The namesake for my BookLikes life, Murder by Death is, in my opinion, one of the best movies ever made.  What Blazing Saddles did for westerns, Murder by Death did for the traditional murder mysteries.  With an almost dream-team cast that included Truman Capote, Dame Maggie Smith, Peter Faulk, Peter Sellers and Alec Guiness as well as Neil Simon as the scriptwriter, the movie could hardly go wrong as it revealed in plot holes, implausible explanations and fantastic theories.

But it was a script written to be a movie; a rarity nowadays.  So imagine my SQUEE! when I stumbled across this adaptation of the original screenplay in an overflow stack at a used book store.

Ah the memories this book brought back; it's an almost word-for-word rendition of the movie, but with a narrator.  This could have killed the book, but Keating did a brilliant job and turned this into a bonus: his commentary in the guise of normal narration added a cheeky layer of humour to the already hilarious dialogue.  I doubt anyone else could have done as well with the kitchen scene (those other fans out there know which scene I refer to).

BUT... just as I was about to 5 star this baby - and I still can't quite believe he did this - he changed the ending!!  The last 6 paragraphs... what the??  Gah!  Keating went all Dickens at the end, and he just shouldn't have messed with perfection.

Even so, you know I'm going to treasure this book until the end of time.

'Oh, thank you,' Dora answered, radiating charm.  'Thank you –– er?'

'Benson, m'um,' the butler supplied.

'Thank you, Benson.'

'Bensonmum,' the butler corrected her, ... 'My name is Bensonmum. Jamessir Bensonmum.'

'Jamessir?' queried Dick.

'Yes, sir.'

'Jamessir Bensonmum?' Dick asked, hardly able to believe his sophisticated ears.

'Yes, sir,' said Bensonmum,

'How odd, ' Dick said.

'My father's name, sir,' (...)

'What was your father's name?'

'How-ard, sir.  How-ard Bensonmum.'

'Your father was How Odd Bensonmum?' Dick asked, struggling. 

'Well, sir, ' Bensonmum came in quickly, 'I suppose by most standards my father was very odd.'

The dialogue is exact to the movie itself, but reading it, I find I'm getting a joke here and there that I missed watching the film (repeatedly).

Met some friends for brunch today and hit the used bookshop nearby afterwards.  I found this sitting at the top of a stack of paperbacks on the floor. I didn't even know they'd written a book off the screenplay!

Kismet.  Fate.  Meant-to-be.

Happy (holiday) weekend to everyone.