I am a huge fan of Lawrence Sanders, who wrote "The First Deadly Sin," and I finally came upon the DVD, and was excited to buy it. To me the novel gives equal time to Delaney and Daniel Blank (hey, what a name for the killer), but this film focuses on Delaney and his problems.
I envisioned an actor like Brian Dennehey playing Edward Delaney, a big man with a good heart, very intuitive, and with a big appetite for all kinds of weird sandwiches and always some good beer, not someone like Sinatra, a rather small man.
Sanders is a brilliant writer of weird characters, and Daniel Blank was one of his best. Yet the whole film seems to focus on Delaney and the dying wife.
I would have much liked to have seen the killer portrayed as he was in the book - a man with a good job, a very strange girlfriend, and brilliant in a horrible type of way.
And so slow moving! Lesson learned, never see a movie after you've read the book.
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