He explained his small output once by saying: "I have never been able to work unless I'm really excited about what I'm doing, unless it demands to be written." A Newsweek critic was unduly harsh when he compared Levin's fiction to a bag of popcorn: "Utterly without nutritive value and probably fattening, yet there's no way to stop once you've started." Stephen King was more accurate when he said: "Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels: he makes what the rest of us do look like cheap watches in drug stores."Īlthough he wrote only seven novels in some 50 years, the books sold in their tens of millions. Levin had never been a literary stylist but his books were page-turners with great plots. Levin's final novel was Son of Rosemary (1997), an ill-advised sequel to Rosemary's Baby which got poor reviews. It was made into a mediocre Sharon Stone movie by the director Philip Noyce. Levin had long lived in Manhattan and Sliver was set in a high-tech Manhattan apartment and involved another paranoid woman under constant surveillance.
His next original piece of fiction appeared in 1991. In the Seventies and Eighties there were a number of television sequels to the films of Levin's books: Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976), Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980), The Stepford Children (1987) and The Stepford Husbands (1988). Break A Leg (1981) starring Julie Harris – which only ran for one night – and Cantorial (1982) followed. The tale of an ageing dramatist who plots to kill a young rival and steal his new play, Deathtrap ran on Broadway for 1,793 performances, from 1978 to 1982. (It was filmed in 1982 starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve.) He won a second Edgar for it in 1980. In the same year, Levin moved back to theatre with his Broadway hit Deathtrap. The 1978 film version starred Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier.
In this thriller the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele tries to clone Adolf Hitler to bring back the Third Reich. Two years later, after Levin had read a newspaper article on cloning which suggested Mozart and Hitler might be good candidates, he published The Boys From Brazil.
In 1974 Levin was back in the theatre with Veronica's Room.
0 kommentar(er)
