Mark,
Re your question below:
"Kinda speaking of which, are there any worthwhile
novelizations?"
If you mean by "novelization" adapted from a play, movie, or
TV script, whether or not said play, movie, or TV script was
actually produced, Raymond Chandler's last Marlowe novel,
PLAYBACK, was a novelization of an unproduced screenplay he
did in the late '40's for Universal. PLAYBACK was probably
Chandler's worst novel, but bad Chandler is still better
than, say, good Mike Avallone. MacKinlay Kantor's SIGNAL 32,
one of the best cops novels ever written, also started out as
a movie script, or at least as a screen treatment.
If you meant adapted from a movie script that was LATER
produced, so that the movie SEEMED to be adapted from the
novel, than Larry McMurtry's LONESOME DOVE and Ian Fleming's
THUNDERBALL both started out as movie scripts, were reworked
as novels, and eventually made it onto the screen, DOVE as a
TV-mini-serial, and THUNDERBALL as on the big screen in 1965
and 1983.
If you refer ONLY to novels adapted from stage, screen, or TV
projects that were actually produced and shown, there's Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,"
adapted from his stage play
"The Crown Diamond," one of only two Holmes short stories to
be written in the third person; Dorothy L. Sayers's BUSMAN'S
HONEYMOON, adapted from the stage play on which she
collaborated with Muriel St. Clare; Max Allan Collins's DICK
TRACY, which manages tp make sense of a rather muddled
script, brings events a bit closer to the comic strip's
continuity, and works in a few classic Gould characters (e.g.
Vitamin Flintheart) who aren't in the movie; Collins's ROAD
TO PERDITION, which adapts the screenplay which was, in turn,
an adaptation of Collins's original comic book script for the
graphic novel of the same name; John Gardner's LICENSE TO
KILL and GOLDENEYE, adapting scripts to James Bond movies
that were not directly adapted from Fleming novels (Gardner
was alreadycontracted to contribute new entries to the Bond
series at this time, which is how he got these novelization
gigs); Isaac Asimov's FANTASTIC VOYAGE, which actually tried
to make the whole "surgical team in a shrunken submarine"
plot scientifically plausible, and which, since the hero's a
secret agent and the villain's identity isn't revealed until
the end, counts (though barely, I grant you) as a mystery;
and Richard Deming's THE CASE OF THE COURTEOUS KILLER,
adapted from the two-part DRAGNET episode "The Big Gent," and
his short story collection DRAGNET, which adapted a
half-dozen or so episodes into prose.
If you mean original novels using characters created for film
or TV (Lawrence Block refers to these as
"tie-ins" to distinguish them from novels that are directly
adapted from scripts), there's a few, like Jim Thompson's
IRONSIDE and Lou Cameron's THE OUTSIDER that have already
been mentioned. I'd add Richard Deming's second DRAGNET
novel, THE CASE OF THE CRIME KING; many of the MAN FROM
U.N.C.L.E. novels by various authors like Harry Whittington
and David McDaniel; and I SPY, written by Walter Wager under
the pen name of "John Tiger," which may have been the first
adult mystery novel I ever read.
There are also any number of short stories expanded by their
authors to novel length, which expansions were deliberately
timed to coincide with film adaptations of the short stories.
Louis L'Amour's HONDO, for example, was an expansion of his
short story "A Gift for Cochise," which became the film
HONDO, which hit theatres at about the same time L'Amour's
book hit bookstories. Steve Frazee's award-winning,
much-reprinted "My Brother Down There" was expanded into a
novel called RUNNING TARGET, which appeared in bookstores at
the same time that a film version of the short story, also
called RUNNING TARGET, appeared on screen.
Novelizations and, to a lesser degree, tie-ins, are regarded,
not without some justification, as literary bottom-feeding,
but really, philosophically, adapting a dramatic form into
prose is really no different than adapting a piece of prose
fiction into a drama, and there's no reason a good author
can't give his best effort to such a project and turn out
something that's worth reading on its own merits.
JIM DOHERTY
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