San Francisco police sergeant Adam Plantinga’s new novel ‘The Ascent’ is in some ways autobiographical, with one major exception — the protagonist cop is forced to break out of a maximum security prison.

It’s pretty unusual for  a cop to write a book. But SFPD sergeant Adam Plantinga had previously written two; 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman (2014, and the winner of the 2015 Silver Falchion award for best nonfiction crime reference), and it sort-of sequel Police Craft: What Cops Know About Crime, Community and Violence (2018). But the Bay Area News Group reports today that Plantinga just published his first novel, called The Ascent.

The initial reviews are promising, with Kirkus Reviews calling its “A meat-and-potatoes thriller, sure—but they're delicious meat and potatoes.”

Now Plantinga’s debut novel is suddenly bigger news, as Deadline reported Tuesday that The Ascent has been picked up to be developed as a TV series. The TV production company Universal Television won something of a bidding war over the rights. Universal Television is also the production company behind the hit series The Gilded Age and the (frustratingly recently canceled) Schmigadoon!, as well as the recent reboots of Bel-Air and The Equalizer.

The Ascent tells the story of Detroit ex-cop Kurt Argento, who in a case of bad luck and mistaken identity, finds himself incarcerated in a maximum security prison. When a security flaw allows for an inmate uprising, Argento and a band of civilians are forced to improvise an escape that only gets more dangerous as they ascend each level, each with different categories of hardened criminals.

“I’ve always been fascinated by prisons: that forbidding silence and boredom punctuated by violence,”  Plantinga told the Bay Area News Group. “It helped me understand not just prison layout, but prison culture. Talking to staff there, I learned there are inmates who legitimately feel sorry for crimes they committed and will try to do better. Some actually had victims who come visit them. There’s a spectrum, but mine, even the best are still on the outs. It’s not a place where anyone’s getting better.”

So when is The Ascent going to be on TV? Difficult to say. Hollywood is littered with ideas that get bought up but never made, like the time that Guillermo del Toro was going to make a movie based on the video game Halo. Even if The Ascent gets cast and made, it could end up on a big network, or a streaming platform like Netflix or Apple TV. Universal Television is owned by NBCUniversal, so Peacock is a possibility too.

That could all take years to sort out. So in the meantime, just grab a copy of The Ascent at your favorite local bookstore and dig in.

Related: Rainy Weekend Reads: Three New(-ish) Books Set In San Francisco [SFist]

Image: @AdamPlantinga via Twitter

As this week sees the much awaited publication of a brand new, previously undiscovered Mark Twain children's story, one scholar at UC Berkeley is talking about the day he found evidence linking it to the legendary, prolific writer.

Robert Hirst, professor at UC Berkeley and General Editor and archivist of the Mark Twain Project, described to ABC 7 the discovery of a small note in the margin of an unfinished Twain manuscript. The note read, "Karoo hostess ain't she -- Susie." Given that Susie is the name of one of Twain's daughters, Hirst believes this to be proof that the funny handwritten manuscript, titled "Oleomargarine," can be directly linked to the author. Further, Hirst believes that "Oleomargarine" was one of Twain's many unwritten bedtime stories demanded constantly by his two daughters.

The unfinished manuscript was originally unearthed in the UC Berkeley archive by scholar John Bird in 2011, as he explained to the New York Times earlier this year. It was just 16 pages long, and it was only that tiny note that provided a connection to the bedtime stories Twain talked about making up in his autobiography, but never actually wrote down.

Hirst believes it was chance that he happened upon the note. He said, "A lot of people look through this and didn't tumble to that. And I've transcribed it — and I didn't tumble to that."

The manuscript might have remained unfinished if not for the efforts of author Philip Stead, who worked to complete the story. Along with his illustrator wife Erin Stead, he was able to create The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, which hit bookstores earlier this week. In a chat with NPR, Philip Stead said, "It was never entirely clear to us if there was never an ending, or if Twain just never got around to writing it down. That said, we had to make a book, so we had to provide an ending to the story."

The book tells the story of a young boy named Johnny who eats some magical seeds and discovers he's then able to talk to animals. In addition to a few changes to the animal characters, Stead also made Johnny, the main character, a young black boy. NPR asked him about that particular decision, to which Stead replied, "Three years ago, when we began the project, it wasn't a political decision. The character of Johnny was based in part on a real boy that we know. That said, I think it's very unfortunate that if we had chosen a white character as the main character, I'm not sure that we'd be answering these questions."

Of course, Twain may take issue with the book for another reason completely, as Hirst pointed out to ABC 7. Hirst said, "We have plenty of evidence that he did not like people tinkering with his stuff."

Related: Inventor of Dothraki Language Teaching A 'Game of Thrones' Class At UC Berkeley

We live in a relentlessly beautiful place that has inspired many over the years. This has always been a city brimming with artists, writers, and musicians — and SF's bohemian streak will hopefully not end with the 20th Century as it becomes more and more insanely expensive to stay here. But among the books that have been written about San Francisco, these fourteen stand out as our favorites, depicting different eras in a city that has been, by turns, wild, drunken, bawdy, tragic, too smart for its own good, and occasionally booming. Here are SFist's selections for the best SF-centric fiction to fill your spring and summer reading lists.

Valencia by Michelle Tea
Local queer author Michelle Tea's breakout novel, which like much of her work draws plenty on autobiographical experience, is a rollicking, kind of dirty, and very funny time capsule of the world of hip and under-employed lesbians in the Mission District of the 1990s. Tea was honing her own baldly honest, profane, Kerouacian prose style in this early book, and the free flow of her earnest, often boozed-up energy is infectious from paragraph to paragraph. The story focuses on the first-person narrator, named Michelle, looking back on her mid-twenties from not that far in the future with a sense of humor and a fondness for all things intoxicating. "She wouldn't have sex with me in public bathrooms," writes Tea. "Little things like this haunted me. I was only twenty-five." It's sweetly nostalgic now to think of a time when people could write in cafes, turn a few tricks, and cough up a couple hundred in rent each month and still be able to thrive in the Mission, and Tea's descriptions of 15th Street will not be familiar to anyone who has been here less than ten years. — Jay Barmann

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
This contemporary novel from a former Twitter employee does a marvelous job of weaving together the old world of print media with the digital age, beginning in the bowels of a mysterious, dark, seemingly infinite bookstore that has its own secret society attached. With the help of his brilliant Google-employed girlfriend, the protagonist Clay employs the wonders of the internet to crack a centuries-old puzzle. In the process, Sloan paints a picture of modern San Francisco during the Great Recession in which ex-Googlers start bagel companies and there's a speed-dating service for nerds called Singularity Singles. "Yeah. I met a guy who programmed bots for a hedge fund," says girlfriend Kat. "We dated for a while. He was really into rock climbing. He had nice shoulders. But a cruel heart." — Jay Barmann

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Tales Of The City by Armistead Maupin
Beckoning many an ingenue to Baghdad by the Bay, the first of nine novels by Armistead Maupin introduced enduring characters like the naive Mary Ann Singleton, her eccentric, pot-growing landlord Anna Madrigal, and a cast of queer locals like Michael "Mouse" Tolliver. Published in 1978 and first serialized in the pages of the Chronicle, Tales of the City occupies a special place in local literature and lore, reflecting the "alternative" mores of the '70s Bay Area like hippy bisexuality and Safeway cruising. Installments of the series incorporate current events and fictionalizations of real-life figures from Jim Jones to Elizabeth Taylor to a thinly veiled Rock Hudson. And, though the rent at 28 Barbary Lane has probably skyrocketed since those days, Tales of the City continues to offer an inclusive fictional home for San Franciscans. — Caleb Pershan

McTeague covers throughout the years

The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac
Everyone knows about the parts of On the Road that take place in SF, and Desolation Angels and Big Sur each tell sad, lonely tales that touch down in Berkeley and Big Sur respectively. But the book of Kerouac's that truly feels like a novel — a tightly written, lyrical, and brief one at that — and is his loveliest love letter to San Francisco, is The Subterraneans. It's personally my favorite of all Beat Generation novels, and the one I tell everyone to read if they try to dismiss Kerouac's talent on the basis of one book (usually On the Road). Critics sometimes bristle at Kerouac's tone around race in this one — it depicts his real-life affair with Alene Lee, who was African American, cast here as Mardou Fox. But this is a book that tries to capture North Beach of the 1950s and its liberal intellectuals of all races, as well as his own fickle heart. There's talk of "egg foo young at Jackson and Kearny" and of "the great glitter up and down Market like wash gold dusting and the throb of neons at O'Farrell and Mason bars with cocktail glass cherrysticks winking invitation to the open hungering hearts of Saturday." If you can get past the race stuff, it is a truly beautiful read. — Jay Barmann

You Can Say You Knew Me When by K.M. Soehnlein
Like Valencia, this is a book about SF in the 1990's, only this time from a gay angle, and with the added dimension of a character we meet through letters from the Beat era of the 1950's. Soehnlein paints a very real and humble portrait of pot-smoking protagonist Jamie, his beach trysts and HIV panics, his relationship with his boyfriend Woody, and his very San Francisco friends. It's a book of frank sexuality and also thoughtful reflection, and it does well tying together two legendary eras of the city in a series of confidently drawn scenes and a flurry of excellent prose. — Jay Barmann

The Barbary Dogs by Cynthia Robinson
Don't mind the cover. This contemporary mystery novel, originally titled The Barbary Galahad, is the second in a series that began with the more Berkeley-centric The Dog Park Club, centered on opera singer-turned-amateur sleuth Max Bravo. Robinson's prose is too witty and rich to belong solely in the mystery genre, and her love for and deep knowledge of San Francisco and its history is evident on every page. The Barbary Dogs centers on the Golden Gate Bridge suicide of Max's friend Frank, a failed writer whose found journal takes Max on a tour of the ghosts and bohemians of SF's past. But the humor littered through every chapter, some of it highly place-specific, will delight all locals. "I sat down on the sidewalk halfway up Diamond," Robinson writes. "To scale that particular street one needed the legs of a speed skater and the mindset of a drayage beast. I had neither of course, just a general restlessness and lack of direction." — Jay Barmann

Cover for The Joy Luck Club: Putnam

Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
Tell me if this sounds familiar: a tough-guy gumshoe is hot on a corruption case in a city where nothing is as it seems. Though the tropes are pure noir, Jonathan Lethem's first novel is equal parts sci-fi in a double-genre fiction experiment with its own hilarious rules. Located in a future Bay Area, "evolved" animals like kangaroos are gangsters while intelligent babies are speakeasy-frequenting cynics. The drugs snorted by most characters are named for their purposes, like "Acceptol" and "Forgettol." And lending the book its title, handguns play menacing violin music when drawn in a nod to the gangster movie soundtrack cliché. The playful streak in Gun, With Occasional Music earned it a 1994 Nebula Award nomination and continues to make it a clever, cunning caper.— Caleb Pershan

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Honorable Mentions
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
It's not a novel, exactly. Eggers maintains it's a memoir, though, like Valencia, it's pretty much a novel as well as an ode to SF in the '90's as told via the magazine world. And Eggers has some very pretty descriptions of the city, and of the frustrations of riding Muni buses. — Jay Barmann

The Royal Family by William T. Vollman
A tragedy-tourist's dream foray across the addicts and sex workers that populate the Tenderloin, this book is frequently cited on SF-set great novels list. However, the misanthropic glee Vollman expresses throughout this book makes it, however dazzlingly written, hard for us to recommend as a "best." Approach with caution. — Eve Batey

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
In this 1966 novella — frequently held up in answer to the question "what is postmodern?" — protagonist Oedipa Maas spends a bit of time in San francisco and Berkeley on her hunt to unearth a potentially major mail conspiracy. In the city she meets a group dedicated to the pursuit of falling in love as a drug experience, and in Berkeley she encounters a sort of mad engineer. Everywhere she goes in the Bay Area, Oedipa can't help but notice a secret acronym: Waste, or "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire," so be on the lookout, everyone. — Caleb Pershan

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
This recent Pulitzer Prize winner is only partly set in SF, and largely in New York, but it still deserves a mention for depicting the punk scene in SF in 1979 where main character Bennie gets his start in his first band. — Jay Barmann

Berkeley-based writer Sara Houghteling has a debut novel on the shelves called Pictures at an Exhibition, which tells the story of Max Berenzon, son of a Jewish art dealer in Paris and his quest to recover his family's priceless art collection, looted by Nazis during World War II.

SFist asked her a few questions:

SFist: Your family has some history in Paris. Did they have any connection to the pre- or post-war art world you write about?
Houghteling: My great-great-grandfather was a majolica painter in Italy—this is the closet genetic connection I can claim to any fragment of the art world. My family’s only immediate connection to Paris in the post-war period is through my grandfather, who worked for the Marshall Plan mapping bridges.

How much time had/did you spend in Paris, prior to or while writing the book?
I’ve spent about two years living in Paris—the first was as a twenty-two-year-old English teacher at the American School in Paris, and the second as a Fulbright in Paris. Prior to this, as an undergraduate, I worked for the Let’s Go: France travel guide series. The editors asked us to indicate landmarks (like, Youth Hostel, Train Station) on a map, which I was completely incapable of doing. However, I loved learning about the history of the places I visited, especially the artists’ houses in the South of France—Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall were all neighbors down there.

While it seems too sugary to be true - and we doubt it is - this story has touched our cold, selfish hearts. See, Muni Diaries has a story of fate and romance that will have you believing in the magical powers of public transportation again.

OK, not really. But this allegedly true story, told by Muni rider Daniel Seraph, happened on a cable car way back when residents used to ride them. Seraph recounts what he heard the the car's driver tell a passenger - using the driver's voice - which might make you believe in love all over again.

Did you see that lady back there with that child? Well, years ago when I was driving this same cable car, a woman pushing a baby carriage was riding in my car. She got off the cable car but somehow the cable car started moving with the baby still onboard! She chased after the cable car but she wasn’t fast enough. So she flagged someone down to give her a ride to chase after this cable car. Finally she got me to stop and she was reunited with her child. Well this woman and I became friends, and her baby girl - the one who was left in my cable car - grew up and ended up marrying my son. And that little kid with her just now? That’s my grandchild.

Anyone else hear about this story? Because we smell romcom smash in the making.