I just finished reading James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, the first piece of crime-genre fiction I’ve read in years. It was complex and engrossing, and I had a hard time putting it down on my recent transit flight from Ushuaia to Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was particularly struck by how different it was from the 1997 movie of the same name — and it left me with a lot of respect for whoever adapted it into a screenplay, since the screen version of L.A. Confidential does a very good job of using the same characters to tell a rather different and more condensed story. I had a similar reaction when I read Michael Ondjaate’s The English Patient: I found the book to be a much different story from the movie, though both versions worked well for me.

There’s an old clich