Harlan Coben’s plot twists translate to binge viewing
I’ve just caught up with Fool Me Once, which stars the increasingly visible Michelle Keegan, Richard Armitage, Adeel Akhtar, Emmett J. Scanlan and the redoubtable Joanna Lumley. Here’s my verdict.
‘I think most writers have impostor syndrome,” crime writer Harlan Coben recently told the Guardian. “On the one hand you think, ‘I suck, I’ve got nothing to say, this isn’t working at all,’ and the next moment you have the hubris to say, ‘I’m going to write 500 pages and people are going to pay me to read it’.”
Well, he may have written 35 bestselling novels and created a dozen hugely successful television series – based on original ideas and his books – but even Harlan Coben isn’t immune from not only self-doubt but that apprehension of somehow being exposed as some kind of fraud despite the evidence of his successfulness.
“It’s part of being a writer. It never goes away,” he says, something he reiterates in his many interviews. “It’s hard for me to be confident. That said, the reaction to Fool Me Once has been the strongest for any of the series we’ve done so far.”
I’ve just caught up with this series, which stars the increasingly visible Michelle Keegan, Richard Armitage, Adeel Akhtar, Emmett J. Scanlan and the redoubtable Joanna Lumley. And it’s been a huge hit for Netflix, easily it’s number one English language show, even if the critical response has been somewhat mixed.
Many reviewers were perplexed, baffled, and then mortified by the typical Coben plot twists that, as always, stretch credulity and plausibility but tantalise his millions of viewers in more than 90 countries. (I did enjoy The Independent’s Nick Hilton’s line that “watching a Harlan Coben adaptation for the zippy dialogue is like watching a Harold Pinter play for the action sequences.”
Despite the critics, it’s been another popular success for Coben who, in 2018, signed a mammoth deal with Netflix to bring 14 of his novels to the small screen, a deal internationally designed to adapt the English language novels into a variety of foreign languages.
The success of the first shows, including Safe, The Woods, Stay Close and now, Fool Me Once, resulting in what’s now called The Harlan Coben Collection. To some critics the creator is also known as the undisputed King of the Netflix binge. The expression etymologically derives from a Lincolnshire dialect word meaning “to soak”, entering general use in the 19th century, when those who consumed excessively were said to be soaked in alcohol.
The writer responsible for pickling so many brains around the world started with the inimitable Myron Bolitar novels about a basketball player turned agent representing sports stars and celebrities which leads to him playing detective for his clients who have sticky problems requiring quick solutions.
But he made his name with several stand-alone books whose trademark was the way he develops page-turning plotting around the dark machinations of suburban life and the shadows that creep into the happiest of relationships.
He’s not to be trusted; you can’t stop reading, Coben renowned as the undisputed master of never-saw-it-coming thriller plots. (He engineers his stories, he says, fearful that readers will get bored: “I write as though there’s a knife against my throat, and if I bore you, I’m a dead man.” He’s always conscious of Elmore Leonard’s advice, “I try to cut out all the parts you’d normally skip”.)
The world of Harlan Coben is constituted by what is problematic in it. He creates stories that not only make his characters feel anxious but also his readers. Coben manoeuvres us into various forms of complicity, a not altogether unpleasurable expectation of thinking we understand the mystery and then welcoming being thwarted. He says he’s driven to make every paragraph, every page, every sentence, and every word more compelling. “How can I make you want to turn the page even more?” he often says in interviews, a novelist with no compunction about being an entertainer.
Fool Me Once is based on his well-reviewed novel of the same title. The respected Kirkus review said: “Once again, Coben marries his two greatest strengths – masterfully paced plotting that leads to a climactic string of fireworks and the ability to root all the revelations in deeply felt emotions – in a tale guaranteed to fool even the craftiest readers a lot more than once.”
The show is again from Nicola Shindler’s Quay Street Productions, the producer responsible not only for Coben’s The Stranger and Stay Close but award-winning shows such as Years and Years, Happy Valley, and Last Tango in Halifax. It’s written by Danny Brocklehurst, his fifth collaboration with the American writer, the production team of Brocklehurst, Shindler and Coben, an executive producer, working from a shorthand keeping the cliffhangers and hooks of the novels on which the series are based meticulously in place for fans.
Across the series, Coben is involved in casting and location decisions, as well as outlining the story as part of the core creative team, before Brocklehurst takes over scriptwriting duties. Coben will then also have a hand in rewrites.
“Harlan openly says he wants to keep people up as late as he can because you get to the end of the chapter and you want to read the next chapter – and that’s how we design the TV shows,” Brocklehurst told Drama Quarterly. “I guess a lot of people design TV shows that way because you’ve got to have a big hook at the end of each episode to keep people coming back. But we work really hard. In eight episodes, I don’t think there’s a weak end-of-episode hook. The hardest thing is that eight episodes is quite a lot (of time) to keep plates spinning and keep the plot twisting, and although you do have the book to fall back on, there are quite a lot of changes for the TV series.”
His own philosophy is that a novel’s a novel and a TV show’s a TV show, Coben says. “The worst adaptations are the ones that really worry they’re not being true to the novel, that they have to stay slavishly devoted to the novel.”
And Fool Me Once is certainly its own thing regardless of the novel being transplanted from New York to the fictional town of Winhurst located in the UK’s Greater Manchester with scenes also shot in Cheshire and the rather visceral army scenes shot in Almeria, Spain.
Keegan’s Captain Maya Burkett is a former Army special-ops helicopter pilot who is still in trouble over an incident in combat involving some tragic collateral damage. Whistleblower Corey Rudzinski (Laurie Kynaston) ended her military career when he posted footage of her ordering a defensive air strike that killed five civilians in the Middle East, and she’s anxiously waiting for him to release the audio feed that would damage her reputation even more.
Already grieving the death of her sister in a home invasion, she witnesses the violent death of her husband, Armitage’s Joe Burkett, during what appears to be a robbery gone wrong when he is gunned down by masked men. This follows a macabre scene in the past involving a weird ritual in which young men wearing fencing masks cavort around another man tied to a chair, their capering illuminated by a blazing fire.
As Maya grieves following her husband’s funeral, she installs a concealed camera in her home to keep an eye on Lily, her 2-year-old daughter. But on returning from her job as a flight instructor, she’s shocked when she checks the footage and sees images of her murdered husband with her daughter. If that’s not enough she has to cope with his mother, Judith played with admirable restraint by Joanna Lumley, a matriarch who never really stomached her son’s marriage to Maya, and Joe’s brother and sister, Neil (James Northcote) and Caroline (Hattie Morahan). Then there’s the intense cop investigating Joe’s killing, the dogged DS Sami Kierce, a terrific performance from Adeel Akhtar, who has his own problems with blackouts, along with an impending marriage.
Just when you think you have it all figured out, Coben stuns you again and again, no matter how preposterous his twists are or how unbalanced the narrative. He delights in keeping the problem of guilt and complicity at the fore of his complex stories – as soon as you think you know what’s going on he maddingly changes the focus.
Fool Me Once streaming on Netflix.