God bless you, Paul Newman

I enjoyed going to Paul Newman movies over the years (Slap Shot, Fort Apache the Bronx and The Verdict anyone?) and I was saddened to hear of his recent death. I still find it a little odd to see his pix on salad dressing bottles but he was blessed to have mulitple careers and ventures.

I do give him partial credit to directing me to mysteries as a genre when I discovered his version of writer Ross McDonald's private eye Lew Archer in the films Harper and years later The Drowning Pool. In the Newman movies, a character's name was changed to Harper--and I've read two different accounts why that is the case--and Harper is based on the novel, The Moving Target while The Drowning Pool is the same title of the book. As it happened, the movies lead me to reading the books and I enjoyed McDonald's strong narrative of the lone wolf California PI.

The two Harper movies are in the new Newman collection DVD set and the photo on the cover case (shown here) is from the first movie.