes, corruption, Mar-a-Lago, a shit-ton of sinkholes, these fine people. For authors, however, all of these reasons make Florida a great setting for a story. As humorist and Florida resident Dave Barry remarked, “Florida is a never-ending source of material. It’s a statistical fact that while Florida has only 6 percent of the nation's population, it produces 57 percent of the nation's weirdness.”

Though Florida wasn’t without its weirdness when novelist and Sarasota resident John D. MacDonald was alive (he died in 1986), the state’s tinfoil hat-wearing population hadn’t yet grown into the national punchline/desired voting bloc that now provides fodder for the works of Barry, Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey. Not that MacDonald would write novels like Bad Monkey or Florida Roadkill had he been confronted with today’s Florida Man; though not without humor, “wacky” is not an adjective I’d ascribe to MacDonald’s writing. MacDonald’s Florida is more grounded, at once seductive and sinister. You’ll come for the sunshine (and likely a woman and a large sum of money), but you might not survive your stay.

In MacDonald’s 1977 novel CONDOMINIUM, Florida’s Fiddler Key, the fictional stand-in for Siesta Key, where the author lived, is a haven for retirees, drawn to the beautiful beaches, the warm weather and the affordable luxury of the Golden Sands condominium. They’re easy marks for real estate developer Marty Liss, who built many of the condos on Fiddler Key, Golden Sands among them, and has plans to build another one — Harbour Pointe — next to it, confident his luck will prevail despite a flagging real estate market. Liss, who “had a third wife he mistrusted and two grown children he despised,” gets his confidence bolstered by his secretary Drusilla, with whom he shares trysts between business meetings. Life is good in Fiddler Key, and it can only get better.

Of course, we know it can’t. Residents at Golden Sands begin to suspect they were sold a bill of goods. Many of them are up in arms about maintenance fees being doubled, especially when they’re already made responsible for any repairs needed in their units (Julian Higbee, who manages the Golden Sands with his wife Lorrie, is more interested in bedding the younger female residents than wasting time fixing a geezer’s air-conditioner). This actually sets the stage for a vividly drawn condo residents’ meeting, the tedium, the tangents, the tantrums and, ultimately, the futility immediately recognizable to anyone who has attended a meeting where the floor is opened for attendees to speak.

Retired engineer Gus Garver is a resident who has concerns about Golden Sands’ very structure. Gus only bought his unit because his wife Carolyn fell in love with the place, but the couple were barely in it a year before Carolyn suffered a series of medical emergencies, beginning, I shit you not, with a slip on a discarded banana peel, and wound up in a nursing home. Without his wife around to sing Golden Sands’ praises — and without a job to occupy his time — Gus begins to take note of the condo’s flawed construction. The building wouldn’t stand up in earthquake country, he observes. What are its chances in hurricane country?

Meanwhile, Liss runs into a snag with his proposed Harbour Pointe project when his bank puts a freeze on his line of credit. “The fat rosy ass has fallen off the economy,” the president of the bank explains. In an effort to keep in the developer’s good graces, the bank president puts Liss in touch with Sherman Grome, the shady-as-fuck CEO of an Atlanta-based real estate investment trust. Liss doesn’t like Grome or his questionable deal — a kickback scheme that requires Liss to take over Tropic Towers, a failing property Grome financed — but agrees so he can get Harbour Pointe built. And this is just the beginning of his problems.

Because Liss has greased a lot of palms in city and county government, construction on Harbour Pointe begins almost as soon as Liss deposits Grome’s check. To the horror of the denizens of Golden Sands, the lush tropical jungle beside their building is bulldozed to make way for the new condo. Liss, of course, doesn’t lose much sleep over the cries of his properties’ outraged residents. He doesn’t even worry too much about the FBI looking into Sherman Grome’s business deals — that is, until Liss’s associates start cooperating with investigators.

While Marty Liss’s business crumbles and Golden Sands residents’ dreams shatter, few people are thinking about hurricanes. Garver is like a dog with a bone, however, and with the financial help of Golden Sands’ very rich and very ill penthouse resident LeGrande Messenger (think Warren Buffet with cancer), commissions a colleague, marine civil engineer Sam Harrison, to make a thorough investigation to determine Golden Sands’ chances of withstanding natural catastrophe. Sam is just as dogged as Gus, though he soon becomes preoccupied by feelings for Messenger’s much younger and very attractive wife, Barbara.

And out in the Atlantic, tropical storm Ella is gaining strength as she heads toward the Gulf Coast...

More Than Corruption and Natural Disaster

The paperback cover for the 1980
mini-series tie-in is an upgrade
from the original design, IMO.

Condominium is an epic (1985 Fawcett paperback I read is almost 480 pages) and, consequently, it has a lot of characters. A shit-ton, even — far too many to keep track of, in fact, one of my few minor complaints about the book (my other being that some technical aspects, such as Marty Liss’s financial dealings and the development of Hurricane Ella, are detailed so explicitly they slow the book’s momentum). Yet, while many of these characters aren’t crucial to the story, they are essential to the novel.

As MacDonald introduces us to these various supporting characters — including a horny, hot shot real estate agent; an alcoholic widow; a militaristic blowhard obsessed with condo security; a city councilman’s adulterous wife; and an obsessive conspiracy theorist (a pretty labor-intensive pastime pre-internet) — Condominium becomes more than a novel about corrupt businessmen and natural disaster. It’s a novel about the so-called American dream, introducing us to characters who will do anything to attain it, those terrified of losing it, and those disillusioned by the very idea of it.

A passage that particularly resonates, especially now, is a conversation — a soliloquy, really* — that one of these minor characters, retired diplomat Henry Churchbridge, has with his wife Carlotta, when he observes that “Golden Sands and all of Fiddler Key stinks of fear” and why this explains Golden Sands’ resident conspiracy nut C. Noble Winney:

“On the local level they are terrified of predatory tax increases, drunken drivers, purse snatchers, muggers, power failure, water shortages, inflation and the high cost of being sick. Nationally they are afraid of big government, welfare, crime in the streets, corruption, busing, and industrial, political and fiscal conspiracy. Internationally they are afraid of the Arabs, the Blacks, the Cubans, the Communists, the Chinese, the multinational corporations, the oil cartels, pollution of the sea and the air, atomic bombs, pestilence, poisons and additives in food…

“[It] is the vast and wicked complex of interwoven fears, the personal and the specific to the vast misty uncharted, that gives all these people a feeling of helplessness when it comes to comprehending their total environment. … But these people think they have a God-given right to understand. They are educated Americans. They think that if anybody can understand the world and the times, it is an educated American. C. Noble Winney was an auditor, an accountant. Both sides of the sheet must balance. He could not cope with a nonsense world. He had to find a reason why he could not understand events. His only other choice was a permanent condition of confusion and terror. So one day he came across something which hinted at a vast conspiracy. He read further in that area. God knows, there is a very wide choice of fictional conspiracies to accept. The Rothschild anti-Semitic world-control mishmash made some kind of weird sense to C. Noble, and now he documents it. He is still afraid, but he thinks he is doing something constructive to thwart the conspirators by exposing them to people who will join him in his work.”

And this was in the 1970s. If only C. Noble had Facebook and Twitter in his time he might have learned about the Jewish space lasers.

Though I’m partial to MacDonald’s more concise thrillers (A Bullet for Cinderella, Slam the Big Door), I thoroughly enjoyed Condominium, its hardcore business talk notwithstanding. It was easy to see why it was a huge bestseller. The novel was later adapted into a miniseries in 1980 starring Barbara Eden, Dan Haggerty and Steve Forrest. Unfortunately, the miniseries isn’t available on Blu-ray or streaming. I found a copy of it on YouTube, but be warned it that it looks, well, exactly what you’d expect something recorded on VHS over 40 years ago and uploaded at 480p to look like. I haven’t watched it yet, but from reading the Wikipedia synopsis, the adaptation sounds like it has more in common with a Prime-Time soap than the source novel, because TV’s gotta TV. 

John D. MacDonald’s Florida may not be as whacked-out as his successors in the crime-in-the-Sunshine State genre, but it’s just as fascinating and well worth seeking out.

*I omitted the wife’s interruptions, which are minimal to the point they strain credulity. As if a married couple has the luxury of speaking in complete sentences, let alone full paragraphs.

ADDENDUM: This book just got a whole lot more relevant!