JOHN MCCLANE

In 1966, author Roderick Thorp created a gritty detective novel entitled The Detective. It dealt with a homicide detective for the NYPD who is in charge of the investigation into the murder of a gay man in what was clearly a hate crime. The novel delved deeply into the different feelings people had towards homosexuality and those that prey on the gays. Two years later a movie was released with the same name and starred Frank Sinatra as the detective, Joe Leland. Both the book and the movie enjoyed reasonable success.

Thirteen years and several novels later, Thorp returned to the crime scene after a few books about widely different subjects. The story goes he had watched the movie The Towering Inferno and dreamt that night about a man being chased through a skyscraper. The idea stayed with him and in 1979 he revised his character Joe Leland. Instead of New York, though, he set the scene in L.A. where Leland was visiting his daughter. The culprits were terrorists led by a man named Gruber whom Leland had known briefly during WWII. The second book was called Nothing Lasts Forever.

Some years after the book was released, its rights were purchased and a movie made of it. The character name was changed to John McClane and the person McClane was visiting went from a daughter, Stephanie Gennaro, using her mother's maiden name, to be Holly Gennaro McClane, estranged wife of the Leland/McClane. The director switched the lead bad guy from a terrorist to a master criminal masquerading as a terrorist and threw out the part about the two character having met before. Other than that, much of the book made it into the screenplay, superbly penned by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza.

The movie did very well, producing very respectable profits for the studio and turning Bruce Willis, already a television star from Moonlighting into a major action hero.

In 1987, highly skilled and terribly underappreciated author Walter Wager published a stand-alone action novel entitled 58 Minutes. Mr. Wager, no stranger to spy novels having penned several books in the I Spy and Mission: Impossible series under his penname of John Tiger, was also very adept in the action crime novels. In this book Frank Malone is a NYPD captain, divorced, who is at JFK to pick up his daughter coming in from California for Christmas. A man calling himself 'Number 1' takes control of the airport and those in the area and gives them just 58 minutes to meet his demands. The planes circling above are due to start crashing from lack of fueld and Malone knows he has to step in to catch the man behind it all.

Looking around for another good book to use as a sequel to Die Hard, the studio bought the rights to the book and brought in one of the screenwriters from the first movie to adapt it. The reason for the airport seizing and the person behind it were changed but the basic concept remained and once again the NYPD detective John McClane was doing his thing.

The third, and so far last, novel in the series was a novelization well crafted by Deborah Chiel based on an original screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh. Hensleigh had originally created the story Simon Says but modified it to be a John McClane action piece.

So far no books have been penned on the last two movies.

An action movie done very well with characters you can like, bad guys you can hate, scenes you can believe and some you cannot but accept anyways, this is not something that happens that often - perhaps three or four times a year. 1988 was such a year when television star Bruce Willis, enjoying tremendous fandom for his role as David Addison opposite Cybill Shepherd's Maddie Hayes on Moonlighting, made great use of his off-time to make Die Hard.

The movie was a fantastic success and launched his already skyrocketing career into orbit, a rotation he has kept going by not sticking with just one character but branching into many different types, albeit many of them "don't mess with me" types. But he was wise enough to know that Die Hard needed a sequel soon or people would quickly forget. Two years later he came out with Die Hard 2, still great action and still a lot of fun.

Then he put his John McClane torn t-shirt into a drawer (actually, from what I heard, he donated it) and went on to other things. Always leave the audience wanting more is a great performer's adage and he did. He would let five years go by before he brought the argumentative, uncontrollable NYPD detective back. This time he was not alone and that was genius (hats off to screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh for having a great character like Zeus who could hold his own against McClane and to whoever came up with Samuel L. Jackson for the part). The two actors were incredible together and the movie was a ton of fun.

So what does a great actor with a great character do next? Apparently it was to do lots and lots of other things until the bringing of McClane back again was newsworthy and enough for old fans to clap and new soon-to-be fans to flock to the theater. The character was quite a bit older, as was of course all of us, and a guy who still did not want to do what he had to do but he was "that guy" once more. The movie was awesome. And then you had Timothy Olyphant and Maggie Q and no movie is bad with either of them, especially Ms. Q.

We did not have to wait over a decade for the next installment - just half a decade but the action was still great and having an even older McClane working with a very capable son who is rather surpirsed his old man could do some of the things he did was a delight to a lot of us old men who couldn't do them.

Will there be a sixth movie? I would like one but if not, I got the DVD of five really great movies to watch more times than my wife can sit through.