Interesting! I didn’t read it all, but are you saying many authors have written stories with characters named Phillip Marlowe?
I have now started four “capers” by Peter Mayle, finished three of them ; great food on the side. He does great restaurant, drink, menu, and food descriptions.
The Vintage Caper
The Marseille Caper
The Corsican Caper
The Diamond Caper (still reading)
I’ve listened to at least four of these!
John Sandford introduced a new protagonist, Letty Davenport, Lucas’s daughter in The Investigator. At page 55:
"‘What do you want to do?’ Kaiser asked . . .
"Get something decent to eat . . .
“Maybe find a rib joint,” Kaiser suggested: “Towns like this [Oklahoma City] got good rib joints.”
"Fine with me if I can get a salad.
“They wound up at Front Door Barbecue, where Kaiser ingested a year’s worth of cholesterol and Letty had an oversized salad with turkey.”
Well, wouldn’t you know, Oklahoma City is home to:
http://www.backdoorbarbecue.com/menus.html
P.S. Fried pickled okra! Pork belly! We’re in.
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I just started Search by Michelle Huneven. It’s described as a novel as well as “A Memoir with Recipes”. It’s too soon to tell much, but the main character is a restaurant critic and food writer.
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Sorry, this is a duplicate of a post I made in another food forum! If that’s against the rules please let me know but otherwise I realized this is probably a more suitable thread to put it in:
Found the pilot script for The Bear on this site I like. It’s an actual script (not a transcript) but NOT the shooting script and it doesn’t have a date or draft number.
I haven’t compared the script side by side with the produced pilot but it’s significantly different than the actual pilot including:
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Some character changes (eg, I think Tina is Tito in the script)
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Pretty significant dialog changes- some may have ended up on the editing room floor but other parts seem rewritten
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There’s a scene in the script not in the pilot that seems like it was repurposed for a different episode. It tickled me that they capitalized “DELI” in the script- generally speaking that’s a signal to props to make sure it’s included and apparently that was critical enough to them to include in completely different episode. As someone that spent even a little time in a restaurant I did like that and other details they specifically wanted included:
There are a lot more changes both small (eg, minor plot points) and large (eg, seemingly important character beats) and some other interesting tidbits. It’s not at all uncommon for even a polished pilot script to have these differences and makes for a fun read. It reminds me of old Justified scripts (also an FX show) where even what shooting scripts could be significantly different than what appeared on screen. Given the blocking, chaotic dialog, etc. I wonder if they take a similar approach to how Justified could deviate from the script based on how the writers, actors and director feel at any given moment. Very difficult to achieve if so.
EDIT:
In case anyone is uncomfortable clicking on the above link, here’s the URL for the site overall. For the moment the linked script is on that initial page and it should be searchable even when it gets pushed out of the most recent updates:
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In Daniel Silva’s latest, Portrait of an Unknown Woman Gabriel Allon is now living in Venice. Beginning at page 35, “He wandered over to the gleaming stainless steel Vulcan oven and peered through the window. Inside was the orange casserole dish that Chiara used for preparing osso buco .”
. . .
“‘It needs another thirty minutes.’ She poured two glasses of Brunello.”
. . .
"The meal arrayed upon the table looked as though it had been staged for a photo shoot by Bon Appetit – the risotto, the platter of roasted vegetables glistening with olive oil, and, of course, the thick veal shanks drenched in a rich sauce of tomato and herbs and wine. As always, they were fork tender . . . "
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Have always enjoyed Daniel Silva, but haven’t read him in years. IRL, he’s married to journalist Jamie Gangell, which is interesting. May need to read that, can’t remember him writing in detail about food in his earlier books.
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Chiara and Gabriel have always had good food and wine around, usually in old warrior Shamron’s company. Silva’s wife is a media name, and it might have been in the previous Allon book The Cellist that their dinner table current events conversation seeped into the manuscript. (We doubt that Vulcan stoves are installed in Italy in numbers even approaching double digits, so now we surmise how the Silva/Gangel household might be equipped.)
(Or it could have been another writer’s series that we always read.) Not James Lee Burke’s Dave Robichaux and his buddy Clete Purcel, who were usually good for some eating and drinking in Louisiana. They’re no longer a once a year treat, as Mr. Burke gracefully ages, we presume. His daughter seems to have taken up the family craft.
Michael Connelly, whether through Harry Bosch or Mickey Haller still sprinkles an LA menu or two into his manuscripts. By the way, the new Lincoln Lawyer series on Netflix held us better than Bosch on Prime.
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Oh good to know that about the LL Netflix series - I love that character. Jonathan Kellerman’s books actually go into quite a bit of detail about food in LA. I got tired of them after a while though and then discovered Michael Connelly.
If you like atmospheric suspense in San Francisco, I really enjoyed David Hunt’s The Magician’s Tale, and Trick of Light. Those books were written under a pseudonym that try as I might, I couldn’t determine the real name of the author. Accidentally I found out it was William Bayer, married to none other than Paula Wolfert! I was watching some cooking channel when they were interviewed and this detail came to light! Two favorite worlds colliding!
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Following An Old Man’s Game (reported somewhere above), in Reason to Kill, Andy Weinberger has Amos Parisman starting out fast at page 10 describing his L.A. Fairfax neighborhood:
“Back then there was no fancy Grove shopping center. No Whole Foods. No Trader Joe’s. There was the CBS lot and Canter’s Delicatessen and an actual farmers’ market where they sold broccoli and chicken and heirloom tomatoes. Real food straight off the truck. That was before the days of packaged candy and personalized license plates for kids.”
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Your post is the first I’ve heard of the new Lincoln Lawyer series on Netflix. Just watched the trailer. I don’t know. For me, , Matthew McConaughey IS and always will be the face of Mickey Haller, even when reading the books. Out with the old and in with the new I guess.
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We especially enjoy how Lorna and Cisco, and his driver Izzy, are depicted.
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I just devoured Portrait of an Unknown Woman. I am a big fan. I remember earlier books where the “housekeeper” at the UK property always served up great meals.
I also enjoyed Netflix’s LL series and Bosch-Legacy on Freevee.
FWIW James Lee Burke’s last book, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, has knocked him off my must read list. I skimmed through about 75% of it just to get to the end to see if there was any point to it. There wasn’t. Sad to say I don’t think he is ageing gracefully.
Yes, there comes a time when you just have to give up on a book.
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We never took to James Lee Burke’s Holland series. It’s Dave Robichaux for us; the series’s writing has never disappointing, and a decades ago after discovering Burke through Black Cherry Blues, we were lucky to have had business trips to S.W. Louisiana and seen the well-depicted scenery and eaten many lunches at Antlers in Lafayette.
For us, the best part of Portrait of An Unknown Woman was the recap of the reality of that slice of the fine arts world.
For me the Robichaux series has become formulaic. Same plot, different characters. He was just hanging on by a thread before I read the last one. His poetic and lyrical writing is just not enough for me any more.
Yep, there’s too many books & too little time to waste on subpar reading. I once had a vow (in my teens cough 50 years ago cough) to finish any book I’d started. Realized that was foolish. Now, especially with the Kindle, I’m skimming & dumping w/o a 2nd thought.
Robert Parker in his Spenser series is a good example of a writer getting lazy (or maybe aging med issues). His early books are excellent but he was prolific with some 35-ish Spenser novels that he wrote and there were a few where he was just phoning them in. and just to stay on topic 
Spenser is often cooking a meal or eating out (from Chance):
John brought us two steaks and the cold seafood platter. He put the seafood in front of Susan.
“Isn’t it a lot?” she said.
“We can help,” I said.
“We can’t solve nothing,” Hawk said, “but we good eaters.”.
Susan speared a clam, dipped the end of it in cocktail sauce, bit off the sauced corner, and chewed it thoughtfully.
At page 263 of Reason to Kill, Lieutenant Malloy is buying lunch for Amos at Musso & Frank:
“It’s old Hollywood, elegant in the manner of your late Aunt Dorothy, who drank bourbon and did the Charleston. It’s got dark, cool, padded booths and waiters plodding around in red uniforms with towels draped over their arms. When you step the door here, your first impulse is to order a martini. I never do, not at my age, but it’s that kind of place. It’s been around forever, and it still serves up giant platters of food from another era, when nothing was organic and they didn’t skimp on butter. The last time we were here one of us (I forget who) had liver and bacon. You don’t see that on menus anymore.”
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After 50 years in business, Chinese Friends restaurant in LA is closing down this week. This little mention in their online good-bye made me smile and think of this thread.
“Even celebrated in the detective novels of Michael Connelly!”
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