The Stranger

And I'd get back in the car and my son would be like, you smell like olive loaf or something, you know what I mean? And then that stopped working, and so I had to stop.

And the other example I will give you is the stranger.

When I wrote The Stranger, at the end of The Stranger, ride shares, Uber, that kind of thing was just coming into fashion.

And I took one to New York.

And of course, I have to justify the expense.

Because I want you to feel good about yourselves.

There's a lot of you here who really hate being fooled.

So you can write me that email saying, oh, I figured out it was Lorraine in The Stranger.

Well, neither happened.

My partner here in the UK, a woman named Nicholas Schindler, who I've done many of the shows that you've maybe watched, Fool Me Once, I Will Find You, but almost all the other ones, Fool Me Once, Safe, The Stranger, Stay Close, Missing You, Runaway.

She had seen some of Charlotte's writing and said, we need some younger blood in here.

I want to bring in Charlotte to work with us.

His Myron Bolliter series has earned the Edgar, Seamus, and Anthony Awards.

Harlan Coben is also the creator and executive producer of many television shows including including adaptations on Netflix of the number one global hits Missing You and Fool Me Once, Run Away, Stay Close, The Stranger, The Innocent, Gone for Good, Hold Tight, and The Woods, as well as Shelter and Lazarus on Amazon Prime.

His newest series adaptation on Netflix, I Will Find You, starring Sam Worthington, premiered globally on June 18th.

Seriously, read this book, and I loved this conversation.

Um, that's not to say, you know, I want wholesale changes, but I'm very, very careful about what I'm like, "Yeah, you know what? That worked well in the book, but that's not gonna work well on, on screen." That's just, that's not...

When I did this TV show called The Stranger, the stranger in the book was sort of a male computer nerd guy, and visually, that just didn't work, and we ended up hiring an actress named Hannah John-Kamen.

So I made it y- the character younger and female, who had this really cool vibe to her.

And when she came on, instantly you sort of got ready for the stranger's visit, just visually.

So doesn't mean the book was worse or the b- or the, or the, or better.

It doesn't mean I, I should go back now and rewrite the book with a female character, or I should have kept exactly what I had and had a male character.

One you, you mentioned.

Um, I took rideshare for the first time, I think it was 2012 to '14, somewhere in that range.

I don't know what that dude's deal was.

I read, for AP English in high school, we read The Stranger.

But I can't remember how The Stranger...

Because The Stranger's a very absurd...

I know he was like a big guy in absurdist thought, right? Or absurdist literature.

But I don't know where that comes in of like...

Is that what he believed? Or is that just the kind of characters he wrote? You know what I mean? Because the protagonist of The Stranger, he's an absurd character, right? The plot of that book is that he shoots a man for no reason at all and doesn't really feel anything bad about it and doesn't care why he's...

Because it's like his mom dies and he doesn't care about that and then he kills a man and he doesn't care about that and then they put him to death because they're like, do you feel bad about what you did? And he's like, nah.

They excel at portraying polite society masking deep dysfunction.

Let's examine this dominance, starting with the 2020 Netflix release, The Stranger.

Oh, man, I will say the inciting incident of The Stranger is one of the most brilliant, insidious hooks I have ever seen.

It's so good.

Adam Price is living the dream.

Exactly.

And as the show progresses, this stranger moves through the town, dropping these atomic truth bombs on different residents, connecting all these seemingly unrelated lives.

The structural genius of the stranger, which the article points out, is how it expertly handles these cascading storylines.