Michael Mann’s novel based on ‘Heat’ will be released next year

Publisher Harper Collins will release a novel by filmmaker Michael Mann featuring the characters from his iconic 1995 film “Heat” next year, the director revealed on Twitter.

The novel, which has been in the works for years, is being co-written with Reed Farrel Coleman, the crime author best known for his series of novels featuring Moe Prager, an ex-police officer turned private eye.

“Heat,” written and directed by Mann, gained critical acclaim upon its release and remains one of the best-known films of the 1990s. The movie follows a Los Angeles police detective, played by Al Pacino, on the trail of a crew of robbers led by a longtime thief, played by Robert De Niro.

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In a review for The Times, film critic Kenneth Turan praised the film, writing, “Its use of L.A. locations is excellent (as was the case with Mann’s earlier ‘Manhunter’) and its violence is for the most part carefully parceled out, potent without causing revulsion. Mann’s dialogue can sound overwrought and self-consciously operatic, but it is more often muscular and to the point.”

Both Coleman and Mann were recent guests on “One Heat Minute,” a podcast by Blake Howard that features a minute-by-minute analysis of Mann’s legendary film.

Mann first indicated his interest in writing a novel inspired by”Heat” in 2016, when Harper Collins announced that the director would be getting his own imprint with the publisher.

Deadline reported that the planned novel would be a prequel, covering “the formative years of homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), McCauley’s accomplice Nate (Jon Voight), and other characters ... in the 1995 film.”

Coleman was announced as Mann’s co-writer on the project the following year.

In a Twitter post retweeted by the Michael Mann Books account in January, crime novelist Don Winslow (“The Cartel,” “The Border”) described the upcoming “Heat” book as a “sequel/prequel,” and said it would be the second book from Mann’s imprint.

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The first book to be published by Michael Mann Books was “Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire,” by Elaine Shannon. That book, released in February, featured a foreword by Mann.

It’s unknown what future books Mann’s imprint might release, but in 2016, Deadline reported that the filmmaker planned to collaborate with Don Winslow on a novel based on Chicago mobsters Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana.

There’s no release date or title as of yet for Mann and Coleman’s “Heat” book.