Part of Series
Joe Leland, war hero, career cop, private detective, is a public tough guy whose private world is coming apart. When a wartime acquaintance is killed in a fall from a race-track roof, his young widow hires Leland to investigate. As the search progresses, Leland is drawn into the shadows of Colin MacIver's life and into the black areas of his own past—the war, his troubled marriage, the brutal murder case that ended his police career. Made into a classic film starring Frank Sinatra, The Detective is a psychological thriller as well as a portrait of a man confronting violence and horror—and himself.
Author
Roderick Mayne Thorp, Jr. was an American novelist specializing mainly in crime novels. As a young college graduate, Thorp worked at a detective agency owned by his father. He would later teach literature and lecture on creative writing at schools and universities in New Jersey and California, and also wrote articles for newspapers and magazines. Two of his best known novels were adapted into popular films: his 1966 novel The Detective was made into a 1968 film of the same name, starring Frank Sinatra as Detective Joe Leland, and his 1979 sequel to The Detective, Nothing Lasts Forever, was filmed in 1988 as Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis. Though Die Hard was relatively faithful to Nothing Lasts Forever, it was not made as a sequel to the film version of The Detective. Two other Thorp novels, Rainbow Drive and Devlin, were adapted into TV movies. Thorp died of a heart attack in Oxnard, California.
