If Hollywood Came Knocking...

by Bente Gallagher/Jennie Bentley

A month or so ago, I threatened to do one of those My Book, The Movie, posts for A Cutthroat Business.

I did one a while back for the DIY series. It was a guest post on a blog that does those things, and I had a ton of fun with it. It’s here, if you want to take a look.

A Cutthroat Business, as some of you might know, is the first book in a new series, featuring a Southern Belle and new-minted Realtor named Savannah Martin, who lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee. She’s 27 years old, five feet, eight inches tall, and a respectable size eight, to use her own words. She has blonde hair and blue eyes, and other than that, there’s not much description there.

That’s on purpose. There’s danger in too much description, as we all know. Readers like to make their own mental pictures of the characters, and I’m sure we’ve all seen movies based on books we’ve loved, where the characters haven’t looked at all the way we pictured them in our minds. (Kevin Costner as Robin Hood, anyone?) And I don’t picture my characters as actors or anything else when I write about them; they just look like themselves then. Still, the point of this is to tell you—if a movie was to be made—who I could see playing them. So here we go.

I have no idea who would do a good job playing Savannah. I can’t get a good look at her, since I see the world through her eyes, and since she’s a little insecure and somewhat biased when she describes herself. To my mind, she looks rather like Faith Hill, the country singer. Pretty and blonde, and sexy in a sort of innocent, girl-next-door way. Ladylike, not flashy at all, demure and soft-spoken. The perfect Southern Belle.

Her co-worker Tim looks a lot like Simon Baker from the Mentalist. Tim is flamboyantly gay, and a whole lot of fun to write. Physically, Baker is spot on: the curly, blonde hair, the blue eyes, the perfect teeth... and the attitude. Joyce tells me Baker is happily married with a passel of kids, and looks like the love interest in her WIP, so obviously life would not be imitating art in this case, but that’s sort of what Tim looks like.

Savannah’s high school sweetheart Todd Satterfield, her mother’s choice of second husband for her—Savannah was married to Bradley Ferguson for two years, before he cheated on her and she dumped him—is another blond. Six feet tall, give or take a little, with sort of gray/blue eyes. Pretty much any blandly good-looking guy in a suit would do for Todd; that’s the kind of character that he is.

Rafe, now...

Rafe’s a different story.

He’s Savannah’s love interest, although she spends most of the book denying that she’s interested in him at all. Rafe’s just not the kind of guy a sweet Southern girl should ever get too close to, and Savannah knows it. In fact, if Margaret Anne Martin, Savannah’s sainted mother, could pick the last man on earth she’d want her daughter to become involved with, Rafael Collier would be him. He’s Savannah’s direct opposite—dark where she’s fair, hard where she’s soft, dangerous where she’s sweet—and we all know how opposites attract.

Originally, I pictured Rafe looking something like Derek Jeter. (Yeah, I think Derek Jeter’s cute. Sue me.) That was until I got six pages into the book, where Rafe shows up, and as it turned out, he didn’t look anything like that. Derek Jeter may be many things, but dangerous-looking isn’t one of them. These days, I picture Rafe looking rather a lot like this guy.

That’s Special Agent Derek Morgan on "Criminal Minds," as played by Shemar Moore, for those of you not familiar with the deliciousness. He’s a few years too old—Rafe’s 30—and an inch or so too short, but other than that, he’ll do. Rather nicely, in fact.

So there you have it. The dream cast of A Cutthroat Business. You'll notice that if I can just have Shemar Moore, I don’t really care about anyone else. If you happen to know him, please feel free to pass him a copy of the book. Or better yet, give me his number and I'll take care of it myself.

So tell me, fellow Stiffs and readers, who you see playing in the movie of your book/manuscript. Or if you prefer, who you see playing in mine. And be sure to tune in next Friday, on my regularly scheduled day, when we'll be visited by my fellow Berkley Babe and Good Girl, Laura Bradford AKA Elizabeth Lynn Casey, who'll be telling us about her Southern Sewing Circle mysteries, the second of which - Death Threads - will be released the first Tuesday of May.

Till next time!