Juri,
Re your comment below:
"I think the first TV tie-in novel is written by one of our
guys, Richard Deming. He did two Dragnet books, which, I
think, are first examples of this genre. They were published
in the mid-to-late fifties, can't remember the actual year
and am too lazy to check."
Actually, the first DRAGNET novel wasn't written by Richard
Deming, but by another of our guys, Richard S. Prather, under
the pen name of "David Knight." It was called CASE NO. 561,
and fictionalized the case of cop-killer Erwin "Machine-Gun"
Walker, the same case that provided the basis for the film HE
WALKED BY NIGHT, the movie that inspired Jack Webb to create
DRAGNET. Prather's novel came out in 1956 from Pocket
Books.
In 1957, the juvenile publisher, Whitman, hired Deming to do
a collection of short stories based on DRAGNET, called
DRAGNET - CASE HISTORIES FROM THE FAMOUS T.V. SERIES. These
were not original stories, but were all adapted from scripts
from the radio and TV series. Hence, "novelizations" rather
than "tie-ins."
Mark VII Limited was impressed enough with the short story
collection, that they hired Deming to continue the novels for
Pocket. Deming's first DRAGNET novel came out in 1958. It was
called THE CASE OF THE COURTEOUS KILLER. It was followed in
1959 by THE CASE OF THE CRIME KING, which most regard as the
best in the Pocket Book series. These were original novels,
not based on scripts, but were, like the series adapted from
actual cases.
In 1967, after the series was revived, David H. Vowell, one
of the scriptwriters on the revived series, wrote one
original novel called DRAGNET 1968, the only prose DRAGNET
story which has Friday and his partner working as
narcs.
However, as Imentioned earlier, the DRAGNET novels were far
from the first tie-ins. Tie-in novels, and novelizations of
stories originally written for screen, stage, or broadcast,
predate, not merely DRAGNET, but television, and go all the
way back at least to Conan Doyle, whose short story "The
Adventure of the Mazarin Stone," was adapted from his
original Sherlock Holmes stage play, THE CROWN DIAMOND.
JIM DOHERTY
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