The news is better than you seem to expect.

Writer-director Michael Mann's planned book isn't "about" his 1995 cops-and-robbers classic "Heat," it's a continuation of the story set to come out in the summer.

I should, at this point, temper the excitement a little. Mann gave this update in a pretty offhand way during a broader discussion of "Heat" on the podcast "The Rewatchables," but this is far from a commitment -- in fact, he's been talking about this book since at least 2016. In all that time, he hasn't even announced a title, let alone a publisher or precise release date.

But he does have the story. He's had it ever since he wrote the screenplay for the movie in the early '90s.

In doing that, he said he developed full life stories, past and future, for the main characters, so writing the novel was just a matter of putting it all on paper. 

These character sketches were "so vivid, worked out and thorough that [it] compelled us … we've written a novel," Mann said. "Not on 'Heat,' but everything preceding 'Heat' and everything following."

In the meantime, he's still a busy producer-director-writer. He's currently working on the new series "Tokyo Vice," due for release in 2022, and he has a stake in several other projects in varying stages of development.

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