A name that often gets mentioned when people are looking for something "similar" to True Detective is Dennis Lehane. Author of eleven novels - three of which have been adapted for film - and a few episodes of The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, Lehane is probably best known for the movie versions of his books Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island. The latter is a bit of an anomaly in Lehane's bibliography, being a period piece that was written as an homage to B-movies and pulp fiction. It's the other two that will go a ways to helping you deal with the loss of True Detective. Mystic River, adapted to film by Clint Eastwood in 2003 with an all-star cast, and 2008's Gone Baby Gone, directed by Ben Affleck and starring True Detective cast member Michelle Monaghan, may not quite share the pessimistic world view of Rust Cohle, but they're certainly under no allusions as to the sort of awful things people are capable of. The former stars Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon as friends who share a disturbing secret from their childhood which rears its ugly head once again when one of their young daughters disappears and is later found brutally murdered. Gone Baby Gone, to cheer things up a little, features Monaghan and Casey Affleck as a couple of PIs investigating, er, the disappearance of a woman's young daughter. Both the books and the films are, like True Detective, much more concerned with the circumstances that allow such crimes to occur, and the effects it has on those involved, than solving the crimes themselves. They'll also make you lose faith in humanity, so they've got that in common, too!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
