An Overlooked Vanessa Kirby Crime Thriller Was Based On An Anthony Bourdain Book

Long before Vanessa Kirby was playing Sue Storm, arguably the main character in the new "Fantastic Four" film, she was starring in a low-key 2015 crime thriller called "Bone in the Throat." The movie was about an ambitious chef who starts a new job at his uncle's restaurant, only to find out that the London mob's decided to use the restaurant to commit murder. Don't you just hate when that happens?

Kirby doesn't play the main chef, but she does star as Sophie, the main character's love interest who is very concerned about that whole mob situation going on. It was a compelling role that Kirby handled well, but the movie was never a big hit. Most people today, even some of Vanessa Kirby's biggest fans, don't even know the movie exists. It's hard to tell if this was a case of bad marketing or if audiences genuinely didn't like the movie, because so few people have even bothered to leave a rating for the film. The movie doesn't have a Rotten Tomatoes score because it only appears to have garnered three critics' reviews. No audience member left any reviews on the site either. 

"Although entertaining in fits and starts, the filmization too often has the flavor of a reheated leftover from the Guy Ritchie menu," wrote critic Joe Leydon for Variety, in one of those three lone reviews logged onto Rotten Tomatoes. "Audiences aren't likely to sample this middling concoction until it's served in home-screen platforms." 

What does he mean by "filmization," exactly? He's referring to how this movie is an adaptation of a 1995 novel of the same title. The book had the same basic plot, except it took place in New York instead of London. The book was written by none other than Anthony Bourdain, a guy you might be surprised to learn had three fiction books to his name. "Bone in the Throat" was his first novel, "Gone Bamboo" in 1997 was his second, and "The Bobby Golden Stories" in 2001 was his third. None of them sold well at first.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about "Bone in the Throat," at least to the more casual Bourdain fans out there, is that it was published five years before "Kitchen Confidential," the kitchen memoir of his that made him a household name. In the cultural narrative around Bourdain's life, "Kitchen Confidential" is spoken of as if it were his first time getting published. The 2021 documentary "Roadrunner," detailing the ups and downs of Bourdain's life through questionable methods, only alludes to "Bone in the Throat" once in passing.

Bourdain's rise to fame led to his novels seeing a rise in sales, but they were never talked about even half as much as his nonfiction books like "A Cook's Tour" or "Medium Raw." Despite this, Bourdain had always spoken fondly of his fiction work and would often imply that he preferred fiction more as a medium. "I spend a lot of time writing about me, me, me, and what happens to me, me, me, and can make a television about me, and here I am talking about me," Bourdain said in a 2007 interview. He explained further:

"So it's nice to escape into an alternate universe, create other characters, create an alternate universe where complex problems can be solved with guns and blunt objects.  ... It's funny, though, fiction. I write a lot of nonfiction. I write about myself a lot, but in a sense you can say things about yourself [in fiction]. You can talk about things in fiction that you wouldn't dare in nonfiction."

His crime novels may never have been the big hit his memoirs became, but if you want to get to know Bourdain better, you should probably check them out anyway. They may not seem like they're about Bourdain himself, but they're arguably a more personal window into his mind than his direct memoirs ever were. As he's quoted writing in "Roadrunner," addressing his life in the late '90s, "I wrote a crime novel around that time in which the character's yearnings for a white-picket-fence kind of a life reflect my own far more truthfully than any nonfiction I've ever written."