News
Who Ought To Play Gus In The Movie, The Hanging Tree?
22 July 2011
It’s been quite a week.
Just the other day, my agent Anna DeRoy of William Morris Endeavor finalized a deal with writer-director John Gray, who has optioned THE HANGING TREE for a film. John’s a hugely successful TV screenwriter and director who in recent years has shifted to making feature films. He wrote me a passionate letter about the book and, while recognizing that these things take a lot of time, I’m hoping that he might actually get a movie made.
On Friday, July 15, I left The Wall Street Journal after nearly 16 years. I still love the paper and my many friends there, but a great new opportunity arose and I figured, what the heck, why not try something really different before I get really old.
So on September 6, I’ll start as a reporter-at-large at Bloomberg News, specializing in big features for Businessweek. I’ll be able to roam widely and bore in deeply on the sorts of narrative and investigative features I’ve loved writing at all of the newspapers I’ve worked for. But it’ll be a different kind of writing—magazine-style—for different people and a different company. Fingers crossed that I don’t fall on my face!
For now, I’m on vacation, and heading up soon to Big Twin Lake, where I’ll be hanging with family and friends for a week or so—and I’ll be sure to pay a visit to the real Starvation Lake.
About the Author
Bryan Gruley is the critically acclaimed author of Starvation Lake: A Mystery, and the sequel, The Hanging Tree. His third book, The Skeleton Box, is scheduled to be published in 2012.
Now in its eleventh printing, Starvation Lake was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America, and won the Anthony, Barry, and Strand awards. The Hanging Tree was named a Michigan Notable Book for 2011 and a Kirkus Reviews Best Mystery of 2010, and has been nominated for a Barry Award for best paperback original. Reviewers have compared Bryan to novelist Dennis Lehane.
Secretly, though, Bryan would love to be compared favorably to Detroit Red Wings stars Johan Franzen and Pavel Datsyuk. He’s been playing hockey since he was a boy growing up in Detroit, and still plays regularly at Johnny’s Ice House in Chicago.
Hockey plays a big role in the life of the fictional town of Starvation Lake, as do two of Bryan’s other passions, northern Michigan and newspapers.
He loves to visit his Dad’s cottage on Big Twin Lake in Michigan’s northern lower peninsula—a few miles from the real Starvation Lake. When he’s not skating or spending time with his wife Pam and their three kids, he’s a reporter-at-large writing features for Bloomberg Businessweek.
read more