Shaft is a 1970 detective novel by Ernest Tidyman. It is the first novel in the John Shaft novel series. The novel debuted the character John Shaft and inspired both the 1971 film Shaft and its sequels. Shaft tells one of the adventures of John Shaft, a private investigator based in New York City. Author Ernest Tidyman was at the time trying to transition from the field of journalism to fiction, after his first novel, Flower Power, had little success. Editor Alan Rinzler, who had worked with Claude Brown on the bestselling Manchild in the Promised Land, wanted a book to take the gritty realism of Manchild in the Promised Land and bring it into the mystery genre.
Adaptations (3)
Shaft has been adapted 3 times, across film and television series, from 1971 to 2000.
Shaft1971 · film · 100 min · dir. Gordon Parks · IMDb ↗Cool Black private eye John Shaft is hired by a crime lord to find and retrieve his kidnapped daughter.
Shaft1973 · television series · 73 min · IMDb ↗IMDb6.5Shaft is a series of TV movies that aired along with Hawkins during 1973-74 television season on The New CBS Tuesday Night Movies. The series was based on three films beginning with Shaft, and starring Richard Roundtree as private detective John Shaft. Because it was aired on over-the-air television, CBS felt that the character needed to be toned down. Now instead of working against the police, he worked with them. The series rotated with Hawkins starring James Stewart as a country lawyer who investigates his cases, similarly to his earlier film Anatomy of a Murder. Contemporary analysts suggested that since the two shows appealed to vastly different audience bases, alternating them only served to confuse fans of both series, giving neither one the time to build up a large viewership.
Shaft2000 · film · 99 min · dir. John Singleton · IMDb ↗New York police detective John Shaft arrests Walter Wade Jr. for a racially motivated slaying. But the only eyewitness disappears, and Wade jumps bail for Switzerland. Two years later Wade returns to face trial, confident his money and influence will get him acquitted -- especially since he's paid a drug kingpin to kill the witness.
