Shooter

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I just found out about the movie Shooter coming out next year (March 16th, 2007 release date) and I think I’ve died and gone to heaven. This movie is based on an excellent book Point of Impact by one of my favorite authors, Steven Hunter. In fact he’s written a few books that jump all around, but I’ll explain some of that in a bit.

First, the movie Shooter and the character Bob Lee Swagger (AKA: Bob the Nailer).

An ace marksman — living in self-exile in the Arkansas wilderness after causing the death of an innocent person — who is persuaded by his former associates that they need his help to prevent an assassination and who is subsequently double-crossed and framed for the presidential assassination he was trying to prevent. He is forced to go on the run while trying to track down the real killer and discover the truth about who betrayed him.

This movie stars Mark Wahlberg, Michael Peqa, Danny Glover, Kate Mara, Elias Koteas, Rhona Mitra, Rade Sherbedgia and Ned Beatty. It’s directed by Antoine Fuqua who did Training Day.

So now, see the trailer at http://www.shootermovie.com/

And about the books by Steven Hunter who’s a Pulitzer-prize winning newspaperman and wrote a bunch of great novels that skip around between Bob Lee, his father Earl, and other characters referenced in all the books.

The Master Sniper – It is the spring of 1945, and the Nazis are eliminating all the witnesses to their horrible crimes, including Jews and foreigners remaining in the prison camps. Kommandant Repp, who is known as a master sniper, decides to hone his sniping abilities by taking a little target practice at the remaining laborers in his own prison camp. But one man escapes and becomes the key to solving the mystery of the cold, calculating Kommandmant Repp and his plans for ending the war.

Repp was the master sniper whose deadly talent had come to the notice of British Intelligence as the linchpin of a desperate Nazi plot to reverse the fortunes of the Third Reich at the eleventh hour. But what was the nature of the weapon that Repp was to aim–and who was to be his last target? Allied Intelligence officers Leets, from the U.S., and Outhwaite from England are dispatched to identify and abort his lethal mission. And when they finally learn the truth, the Second World War’s deadliest race against time is on…

The Second Saladin – Years after his capture and torture by Soviet agents and the collapse of the Kurdish rebellion that he was aiding, CIA specialist Paul Chardy is drawn from retirement for one final mission. In the windswept sands of the Middle East, Paul Chardy fought side by side with Ulu Beg: one, a charismatic, high-strung CIA covert warrior, the other a ferocious freedom fighter. Then Chardy fell into the hands of the enemy, and Beg was betrayed. Now the two men are about to meet again. Beg has come over the Mexican border under a hail of bullets determined to assassinate a leading American political figure and avenge his people’s betrayal. The CIA wants Chardy to stop the hit. Chardy wants to save Beg’s life.

The Day Before Midnight – The countdown to midnight begins on a winter dawn. Doors burst open in the Hummel family home in suburban Maryland and commandos brandishing Uzi submachine guns rush inside. As his wife and children watch in horror, Jack Hummel, the local welder, is whisked away.The reason for Hummel’s abduction soon becomes clear: A sophisticated paramilitary assault team has taken control of the nearby South Mountain MX missile site. But the launch key rests within a vault behind a half-ton titanium block. Hummel must utilize his expertise to cut through the block to the key.

Point of Impact – He was one of the best Marine Snipers in Vietnam.He can hit you from three-quarters of a mile away before you even hear the shot. Some call him the most dangerous man alive. Now if he can just stay alive! Bob Lee Swagger lives in a trailer among his native Ouachita Mountains above the town of Blue Eye, Arkansas. Back in the jungles of Vietnam he was known as “Bob The Nailer” for his eighty-seven kills. Today, twenty years later, disgruntled hero of an unheroic war, all Bob wants is to be left alone. But he knows more about killing, one-on-one, than any other individual in America, and that makes him the perfect man for the job.

The job has been designed by RamDyne Security, a shadowy organization with ties to military intelligence and the CIA. With consummate psychological skill RamDyne seduces Bob into leaving his hills for one last mission for his country, unaware until too late that the game is rigged. The plan is executed to perfection until the final moment: Bob Lee Swagger, alleged lone gunman, has come out of the operation alive – and on the run.

The headlines proclaim him national hero turned murderer, and his targeted by every law enforcement agency in the country and by RamDyne’s own killers. In this ruthless manhunt has has only one ally, FBI agent Nick Memphis, of the New Orleans office. But Bob is out of his shell for good now, the pursued turned pursuer – and a man who has discovered a capacity for loving that he did not know he had. As wily as the mastermind who set him up, he is fiercely intent on revenge; as single-minded as ever, he along sets the terms for that revenge..

Dirty White Boys – They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary, three escaped convicts going to ground in a world unprepared for anything like them. Lamar Pye is prince of the Dirty White Boys. With a lion in his soul, he roars, for he is the meanest, deadliest animal on the loose. Odell is Lamar’s cousin, a hulking manchild with unfeeling eyes. He lives for daddy Lamar. Surely he will die for him. Richard’s survival hangs on a sketch: a crude drawing of a lion and a half-naked woman. For this Lamar has let Richard live.

Armed to the teeth, Lamar and his boys have cut a path of terror across the Southwest, and pushed one good cop into a crisis of honor and conscience. Trooper Bud Pewtie should have died once at Lamar’s hands. Now they’re about to meet again. And this time, only one of them will walk away.

Black Light – Bob Lee Swagger has seen and delivered dozens of deaths. As a United States Marine sniper in Vietnam, his astonishing accuracy with a rifle earned him the nickname “Bob the Nailer” twenty years later he was forced to kill again to unravel a brutal conspiracy. Now happily secluded with his wife and young daughter in the Arizona desert, Bob believes all the killing is behind him. Until a young writer, Russ Pewtie, arrives at his door with troubling questions about the past.Forty years earlier, Swagger’s father, a dedicated state trooper, was gunned down by two robbers in a sensational shoot-out just outside of Blue Eye, Arkansas. Faced with Russ’s persistence and a desire to make peace with a father he never really knew, Swagger decides to discover what really happened that night long ago in Arkansas. But as soon becomes clear, powerful people don’t want the truth uncovered and Swagger must use all his combat skills and ruthless cunning to survive.

Time to Hunt – During the latter days of the Vietnam War, deep in-country, a young idealistic Marine named Donny Fenn was cut down by a sniper’s bullet as he set out on patrol with Swagger, who himself received a grievous wound. Years later Swagger married Donny’s widow, Julie, and together they raise their daughter, Nikki, on a ranch in the isolated Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. Although he struggles with the painful legacy of Vietnam, Swagger’s greatest wish to leave his violent past behind and live quietly with his family seems to have come true.Then one idyllic day, a man, a woman, and a girl set out from the ranch on horseback. High on a ridge above a mountain pass, a thousand yards distant, a calm, cold-eyed shooter, one of the world’s greatest marksmen, peers through a telescopic sight at the three approaching figures.

Out of his tortured past, a mortal enemy has once again found Bob the Nailer. Time to Hunt proves anew why so many consider Stephen Hunter to be our best living thriller writer. With a plot that sweeps from the killing fields of Vietnam to the corridors of power in Washington to the shadowy plots of the new world order, Hunter delivers all the complex, stay-up-all-night action his fans demand in a masterful tale of family heartbreak and international intrigue and shows why, for Bob Lee Swagger, it’s once again time to hunt.

Hot Springs – In the summer of 1946, the most wide-open town in America is Hot Springs, Arkansas, a city of ancient, legendary corruption. While the pilgrims take the cure in the mineral-rich 142-degree water that bubbles from the earth, the brothels and casinos are the true source of the town’s prosperity. It is run by an English-born gangster named Owney Maddox, who represents the New York syndicate and rules his empire like a Saxon lord while sporting an ascot and jodhpurs.But it is all about to be challenged. A newly elected county prosecutor wants to take on the big boys and save the city’s soul (he also wouldn’t mind being the next governor). He begins a war on the gambling interests and, knowing the war will be long and bloody, hires an ex-Marine sergeant, Earl Swagger, who won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima, to run it. Swagger knows how to fight with guns as well as any man in the world. But he is haunted: the savage fighting he just barely survived and the men he left behind in the Pacific still shadow his mind, leaving a terrible melancholy. There are even darker memories: a murdered father who beat him mercilessly and drove a younger brother to suicide. And he’s torn by his own impending fatherhood, as his wife, Junie nears term. It isn’t that Earl Swagger is afraid of dying; more scary still, it’s possible that he yearns for it.

The gangsters fight back, setting up a campaign of ambush and counter ambush in the brothels, casinos and alleys of the City of the Vapors. Raids erupt into full-out combat amid screaming prostitutes and fleeing johns. The body count mounts. Meanwhile, the politics behind the war are shifting: Will the prosecuting attorney stick with his raiders or sell them out to curry favor with the state’s political machine? Will Owney Maddox defeat the raiders but lose a personal battle against a cunning rival from the West who foresees a Hot Springs in the Nevada desert as the future franchise city of organized crime? But most important, will Earl Swagger survive yet another hard war, not merely with his body but also with his soul intact?

Pale Horse Coming – In Pale Horse Coming the unforgettable Earl Swagger returns in a searing follow-up to Hot Springs, Stephen Hunter’s New York Times bestselling novel. It once again demonstrates why Hunter has been called “the only modern writer who can lay claim to being Dashiell Hammett’s immediate successor.

It’s 1951, and the last place in America any sane man wishes to visit is Thebes State Penal Farm (Colored) in Thebes, Mississippi. Up a dark river, surrounded by swamps and impenetrable piney woods, it’s the Old South at its most brutal – a place of violence, racial terror, and even more horrific rumors. Of the few who make the journey, black or white, even fewer return. But in that year, two men will come to Thebes. The first is Sam Vincent, the former prosecuting attorney Polk County, Arkansas. With great misgivings, Sam accepts a job from a smooth-talking Chicago lawyer to investigate a disappearance. Sam has heard of Thebes and knows that in the Negro culture he only imperfectly understands, the place has a special resonance of horror.

Sam is a careful man. Before he leaves on this dangerous trip, he confesses his fears to his former investigator Earl Swagger, a Marine hero on Iwo Jima, veteran of the mob wars in Hot Springs, and now a sergeant of the Arkansas State Police. Earl pledges that if Sam is not back by a certain time, he will come looking for him. Sam will bring his knowledge of the law, his compassion, and his sense of the rational to Thebes, but Earl will bring only his guns. What they encounter there is something beyond their wildest imaginations for evil. The dying black town is ruled by white deputies on horseback who are more like an occupying army that a police force. Each citizen of the town is in debt to the Store, the one remaining civic institution, and the only escape is over the wild currents of the dark river that drowns as many people as it liberates.

But nothing in the town can prepare Earl for the prison itself where he becomes the first white inmate. It is a site of fear: run by an aging madman with insane theories of racial purity, it is administered by a brutally efficient Stalin of a guard sergeant known as Bigboy. The convicts call him The Whip Man – he can take a man’s soul with his nine feet of braided cat gut. Both Sam and Earl will be challenged to the limits of their strength by this place and will struggle not only for their own survival, but with deeper questions: What does a man do when confronted with such evil? Can it be remedied? Can it be rectified, redirected, reformed?

Or must it just be destroyed? And if so, where would you find the men to destroy it?

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