Roger Ebert gave The Rainmaker three stars out of four, remarking: " I have enjoyed several of the movies based on Grisham novels ... but I've usually seen the storyteller's craft rather than the novelist's art being reflected.

He gave each of his Wessex counties a fictionalised name, such as for Berkshire, which is known in the novels as " North Wessex ".

That aggressive research — tracking rebel guerrillas in the Peruvian jungle at age 67 for The Evening News ( 1990 ), or reading 27 books on the hotel industry for Hotel — gave his novels a realism that appealed to readers, even as some critics complained that he used it to disguise a lack of literary talent.

Although McGann played the Doctor on television only once, he gave permission for his likeness to be used on the covers of the BBC's Eighth Doctor novels and he has reprised the role of the Eighth Doctor in an extensive series of audio plays by Big Finish Productions.

These included Patrick Evans ’ s bio-critical contribution for the " Twayne's World Authors Series ," Janet Frame ( 1977 ), Gina Mercer's feminist reading of the novels and autobiographies, Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions ( 1994 ), and Judith Dell Panny's allegorical approach to the works, I have what I gave: The fiction of Janet Frame ( 1992 ).

These two books gave rise to a genre of Safari adventure novels and films.

He studied for a PhD on Charles Dickens and Victorian serial novels, supervised by John Sutherland, but gave it up in 1970.

In the historical fiction novels Masters of Rome, written by Colleen McCullough, a character of the same name gave up the stage to accompany the former dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla into retirement in the year 79 BC.

Contemporary readers also enjoyed these novels because they gave a glimpse into the life of important society figures.

The last two novels were set in the past, which Sontag said gave her greater freedom to write in the polyphonic voice.

The film gave Mil Mascaras a " comic book-type " origin story, which seems to have been somewhat swiped from the then-popular Doc Savage pulp novels that were selling very well in science-fiction bookstores in the mid-60's.

The first six of her novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the author of the popular and critically acclaimed novels Purple Hibiscus ( 2003 ) and Half of a Yellow Sun ( 2006 ), commented in a 2006 interview, " Chinua Achebe will always be important to me because his work influenced not so much my style as my writing philosophy: reading him emboldened me, gave me permission to write about the things I knew well.

The West novels were, for the era, an unusually realistic look at Scotland Yard operations, but the plots were often wildly melodramatic, and, to get around thorny legal problems, Creasey gave West an " amateur detective " friend who was able to perform the extra-procedural acts that West, as a policeman, could not.

When Kross was already in his late 70s he gave a series of lectures at Tartu University explaining certain aspects of his novels, not least the roman à clef dimension, given the fact that quite a few of his characters are based on real-life people, both in the truly historical novels and the semi-autobiographical ones.

As a young man, Waugh wrote five novels that were quite well received, but gave up fiction, for fear of unfavourable comparisons with his father.

At school and at the École Normale Supérieure he gave evidence of brilliant, if somewhat undisciplined, powers, for which he found physical vent in different directions — first as a franc-tireur in the Franco-German War, and afterwards as actor, sailor and stevedore -- and an intellectual outlet in the writing of poems, plays and novels which vividly reflected his erratic but unmistakable talent.

Western novels, films and pulps gave birth to Western comics, which were very popular, particularly from the late 1940s until circa 1967, when the comics began to turn to reprints.

Described by Le Guin as a retrospective, it collects 17 previously-published stories, four of which were the germ of novels she was to write later: " The Word of Unbinding " and " The Rule of Names " gave Le Guin the place that was to become Earthsea ; " Semley's Necklace ," was first published as " Dowry of the Angyar " in 1964 and then as the Prologue of the novel Rocannon's World in 1966 ; " Winter's King " is about the inhabitants of the planet Winter, as is Le Guin's later novel The Left Hand of Darkness.

Their relationship was close, and her father gave her much of the information about Ireland that she would later incorporate into her novels.

He gave up his job and started writing full time, producing thirteen more novels in the next six years under three different names.

This gave van Gulik the idea of writing his own novels, set with the similar Ming anachronisms, but using the historical character.

Regarded by many as one of the finest works in any language, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes was one of the first novels published in Europe ; it gave Cervantes a stature in the Spanish-speaking world comparable to his contemporary William Shakespeare in English.

This, in turn, has given rise to the " grey goo " version of Armageddon, as featured in such science fiction novels as Bloom, Prey, and Recursion.

* The Aubrey – Maturin series of novels is a sequence of 20 historical novels by Patrick O ' Brian portraying the rise of Jack Aubrey from Lieutenant to Rear Admiral during the Napoleonic Wars.

They are connected by their early place in his published works and chronological placement within his overarching Foundation Universe, set around the rise of Asimov's Galactic Empire, between the Robot and Foundation series to which they were linked in Asimov's later novels.

Horatio Alger, Jr. ( January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899 ) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty.

Many writers better known in other genres like Elmore Leonard, Leigh Brackett, and Larry McMurtry have also written Western novels The genre's popularity peaked in the 1960s, due in part to the end of many pulp magazines, the popularity of televised Westerns, and the rise of the spy novel.

Many early historical novels played an important role in the rise of European popular interest in the history of the Middle Ages.

Dream of Eagles is a set of novels about the rise of Camelot after the Roman departure from Britain in the late 4th / early 5th century.

Whyte also wrote The Templar Trilogy, a set of novels that discusses the foundation, rise, and fall of the Knights Templar

* Wyatt is a character in Hilary Mantel's novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies which center on the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell.

The novels hint that she used both wit and seduction to rise through the ranks of the Russian space agency to become the leader of the first colonization mission.

Maugham's plays, like his novels, usually had a conventional plot structure, but the decade also saw the rise of the so-called New Drama, represented in plays by George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville Barker, and Continental imports by Henrik Ibsen and Gerhardt Hauptmann.

The rise and fall of Sejanus have been the subject, or partial subject, of several noted works in literature, including two 17th-century plays and 20th-century novels:

This development brought about the rise of the wildly popular fashionable novels in which publishers spread the stories, rumours, and flaunting of the rich and aristocratic, not so secretly hinting at the specific identity of these individuals.

It first appeared as one of the Fleuve Noir " Anticipation " novels, a series published in France from 1951 to 1960 which reflected the authors ' attitudes towards the supposed post war rise of a " technocracy " in the country.

The novels explore the last years of the reign of Shaddam's father, Elrood Corrino IX ( who is murdered by Count Hasimir Fenring at Shaddam's request ), and Shaddam's subsequent rise to power.

They rise as a threat to the New Republic in the New Jedi Order series of novels.

The last few years have also seen a rise in the volume of popular fiction being published across a range of genres from romantic novels to hardboiled detective stories set in New York.

His posthumous reputation was initially higher in France than in Britain, but has begun a new rise in recent years with the republication of various novels ( including Capuchin Classics ' The Voyage with an Introduction by Oxford's Valentine Cunningham in 2009 ), his poetry ( edited by Peter Holland for Scarthin Books in 2008 ) and the forthcoming re-edition of his plays, planned by Oberon Books for 2012.

She has written novels for children such as the autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and The Other Way Round, which semi-autobiographically tell the story of the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany from a child's perspective.

The play has given rise to innumerable sequels, parodies, and rewritings ; it has influenced countless later plays, short stories, and novels and has played a crucial role in the development of drama criticism.

Inspiration from this gave rise to Dymchurch being the setting of the Doctor Syn novels, based on smuggling, by Russell Thorndike.

The novels have established very little specific information about the exact status of Deryni or their place in Gwyneddan society prior to the Festillic Coup of 822, but they clearly rise to prominence following the successful invasion of Festil I Furstán, a younger prince of the Deryni ruling house of the Kingdom of Torenth.