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Joe Don Baker, an imposing character actor who left his mark on action films, Westerns and James Bond adventures, has died at 89. An obituary for the actor reveals he died on May 7 and is survived by a small group of friends.

Baker was born on February 12, 1936, and spent his early life in Texas, attending Groesbeck High School and North Texas State College. After serving for two years in the U.S. Army, Baker traveled to New York City to pursue a career in theater.

He eventually began a career in television with a small part in the 1965 Western “Iron Horse,” and soon started appearing in films, with an uncredited start in 1967’s “Cool Hand Luke.”

His most famous role was that of wrestler-turned-sheriff Buford Pusser in the 1973 film “Walking Tall.” Baker appeared in scores of projects as a character actor, including three different Bond films and box office hits including 1984’s “The Natural,...

Castle creator Andrew Marlowe is expanding his detective empire.

Marlowe and wife/Castle writer and consulting producer Terri Edda Miller, along with Michael De Luca (Mob City), are working on an hour-long drama featuring Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe character for ABC.

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Described as “sexy” and “stylish,” the new project follows the wisecracking, private eye in modern-day Los Angeles, “where true love can be more difficult to find than justice.”

The character appears in several of Chandler’s novels, including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, and has previously appeared on the small screen.

Hammett, Chandler, Cain: the modern mystery thriller starts with them. They are the godfathers of that sensibility that would come to be called noir which would, in time, overflow the printed page and onto the stage, the big screen, and eventually even to television. Identified primarily with mysteries, the concept of flawed human beings ethically tripping and stumbling in a moral No Man’s Land, equidistant between Right and Wrong, Good and Bad would bleed across genre lines. There would be noir Westerns (Blood on the Moon, 1948), noir war movies (Attack!, 1956), noir horror (The Body Snatcher, 1945), even noir melodramas like Cain’s own Mildred Pierce, adapted for the screen in 1945.

But they all started with what Hammett, Chandler, and Cain did on the page, and each provided an evolutionary step which took what had once been usually dismissed as a flyweight genre dedicated to colorful private investigators and clever puzzles,...

(Elliott Gould, above, as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye.)

by Jon Zelazny

Editor’s note: this article originally appeared at EightMillionStories.com on November 14, 2008.

With the back-to-back success of his Oscar-nominated role in the off-beat wife-swapping hit Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) and the even bigger off-beat hit Mash (1970), Brooklyn’s own Elliott Gould skyrocketed to worldwide fame.

While perhaps best known to those under 40 as Ross and Monica’s dad on “Friends,” or Vegas financier Reuben Tishkoff in the blockbuster Ocean’s 11 series, cine-scholars generally regard Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) as Gould’s most iconic starring role. 2008 marks the 35th anniversary of their extraordinary modern-day reinterpretation of Raymond Chandler’s classic private eye, Philip Marlowe.

Elliott Gould invited me to his home in west Los Angeles, where he generously spoke at length of his three major collaborations with Altman, who passed away two years ago.

I read...