The Gun Seller

Fox's House appeared to be just another show in the saturated doctor genre, but oh-ho we are pleasantly surprised. Sure, he's a physician and most of the show's guest stars are wretched supine souls but there are two key differences about this drama.

One is that it's a mystery. As a diagnostician, Dr. House is the sardonic Inspector Hercule Poirot of the medical world figuring out what no one else can, including the viewer. But you don't feel cheated when his inevitable genius prevails because you're too busy shaking your head and being impressed.

So rah-rah the show, it's fabulous, but the second and real reason this show works is actually quite common with television--because the lead is phenomenal. Yes, the entire cast is excellent and each worthy of applause, but we all watch it for 'the man.' Dr. Gregory House is brilliant, bitter and has the bedside manner of a rattlesnake.

He says what we all want to say and he does it so cleverly that you almost can't understand why his victim is frowning instead of laughing at his insouciance. But it's something else that draws us to this caustic cane-bearer, something intangible that we see in those blue eyes of his that possess the gravitational pull of black holes. Ladies and gentlemen, it's authenticity.

It's a given that we all secrety desire our stars to be who they portray. Unfortunately, they just usually aren't that cool (or, on the flip side, that evil) but this one is. This one makes us feel like Indiana Jones unearthing the Lost Ark. Now I don't know whether Hugh Laurie knows anything about the human body and I hope he doesn't treat Vicodin like Tic-Tacs, but I do know that House's oomph is Hugh Laurie. I know this not because I saw some blip of an interview but because I dove in and swam around in all 368 pages of his book (and read a caboodle of interviews.) Yep, the Brit penned a novel. But before we get to the book, let's meet the author. Paging Dr. House

His first name is James; one of his middle names is Hugh. Only someone who calls 'french fries' 'chips' would prefer 'Hugh' over 'James.' Born in Oxford to an Olympian father, he started out at a rather prestigious preparatory called the Dragon School and matriculated in to Eton and Cambridge. (How's that for a lofty launch into the world?) At university, as they say across the pond, he dated an ingenue by the name of Emma Thompson, who also dabbled in acting and once described him as "lugubriously sexy." (I figure if I had to use a dictionary for that one, you could too.)

Then in 1980, after an auspicious encounter with another talented bloke, Stephen Fry, the two smartly teamed up to form one of the most successful comedy duos in British television history. These days, he plays guitar and keyboard in a band called Poor White Trash and he rides a Triumph Bonneville, which is a fancy smancy motorcycle that looks really cool. And finally, just because I think it's an amusing bit of trivia, in his younger years when Laurie seemed to be rowing his way to a gold medal like his father as an oarsman, he was forced to leave his sculls in the Thames because of mononucleosis. It's a smile worthy irony that if it wasn't for a disease we might never have heard of Dr. House.

And, for the sake of a segue, if I had never heard of Dr. House, I never would have heard of Thomas Lang, the explicably familiar protagonist in Laurie's book. Thank goodness for mono.

Published ten years ago, The Gun Seller is a well written satire about a good enough chap who finds his motorcycle and his self in a bad way. Lang is ex-military who now freelances and somehow got roped into a job he turned down. That's all the plot I'm going to relay because you can read the dust cover and because once again the lead is the reason to tune in. Lang is self-effacing and sharp but we love him for his humanity and his panache. (Notice any House-like qualities here?)

He seems to genuinely care about the world if not actually want to be involved in it too much and he seems more objective, or aware of his lack of being so when the occassion precludes it, than most human beings. Throughout his ordeal, he is honest, poignant and, much to our pleasure, glib. Given that House came almost a decade after The Gun Seller, it seems to me that Gregory House is Thomas Lang is Hugh Laurie. And they're all just so cool.

There's talk of turning this book into a movie (with Laurie writing the screenplay) and more talk about a second novel. With the success of House, fruition of this talk seems more probable than possible. I hope so anyway. Because I think we all love to see the real deal. The actor's who funny because he really is funny.

The writer who can deliver the funny not just type it out. The Brit who can make us all think he's American and then upon learning we've been duped we're that much more in love with him because 'we couldn't even tell.' We love when people can blur lines with such finesse. And Hugh Laurie definitely has that lugubrious finesse.

I was seated with other late comers up in the balcony, which gave me a
good view of the top of his head. He had prepared about 10 pages of
notes and was deep into a discussion of his disastrous attempt at
screenplay writing. Very funny stuff, but very real, I felt. He went
through a painful period of writer's block, and he spoke about the
various methods that helped him break through it, including the
keeping of a journal. This gave us a bit of insight into the real
person: an involved father in a non-cooking household with lots of
Marks and Spencer frozen entrees being served.

He read a second bit of the book, which is out of the Robert
Ludlum/Len Deighton school of literature; good airport reading
that you can bin without compunction. The genre is, by
definition, chauvinistic, sexist, violent, etc. One of the
questions asked during the 20min. Q&A session was, in effect,
if this character was a manifestation of his fantasy life persona. His
response was more or less yes, and that his wife was well aware of
this normally suppressed critter.

When asked if Stephen had read the book Laurie responded that he'd
read it too late to give critical feedback, so Fry simply said it was
great. Other questions included whether or not it would be audiotaped
(no) and if he really know a lot about guns, which he answered with a
not really, but he did the research because he hates books in the
genre that don't include the details.

He explained that the book wouldn't be released in the States
because publishers deemed it a bit too anti-American, but Laurie felt
that this was inevitable as the U.S. is always perceived as the big
bad World Cop, and this comes through in "The Gun Seller." He then
proceeded to jab a bit at Yanks (too big, too loud, too many of us,
too TOO) and we all had a good laugh.

It was a great Q&A period, and he tried very hard to relax, but you
could tell that he's much happier when he's scripted. He would start
to babble, then berate himself hilariously for babbling. I came away
with the impression that Laurie is charming, very sweet one-to-one,
very shy to a group, and he's written a book in a genre that he's mad
about.