Next on television

[Jerry Peterson]

Let’s be honest. We writers, we all want our books to be turned into movies or television series. A degree of celebrity and a lot of money come with it if the movie or the series is a hit.

It happens for few of us. Charlaine Harris a couple years ago with the True Blood series on HBO – vampires on the loose in Bon Temps, a fictional town in Louisiana. Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in a bar, is the character who makes the series work just as she made Harris’s books work.

The show, in its third season and renewed for a fourth, collected a Golden Globe and an Emmy in its first season.

Harris had been writing for 20 years before Hollywood lightning struck. Sookie first appeared in Dead Until Dark, Harris’s first book in her Southern Vampire series. That book won an Anthony Award for best paperback mystery in 2001. There are now 10 books in the series with Sookie solving mysteries that involve vampires and werewolves and other supernatural critters.

I admit it. I’m not big on vampire fiction, so I’ve not watched the series. I’m big on police fiction, so I never miss a Tom Sellick/Jesse Stone television movie. That series is based on Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone novels. Stone is the chief of police in the small Massachusetts town of Paradise.

Parker wrote nine books in the series. The first, Night Passage, came out 13 years ago; the last, Split Image, this year, shortly after Parker died.

And soon I may be watching a series on TNT built around Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire Mysteries. Longmire is a Wyoming sheriff. Six books in the series to date, Junkyard Dogs the most recent.

Two weeks ago, Johnson confirmed that Warner Horizon Television and TNT have hired a production company and a director to develop a pilot for a television series based on his books. And they’ve brought Johnson on board as a creative consultant.

Johnson is a genuinely nice person as well as a superb writer, as is Harris. Both have earned the success that has come their way.

Tomorrow: One-minute book summaries