Threatened with success!

Olen Steinhauer

Opting for overwhelming success?

(Image from Contemporary Nomad)

No, not I, though yesterday was my 1000th blog entry -- possibly a valid measure for some sort of success, I suppose.

No, the person threatened with overwhelming success is my online acquaintance and blogger Olen Steinhauer, about whose Cold War detective fiction, I've previously written, for example, his Bridge of Sighs:

The novel has some excellent moments in which Steinhauer evokes moods that one expects more from an older writer ... as in this scene from Brod's earlier, wartime escape working with an international crew of misfits fishing the North Sea:

They were all sweating from the heat of the boiler room next door, and there were too many of them, sprawled on the floor and the table, the wind hissing over the deck above them.

The Croat described the walk from his friend's palazzo to a canal that was overlooked, high up, by a covered bridge that connected two stone walls. The doomed, he told them. They crossed here on the way to the prisons. They call it the Bridge of Sighs. The Arab asked why. Because the prisoner had been convicted, and this was where he saw that, at the end of that short walk across the bridge, his life would be lived behind a stone wall. Behind iron bars. He would live and die in the dark.

A bleak silence fell over the cabin. No one spoke. Each man remembered his own bridge, but Emil, still so young, only knew he was missing the power of the moment, and said nothing.

Those of us who have reached a 'certain' age understand this moment implicitly, and I can't help but think of Marianne Faithfull singing the old Dubin-Warren piece from 1934, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," which I think was played for me in Fribourg, Switzerland by my friend Tim Anderson around Christmas 1989, when Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu fell from power. We didn't cry for Ceauşescu, but the shattered dreams of all those wasted Eastern European decades saddened us:

I walk along the street of sorrow
The boulevard of broken dreams
Where gigolo and gigolette
Can take a kiss without regret
So they forget their broken dreams.

After a certain age, who doesn't have a few dreams broken...

Olen, however, can now begin to dream big, for from his literary agent, Stephanie Cabot, he has some wonderful news:

Stephanie was the bringer of news: Warner Bros would be optioning The Tourist, with the plan for it to involve…George Clooney....

Clooney and Grant Heslov have optioned the film via their Smoke House production company. Who stars, I guess, is up to them.

Now, this is only an option on Olen's recently-finished-but-not-yet-published-novel, The Tourist, and time alone will tell whether or not a movie gets made, but if this option does lead to a film, then Olen's readership will expand exponentially, and deservedly so.

A hearty congratulation to Olen on his potential success, and for the other good news from his hardworking literary agent, Stephanie Cabot, who likewise deserves appreciation for her successful efforts on Olen's behalf.