Warner Bros. Options Film Rights to Lew Archer Mysteries

Warner Bros. has optioned the film rights to the series of Lew Archer mysteries by Ross Macdonald. The eighth book in the series, The Galton Case, originally published in 1959, is the first to be adapted for an expected franchise for the studio.

Lew Archer is a private investigator in Southern California and was featured in some 17 novels and numerous short stories. Paul Newman played the character — renamed Lew Harper — in two films, both from Warner Bros.: Harper (1966) and The Drowning Pool (1976). The character was also featured in an NBC television series and made-for television movie, also for the same network. Peter Graves played Lew Archer in The Underground Man (1974), while Brian Keith played the private investigator in six episodes of Archer that aired in the spring of 1975.

In The Galton Case, almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them.

(Source: Deadline.)