Lethal Weapon by Joel Norst
In which Martin Riggs quits the LAPD and goes to church.
“Murtaugh needed a lethal weapon on his side, and there he sat, smoking a Winston as calmly and confidently as if he’d been plunked down on that couch by God Himself. Yes, God had loaned this crazy soul to Roger Murtaugh in his hour of need. And Murtaugh thought this without feeling prejudice toward Riggs’ condition, for he now realized that a man can be no crazier than the world in which he tries to live.”
THE FILM
Arguably the high watermark of the post-48hrs mismatched buddy cop action subgenre that exploded in the 80s, Lethal Weapon arrived in 1987. It starred Mel Gibson as hair-trigger recently bereaved ‘Nam-vet-on-the-verge-of-a-PTSD-nervous-breakdown Martin Riggs, and Danny Glover as his new, older, calmer, too-old-for-this-shit partner Roger Murtaugh. Richard Donner was the director, and first-timer Shane Black wrote the screenplay, for which Warner Bros paid him an at-the-time record sum of $1.75m, ushering in a decade or so of similarly immense paydays for writers of spec scripts. Lethal Weapon went on to gross a respectable $120m at the US box office, reinvigorating the modern action movie; Die Hard would follow in short order, also produced by gonzo Hollywood action maven Joel Silver.
Lethal Weapon itself generated three sequels, which picked up and ran with the humour and warmth that leavened what was otherwise a pretty tough and violent movie. It can be jarring, when you’re comfortable remembering the cosy vibe of the Lethal sequels, to go back to the start and be reminded of its rough edges. The plot involves our outgunned cops facing down drug smuggling former CIA/’Nam mercenaries, and there’s some real weight in Riggs’ unstable condition. He’s the lethal weapon of the title, his brittle psyche and cavalier death wish making him dangerous to all sides. “Did you ever meet anyone you didn’t kill?” Murtaugh asks him at one point. The reply: “Well I haven’t killed you yet.”
It gets lighter later. As the series goes on and Riggs gets happier, his lethality, shorn of its context, makes less sense. The original Lethal Weapon balances right on the tipping point between “action” and “thriller”, teetering slightly towards the latter. Subsequently the films tilt the other way, leaning into more cartoonishly entertaining carnage and destruction. By the third film Silver is stumping up the budget to exploit the genuine demolitions of an office building and a hotel as set-pieces. The Riggs-Murtaugh double-act is nicknamed “Mayhem and Chaos” by their long-suffering captain (“No, I’m Chaos, he’s Mayhem”, Riggs corrects him). It’s all good fun but slightly off-message. Black is more about noirish tough-guy plots and “real” violence than generic “action” (at least when he’s pounding the mean streets away from gigs for hire like Iron Man 3 and The Predator).
The story goes that Lethal Weapon’s jokier moments and bits of dialogue were hammered out and improvised on set. That might be true, but it also might be spin, given that the only screenplay widely available online — clearly a very late draft because it includes the eleventh-hour Christmas-at-Roger’s ending — is pretty recognisable as what made it to the screen. The novelization, it seems clear, must have used earlier, harder drafts as its source.
THE NOVELIZATION
Maybe the most immediate disconnect between Lethal Weapon as a film and as a novel is one of tone. Reflecting Shane Black’s own pulp thriller proclivities, the book is (even) harder edged than the ultimate screen version, reinforcing the idea that it was subsequent re-writes and on set improvisations that teased out a warmer relationship for Riggs and Murtaugh and the hope of healing and redemption for Riggs. The rare flashes of humour in the book are deadpan dry: Riggs wondering if it’s normal to get an erection when thinking about ammunition, or the parapet-jumper’s “You’re early!” on learning that Riggs is a homicide detective rather than a psychologist. That line was filmed, incidentally, and features in an extended version of the jump sequence included in the blu-ray’s deleted scenes.
Several of those filmed-but-abandoned pieces show up in the book. The lonely Riggs paying a hooker to watch television with him; Rhianne’s back-seat date with the pit-faced Mark, gatecrashed by Joshua; Riggs defying — and to a large extent inviting — death by walking into a child-killing sniper’s playground line of fire before coolly executing him. The latter in the novel replaces the movie’s scene of Riggs taking out half a dozen drug dealer goons at a Christmas tree lot. I actually think the sniper sequence is stronger, and when Murtaugh later says “Heard about your little stunt earlier; pretty heroic,” it’s certainly that scene he’s referring to. Why was the one dropped in favour of the other? I’d guess because the scene in the lot gives us a more unpredictably crazy Riggs, going in short order from amiability to Three Stooges slapstick to “Come on! Shoot me!” In the playground scene he’s simply steely: an Even-Dirtier Harry, half hoping he gets himself killed.
Little differences include Riggs’ dog being named Cato rather than Sam: a Pink Panther/Inspector Clouseau reference, allowing Riggs to say “Not now Cato!” every time he gets home. We learn that Riggs’ fighting style is an ad-hoc jumble dubbed “Jailhouse Rock”: “military combative moves, judo, karate, Brazilian jujitsu, even testa — a desperate form of African martial arts…”
Endo — here named Mr Kwak — tortures Riggs in a bathtub, rather than suspended in a shower. The “Dear Bad Guys” note left for Joshua in Murtaugh’s house towards the climax is here a different, more believable note left for Roger by Trish. The fight between Riggs and Joshua happens in the living room rather than on the street. And it’s Roger alone who ultimately shoots Joshua dead, saving Riggs’ life in the process. A mercenary called Mick gets killed by Riggs punching him in the face in such a way that his nose bone spikes into his brain. This isn’t in the online screenplay, but almost certainly comes from an earlier draft, since it finally shows up on screen in Black’s The Last Boy Scout five years later (Bruce Willis does it to Kim Coates). Evidently it was an idea he was particularly fond of, although, disappointingly, it isn’t actually anatomically possible.
Without access to multiple screenplay drafts it’s hard to say whether the book’s major departures are hangovers or the author’s own. There are Vietnam flashbacks for both Riggs and Murtaugh. Riggs gets a bar fight and, the same night, a further gundown sequence, executing would-be kidnapper-rapists at a 24-hour liquor store while he’s off duty. He’s so past caring that he simply leaves the scene and doesn’t even call it in. Later, on a different evening off, he takes part in an illegal race from LA to Las Vegas with his ‘Nam acquaintance-turned-highway-patrolman Rainbird. Like the scene with the hooker, this is all about Riggs struggling with downtime. His suicidal depression makes him afraid to be home alone.
Riggs’ wife in this version has died not in a car crash (as Lethal Weapon 2 and a deleted piece of dialogue from this film confirm), but from heart failure, her ill-health exacerbated by the stress of Riggs’ job: “It was terrible for her to be alone while he worked nights, the television her only company. She stopped watching modern cop shows and usually kept the dial on Channel 11 which mostly played old B-movies.” The novel’s Riggs keeps the TV on and at Channel 11 at all times. He would never have smashed the set as the movie’s Riggs does. In the film we learn that his wife was Victoria Lynn, but Norst never names her. Riggs and Trish get an affecting scene discussing her death and its psychological aftermath on the guilt-ridden Riggs. Something like that eventually made its way into Lethal Weapon 2.
Finally, the novel pretty decisively closes the door on any possibility of a sequel. Riggs ultimately quits the police force to become a martial arts instructor at the “Avalon Boulevard Boy’s Club”. The fact that he’s a full time volunteer implies that he’s drawing that psych-pension (although whether someone on a psych pension would be allowed to volunteer with kids perhaps doesn’t bear too much scrutiny). The novel ends on Christmas day, not on the Murtaughs’ doorstep, but with Riggs joining them at church. They’re baptists.
THE AUTHOR
Joel Norst is a pseudonym for the author Kirk Mitchell, whose background as a deputy sheriff in Death Valley and a SWAT sergeant in Southern California obviously feeds into his hard-boiled fiction. His ecological thriller High Desert Malice was an Edgar Mystery Award finalist, and he has to date written five neo-Westerns centred on “investigator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs” Emmett Parker. He also wrote the alternate-history Germanicus Trilogy, about Emperor Julius Agricola Aztecus Caesar in a Rome that never fell. The Norst moniker seems solely to have been for his novelization work in the ’80s, which along with Lethal Weapon included Colors, Mississippi Burning and, of all things, the Chuck Norris movie The Delta Force. In the ’90s he dropped the pretence and wrote Backdraft and Blown Away under his own name.
About the Novelization Station project…
I’ve always had a soft spot for novelizations. As a kid, growing up pre-VHS, they were a way to re-experience films I’d enjoyed. As I got a bit older they became a way to “see” films that I wasn’t old enough to access. And into adulthood I continued to find them weirdly fascinating as warped, parallel universe versions of the things they were supposedly adapting: sometimes based on much earlier screenplays than the ones that were ultimately filmed, and sometimes crazily extrapolated and embellished by the authors themselves. They were — and still are — both hack work and a definite craft. My first major published magazine feature, more than a decade ago now, was an investigation of why they still exist when you can buy the DVD. In the age of Netflix, I still think that’s an interesting question.
They’re a niche interest and they’re not much studied, so my intention here is to create a platform to talk about them. I’m planning to focus on one book a week. I’m using the American spelling of “novelization” for SEO reasons, and I will not be worrying about spoilers. Length and format of these pieces will vary, I think, depending on what there is to say. I’ve got my own list, but if there’s anything you’d like to see covered, give me a shout below the line or on Twitter and I’ll very likely oblige.
Arriving next: The Black Hole.
