Dennis Lehane's Novel Based on his Film Screenplay The Drop to be Published in August 2014

The Drop, a crime thriller starring Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, and the late James Gandolfini with a screenplay by Dennis Lehane, is due to open in theaters in September 2014 but a month before that a novel of the same title is scheduled to be published by William Morrow.

"Early this year, my publisher asked me to consider writing a novel version, which I normally would have balked at," Lehane told The Boston Globe. "But there was all this stuff I loved from the original novel and then all this other stuff I loved that got cut from the script and still more scenes I loved that ended up being cut from the film itself, and I thought it might all make a really cool book."

The "original novel" that Lehane mentions is an unpublished book he wrote over 10 years ago that served as the basis for his short story "Animal Rescue", which was published in the 2009 anthology Boston Noir. It is this short story, about a killing resulting from a lost and contested pit bull, that inspired the film The Drop.

No synopsis yet on The Drop (the novel), but look for it on August 19th, 2014.