Nothing Lasts Forever (Thorp novel)


Nothing Lasts Forever is a 1979 American action thriller novel by Roderick Thorp, a sequel to his 1966 novel The Detective. The novel is mostly known through its 1988 film adaptation, Die Hard. In 2012, the book was brought back into print and released as an ebook for the 25th anniversary of the film.

Plot

Retired New York Police detective Joe Leland is visiting the 40-story office headquarters of the Klaxon Oil Corporation in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, where his daughter Stephanie Leland Gennaro works. While he is waiting for his daughter's Christmas party to end, a group of German Autumn–era terrorists take over the skyscraper. The gang is led by the brutal Anton "Little Tony the Red" Gruber. Joe had known about Gruber through a counter-terrorism conference he had attended years prior. Barefoot, Leland slips away and manages to remain undetected in the gigantic office complex. Aided outside only by Los Angeles Police sergeant Al Powell and armed with only his police-issue pistol, Leland fights off the terrorists one by one in an attempt to save the 74 hostages, and his daughter and grandchildren.
The terrorists plan to steal documents that will publicly expose the Klaxon corporation's dealings with Chile's junta. They also intend to deprive Klaxon of the proceeds of the corrupt deal by dumping $6,000,000 in cash out of the tower's windows. Leland not only believes their claims, but also that his daughter is involved.
Leland kills eleven of the terrorists, but in the end he fails to save his daughter, who falls to her death with Gruber after he was shot by Leland. Blaming Klaxon for the terrorist attack, Leland throws the cash out of the window himself. As Leland is leaving the building, the last terrorist Karl, who was presumed dead earlier, returns and starts a shooting rampage, killing the police chief Dwayne Robinson in the process, before Powell finally kills him. Thus Leland is left bitter and broken from the night's events.

Characters

In 1975, author Roderick Thorp saw the film The Towering Inferno, which is about a skyscraper that catches on fire. After seeing the film, Thorp fell asleep and had a dream of seeing a man being chased through a skyscraper by men with guns. He woke up and later took that idea and turned it into The Detective sequel, Nothing Lasts Forever.
Roderick Thorp decided for the book to be a sequel to The Detective so it could be made into a follow-up film starring Frank Sinatra as Joe Leland. But when Sinatra declined the role, it was offered to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and a number of other actors until Bruce Willis signed on for the role.
The film does not follow the source material closely. Some of its memorable scenes, characters, and dialogue are taken directly from the novel. But the story was altered to be a stand-alone film with no connections to Thorp's novel The Detective. Other changes included the older hero of the novel becoming younger, his name changed from Joe Leland to John McClane, his daughter becoming his wife, and the American Klaxon Oil Corporation becoming the Japanese Nakatomi Corporation. The "terrorists" are actually professional thieves that are after $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds kept in the building's vault and are posing as terrorists to draw attention away from the robbery. In the film, they are also not only German, but of varying ethnicities, although most remain European. The tone of the novel is far darker with underlying themes of guilt, alcoholism and the complexity of the disturbed human mind. The novel also features women among the terrorists. The ending of the novel is also different from the film in that it suggests that Joe could possibly succumb to his wounds and die.
Some of the most famous action sequences from the film are taken from the book:
Similarly, Willis explained in a 1988 interview with KXAS-TV's entertainment reporter Bobbie Wygant that he acted out McClane with enough fear, anxiety, and vulnerability to make audiences believe that he could indeed possibly be killed because of what happened in the story, as Joseph Leland could possibly have died of his injuries in the book.

Reception

The Los Angeles Times called Nothing Lasts Forever "a ferocious, bloody, raging book so single-mindedly brilliant in concept and execution it should be read at a single sitting."