The history of ‘Heat’ is an interesting and slightly convoluted one. The 1995 film was written by Michael Mann, from a script written in 1979 and based loosely on a real-life case. Originally used as a tv pilot script, which became a TV movie (LA Takedown) and then later revisited and revised. This sequel has been long rumoured, and Mann has talked about the possibilities of it being turned into a movie or tv series.
So, there’s a question of how much it’s possible to take the novel on its own merit –I’m assuming the vast majority of readers are, like me, fans of the original film and may well be running it through their mind in cinematic terms more than most novels they’d read.
It starts with a prologue that effectively recaps what happened in the movie – almost to the point of resembling an IMDB synopsis. There’s little fat or descriptive flourish, but it hits all the major points from the almost 3 hour movie story.
Then, we’re into a hybrid thing – not just in the fact that it’s co-written by Mann and Edgar Award winner Meg Gardiner, but because it’s both a prequel and a sequel to the movie.
Obviously, the sequel part relies on who was left alive from the original story, and features Chris Shiherlis and his days, weeks and months after the events we saw on screen in an international tale of cyber mystery that’s more like Mann’s 2015 movie Blackhat than the original source material.
The novel is a staccato thing; short, sharp sentences: not quite to James Ellroy levels, but at times not far off it. The authors (and who knows who wrote how much and which pieces of the book? Is it a Stephen King/ Peter Straub level of collaboration, or a ‘James Patterson and X’ where the ‘idea’ originates from one but the other does the heavy lifting?) do a good job of mimicking or staying faithful to the style of the original in some of homicide detective Vincent Hanna’s Pacino excessive outbursts. There’s not quite a ‘great ass’ outburst, but there are some explosions of dialogue you could see Al chewing the scenery with. In a stand-alone novel it might read hokey; here I prefer to think of it as homage.
Hanna himself is more of a secondary character in the novel – it’s primarily focused on Chris, and he feels a more accomplished tactician than Val Kilmer’s character in the movie was portrayed as – but roll with it and it’s all highly enjoyable stuff. Whether those less familiar with/ favourable towards the source material will find it so intriguing I can’t say.
It's a big old story – I’d estimate around 120,00 words and could easily have been made into a two parter; one prequel, one sequel (the sequel is the stronger part of the book) but the switches between the two are not disruptive and everything comes together naturally in the end in terms of different threads.
It wasn’t the story I was expecting and is a very different beast in scope to the original motion picture, but either because or despite that, I really enjoyed it.