Matthew Scudder might not be a familiar to most of us, but to crime fiction obsessives, you might as well be talking about Batman or Superman. Over 35 years, alcoholic NYPD cop turned private eye Scudder has featured in seventeen best-selling novels by genre master Lawrence Block, and though his sole big-screen appearance before now was in almost unrecognizable form, played by Jeff Bridges in Hal Ashby's famously disastrous final movie "8 Million Ways To Die," Scudder could be about to hit the big time, as he hits multiplexes this Friday embodied by Liam Neeson, in Scott Frank's "A Walk Among The Tombstones."
Scudder's walking a beat that many before have gone down: taking literary detectives and putting them on screen is something virtually as old as cinema itself, and movie sleuths have been among some of the medium's most enduring characters. So, with "A Walk Among The Tombstones" hitting theaters, we've picked out a group (a gaggle? a murder?) of...
