Thriller novel heads to CBC
A five-part series based on Lisa Moore’s book Caught will star Alan Hawco and Paul Gross
Lisa Moore’s thriller Caught (Anansi, 2013) is quite unlike her previous and popular novels, February and Alligator. It is a gripping thriller, an international caper, a pulpy extravaganza. All such labels might apply. Nevertheless, despite the long distances that Caught travels on the page, it is strongly rooted in Newfoundland, reflecting Moore’s love for her native province and home city of St. John’s. Such an action-packed and fast-moving drama lends itself to film and we shall see it on CBC television in February 2018 as a five-hour series.
The novel’s episodic nature lends itself to the series mode. The miniseries stars Alan Hawco (Republic of Doyle) in the lead role as David Slaney and Paul Gross as the detective, Roy Patterson, who tracks him down. If you detect in this a Newfoundland emphasis you are spot on.
Born in 1964, Moore was fascinated as a teenager by all the talk of the drug culture that she heard in St. John’s during the 1970s. Her novel pays a kind of homage to that era and the young men who breathed in the exciting challenge of smuggling marijuana from Central and South America into Canada. She sees her protagonists not as thugs, but as unpretentious, undaunted Odysseus figures, born to live and act dangerously, aiming, against all odds, to strike it rich in a rough-and-tumble world. Her two young Newfie smugglers, David Slaney and Brian Herne, are venturesome and daring “thrill-seekers” who are unintimidated by formidable logistics, menacing violence, and the dark threat of incarceration. They don’t even think of carrying guns nor do they wish to cause pain or injury to those they meet along the way. In Moore’s phrasing, they share “a radical impulse to just plain go for it.” Curiously, Herne segues almost seamlessly from his two failed drug ventures into an appointment as a Professor of English at Memorial University. His is not a recommended route to academic accreditation, but he is certainly not the first pot-head to be so rewarded by a university department.
While Herne and Slaney are cast as bosom-buddies from their boyhood in St. John’s, it is Slaney who is Moore’s Ulysses in Caught. He is the venturesome and appealing guy – the one who does things rather than just planning them - and he is in fact twice imprisoned for his actions. The story begins with his escape from a New Brunswick prison in 1978. Having served four years in jail for a previous drug deal deemed “the biggest bust in Canadian history,” he breaks out of jail to reunite with Herne who, through his lawyer’s manoeuvers, managed to avoid jail time for his part in that first deal. With help from several people along the way, Slaney gets out of New Brunswick and travels across Canada to reunite with Herne. Herne already has their second major marijuana caper planned out.
Along the way he meets truck drivers, strange older women, misfits, and the occasional attractive younger woman. Railway stations, eighteen wheelers, and seedy motels are his road-trip fare. Moreover, the reader is never sure whether Slaney is escaping on his own (as he believes) or is being closely shadowed by law-enforcement officers who plan to catch him with the goods rather than simply send him back to prison. Watching closely is middle-aged detective Roy Patterson, whose advancement in law-enforcement depends on his successful pursuit of Slaney and Herne. Meanwhile, Slaney’s immediate goal is to see his old girlfriend, Jennifer, in Montreal. He pines for her even though he acts like a free agent in his travels and will not give up his dream of smuggling success. But he also pines for Newfoundland even though his travels take him in the opposite direction. Above all, he is a man of action; everywhere he goes he is a close observer of local details and the people he meets. Attention to details is his thing introspection is not his concern.
The action picks up when, after a boozy and drug-laced party in Alberta, Herne delivers Slaney to the airport for his flight to Puerto Vallarta. There he meets Cyril Carter (another Newfoundlander) whose boat they will sail to Columbia for the pick-up. The trip is complicated, however, by Carter who, without warning, brings along his young girl friend Ada. She is notable for her captivating eyes, her red bikini, and her habit of reading novels (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett) which she then chucks overboard. “Don’t leave me alone with her, Slaney thought … He wasn’t going to Columbia with a chick on board.” Carter however gives him no choice: “She’s coming with us, Carter said. It’s my boat. I make the decisions.” Such is the pattern of action and reaction, action and surprise.
The trip proves to be extraordinary. With sexual tensions high and Carter drinking heavily, they have to negotiate with their Columbian drug dealers (in military garb) on a beach, survive a devastating hurricane, and deal with authorities in Mexico where they have to moor their boat while its sails are replaced. There are double-crosses and manipulations aplenty that lead Slaney, now in charge, to redirect the boat through the Panama Canal where more pay-offs of officials are required. His aim is to get to Newfoundland, not Vancouver. But for all his savvy Slaney is outdone by Ada who places a phone call in Panama that alerts Patterson and Canadian authorities to his change of route. Satellite surveillance, the law, and raw human fear serve to counter Slaney’s ad hoc cleverness and his hopes for completing the quest successfully. More jail time awaits him while Ada and Hearn both go free and Carter enters a hospital to deal with his (second) nervous breakdown.
I will be eager to see how Alan Hawco plays Slaney and Paul Gross plays Patterson in the CBC series. Both are interesting characters in the novel - attractive in numerous ways but undefined in others. By that I mean that Lisa Moore has carefully monitored their roles to fit the episodic nature of the thriller genre; as such their individual complexities–Slaney as hero and Patterson as shadow - are reduced by the novel’s attention to action (plot) and its de-emphasis on second thoughts and the kind of introspection that most of us engage in. Things keep happening to these characters and they have to keep adapting - and so it goes. It makes for good reading and it will likely make for good viewing.
Stepping back a wee bit, what we have here is a pure Newfoundland and Canadian product (from Lisa Moore’s writing to Hawco’s film company) being marketed not as feature film but as a multi-platform product whose audience is the world. After the CBC serves as its initial television platform, it will soon be distributed for viewer consumption to audiences here and around the world. It will be sold on the basis of its attractive local flavoring and its carefully-groomed attention to universality. Newfoundland and Canada thus will take another step into the larger contemporary world, following the path marked out by such internationally-produced products as The Handmaid’s Tale, The English Patient, and The Book of Negroes.