Bri­an De Palma’s next project will be his first crime novel

After the mon­u­men­tal headache of gath­er­ing financ­ing for, com­plet­ing pro­duc­tion on, and facil­i­tat­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of his lat­est fea­ture Domi­no, nobody could blame Bri­an De Pal­ma for want­i­ng a lit­tle break from film­mak­ing. So that’s exact­ly what he’s doing.

Enter­tain­ment Week­ly has the exclu­sive today the not­ed direc­tor behind some of the most dar­ing genre films through the ​’70s, ​’80s and ​’90s will make his first for­ay into the pub­lish­ing game with a new thriller nov­el col­or­ful­ly titled ​‘Are Snakes Nec­es­sary?’ Pulp imprint Hard Case Crime will get this new endeav­or from De Pal­ma on shelves in 2020, at which point it will pre­sum­ably res­ur­rect the flag­ging book indus­try and indeed, the writ­ten word itself.

While co-writ­ten with Susan Lehman, the syn­op­sis makes the book’s plot sound like a clas­sic BDP script: there’s cor­rup­tion flour­ish­ing with­in a polit­i­cal cam­paign as an oily Sen­a­tor steps out on his Parkinson’s‑ailing wife to cozy up with his offi­cial video­g­ra­ph­er, and blackmail’s a‑brewing. To straight­en every­thing out, the politi­co calls in his no-non­sense fix­er, and the bod­ies soon start pil­ing up.

The EW item includes a cou­ple of note­wor­thy tid­bits about the forth­com­ing nov­el. start­ing with the title. The name comes from a fic­ti­tious book that Hen­ry Fon­da​‘s char­ac­ter reads in the Pre­ston Sturges rom­com The Lady Eve, and that’s just one in a cor­nu­copia of pop-cul­ture in-jokes. De Pal­ma will drop in allu­sions to his own sil­ver screen work, and one extend­ed tan­gent revolves around a film crew shoot­ing a remake of Alfred Hitch­cock​‘s Ver­ti­go out in France.

The press blast includes a co-sign from Mar­tin Scors­ese, who declares the book to be ​“like hav­ing a new Bri­an De Pal­ma pic­ture,” con­firm­ing pre­cise­ly what we all want­ed to hear. Though after Domi­no, the promise of a new Bri­an De Pal­ma pic­ture may not be quite what it was.

‘Are Snakes Nec­es­sary?’ will be on shelves in the US on 17 March, 2020.