Lee Raintree: Dallas

And now for something completely different - or is it after all that much different from any other books I've been writing here in my blog? 

As you can see from the cover and the title, Dallas by Lee Raintree (published by Dell in 1978) is a novelization of the Dallas TV series. It's written on the basis of the original miniseries which has later been dubbed as the first season, because the series was continued after the five-part miniseries proved to be popular. Mind you, I never watched Dallas and I don't really know how faithful the book is, but luckily there's a Goodreads writer telling what the differences are (i.e. Bobby Ewing is a Vietnam veteran in the book and suffers from violent anxiety attacks). It also seems that the book has a beginning missing from the series that tells about the start of the feud between the Ewings and the Barneses. The epilogue is set in the 1920's or the 1930's, and it's quite strong and dramatic. 

Lee Raintree was really Con Sellers, a paperback writer whose books I've written earlier about in my blog (see here). He started out in very cheap sleaze paperbacks, but managed to make it big with Dallas and scored big deals with his next books. This is his only book as by Lee Raintree. 

Dallas is the fourth book I've read by him, and seems like he was a good writer with a sense for words and drama. His characters and sentences are edgy and angular, and I like that kind of style very much. This is no smooth soap opera for faint-heart middle-class ladies. There are scenes of violence and rape, and the scene near the end when two white trash men crash into the Ewing house and threaten the women of the family is very powerful. (In the book, Ellie Ewing saves the women and kills the other man, in the series Bobby and Jock Ewing come to the rescue.) Of course it also titillates readers, and after having been assaulted, Sue Ellen, the wife of J.R. Ewing, finds her hidden sexuality, which might be embarrassing to some readers. It is indeed awkward and old-fashioned. One other thing must be said: J.R. Ewing is only a mean bastard in the book (fantasizing about tying Pamela Barnes in bed and raping her), and were he to appear like that in the series, he wouldn't have proven so popular. (I noticed there's a book The Quotations of J.R. Ewing. C'mon!) It must be said, though, that at times the book can be quite long-winded, with lots of dialogue going nowhere, especially in the middle. Sellers was probably paid by the word. 

The Finnish translation which I read is quite different from the other translations or the original. It was published in hardcover (which, as far as I can see, is the only hardcover publication of the book), and it was given a nice, Polish-style cover by Finnish artist Pekka Loiri. 

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Out now: Dark Places and Little Tramps: Writings on noir, hardboiled, sleaze and other genres. 

Paul Denver: The Deadly Chance (1973)

Okay, I'm cheating here a bit. This is one of the books I'm including in my forth-coming book on British paperback crime fiction. I only browsed through the book while cycling at the gym. I think that's enough for this book, which isn't exactly quality stuff.

Paul Denver was one of the pseudonyms used by the British writer Douglas Enefer. He has no Wikipedia entry, but there's always Goodreads. I've read some of his books starring private eye Michael Power, they are mildly ok, mediocre but still entertaining enough. (Actually I first thought, over ten years ago when I was writing my first book, Pulpografia, that Denver was American.) Enefer also wrote some Cannon novelizations as by Paul Denver, and the titular The Deadly Chance is one of them. I believe the story went like this: when the bona fide American Cannon novelizations (written by Richard Gallagher) ran out, the British publisher World Distributors asked Denver to write more of them. And that's just what he did. I don't know whether Denver wrote on an outline or a screenplay of an episode or whether he just made it all up. I'll have to check that out.

The first problem is that Denver/Enefer can't write like an American. There's always a feeling someone's cheating. Denver/Enefer is clever enough though to keep descriptions at minimum. The dialogue also gives the Britishness of the author away, but that doesn't happen all that often in the Finnish translation (though it at times adds layers of its own). The story is a bit silly with its depiction of a small town drug scene, but there's a twist that might keep the reader interested. I say "might", because I skipped lots that went on interim. There's something tired about the book.

There are good British paperback crime novels out there, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. Included is the Finnish edition from 1976, published in a series that consisted only of TV novelizations.

Edit: I changed the publisher from Consul to World Distributors. They put out the Cannon novelizations written by Paul Denver. Consul published earlier paperbacks by Denver.

Todd Strasser: The Good Son

I remember Joseph Ruben's film The Good Son (1993) mainly from seeing the Finnish translation of the novelization by Todd Strasser on the supermarket racks. I knew Macaulay Culkin's career had gone downhill and had read somewhere (remember: this was when the internet meant only some awkward e-mail software) that Culkin was playing a baddie in the movie. I'm always interested when actors I don't care for (or even hate) play baddies. (Take Bill Murray for instance. I hate him in comedies, but he's wonderful for example in John McNaughton's Mad Dog and Glory.)

I didn't know at the time, though, that The Good Son was already some years old and that it hadn't come to Finnish theaters in the first place. I still don't know why this was. Maybe it was because the Jamie Bulger case - the British censors even cut some seconds away from this film after the tragic event. The film was released here only on video, and the movie tie-in book by Strasser was published roughly at the same time. To this day, I haven't seen the film.

But I've now read the book. Todd Strasser seems to be a well-regarded YA author, but this, alongside with the movie tie-in of Super Mario Bros (!), is his only book translated in Finnish. He writes smoothly, but somewhat unimaginatively, at times retorting to clichés. The story is interesting, though, and it should be, since the screenplay for the film was written by Ian McEwan. Now, I'm not his biggest fan (I've read only his first, The Cement Garden, 1978, and I haven't liked the films based on his books, like Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers), but given his statue he should be able to come up with something worthwhile. And yes, the story of The Good Son is intriguing and even thrilling, even a bit implausible at times (the 12-year old boy should get caught for his actions many times, as he leaves lots of clues behind him). I just don't get what the story is about. Is it about mothers who care their kids to the borders of insanity? Is it about dads missing out on their sons' lives? Is it about the fear of death or is it about the love that conquers all fears? Maybe McEwan's original script is more complex than Strasser's pretty simple narration (or Ruben's film which I haven't seen) and his points are just missing in this.

It's interesting, though, that Ruben has an auteuristic touch of doing stories about dysfunctional families: The Stepfather (from the Donald Westlake script!), Sleeping with the Enemy and this. There might be more in his filmography. But then again, he's also done Money Train...

There's a minor, but interesting anecdote in this: when I talked about the Finnish publisher of the book, Kari Lindgren (he of the Book Studio), he said that The Good Son (Serkkupoika in Finnish) was his best-selling movie tie-in ever, based only on the video release. What gives here?

Edit: I was mistaken about Bill Murray playing in a David Mamet film. I got him mixed up with Steve Martin, who's very good in Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner. I fixed that now. 

Herschell Gordon Lewis's third novel?

A friend of mine here in Finland is going to interview the notorious horror/camp director Herschell Gordon Lewis. I mentioned to him that Lewis also wrote novelizations of some of his films and that there were reprints of two of them, Two Thousand Maniacs and Blood Feast. Both came originally from Novel Books in 1963 and 1964, retrospectively, and the reprints came from Fantaco in the late eighties (the cover of the other one on the left).

But I seem to remember there was a third one. I've seen the cover for it somwhere in the web, but can't find it again anywhere. The copies of the original editions seem to be very rare (none in Abebooks at least), but I'm sure there was a third one. Now, can anyone confirm this and tell me what the title of the third HGL novelization was? For some reason I seem to remember it was Monster A-Go-Go, but my friend tells me Lewis has discredited the film so that there wouldn't be much point in him having written a novelization of it. The Wikipedia article on Lewis doesn't mention any of the novels.

Why am I interested in this? I asked my friend to ask Lewis if he would allow doing translations of his novels in Finnish!

EDIT: another friend of mine located the book. It's Color Me Blood Red (Novel Books 1964); see the cover on the left. It's mentioned in this thread of horror movie novelizations and tie-ins. The photo of the book isn't very good, I'm sorry to say.

I don't really know why I read this..

..but I was entertained by the idea. Just a basic novelization fodder which wouldn't work if it were not for the movie. Arnold's character, Eraser, isn't really described in any sense and you'll have to picture him in your head while you're reading the book. The love angle is pretty blandly narrated.

Some of the scenes containing violence border on sadism - this makes me think whether there's a difference between a written word and a piece of action cinema: the things that on screen only make me laugh (or sigh...) make me cringe when I'm reading them. Is this because we take the written word more seriously? Or is it because we have to picture the torture in our own mind? Or are we only accustomed to action movies being more and more violent - when the same things are described on page, we wake up to the notion: "Hey, this is pretty friggin' sick sadism!"

There's not much on Robert Tine in the web. He seems to be born in 1954 (or in 1955) and he's written mainly novelizations and tie-ins. Here's a list. In his early career in the mid-eighties, he wrote the postapocalyptic Outrider series as by Robert Harding, which I believe is a house pseudonym, shared also by other writers. If I'm wrong about this, please correct me.

Here's a link to the original cover.

Obscure Chandler no more obscure

I posted earlier about a short novelization of Double Indemnity that was published in Finnish in 1945. I asked if anyone knew where the thing came from - is it a translation of an American tie-in or was it perhaps Swedish in origin?

No one came to help, so I started digging around. I took a look at Fennica, the Finnish National Library's database and made a note of what films had been novelized in the same series. There were surprisingly many, 37 in total, and some of the films were European in origin. Many were American, like Robin Hood, Road to Cairo (another wonderful Billy Wilder outing) and The Saratoga Trunk, to mention only a few.

Then I made quite a many Abebooks searches for many of the films the names of which I'd found in the library database. I knew there are lots of European bookselelrs in Abebooks, and before long I noticed there has been something called Illustrierte Film-Bühne (translated approximately as Illustrated Film-Scenes or some such). And then simply Googling with that I noticed a German-located database had listed all of the books published in the series. I then cross-searched with the books that had been published in the Finnish series, and they all matched each other.

So, the series (which was called Paletin filmiromaanit, by the way, and it was published by Lehtiyhtymä, one of the foremost Finnish published specialized in cheap entertainment) that had the Double Indemnity novelization was first published in Germany and the writers of the texts were probably German, too, so to count the novelization of Double Indemnity as a work of Raymond Chandler is a bit of a stretch.

I haven't been able to find who was the German publisher of these booklets, but they lasted surprisingly long, to the late fifties. Depicted is the cover of John Ford's Gideon of Scotland Yard and Jack Hawkins as the titular hero.

Edit: my friend, Sauli Pesonen, found this quote from the German Wikipedia. It says that the series was published by the Paul Franke publishers in 1946 and that the series lasted till 1969! This seems, though, that there have been quite a many series that have been called Illustrierte Film-Bühne, since the books I found (again, check the link above) were published already in the thirties and early fourties.

And here's the quote: "Die Illustrierte Film-Bühne (IFB) wurde 1946 in München von dem Verleger Paul Franke gegründet. Die Programmhefte wurden häufig in Blau, Grün, Braun oder Rot gedruckt. Mit der Nr. 8069 wurde 1969 die letzte Ausgabe produziert."

Edit 2: Thanks to Tapani Bagge for the explanation of the word "Bühne".

Obscure Chandler

Almost forgot that it's the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death. The Rap Sheet gives you a plethora of links (and here's the rundown of Marlowes on film on the very same blog). By the way, my choice for the best Marlowe novel is Farewell My Lovely.

Pulpetti, being busy as usual, gives only a mystery to all the bibliographers round the world: what is the origin of this booklet, published in Finland in the 1940's? It's a short novelization of Double Indemnity, the film scripted by Chandler and Billy Wilder from James M. Cain's novel. Was it published first in English and if it was, when and in what country, in the US or the UK? Or was it perhaps published in Sweden first? No author credits are given in the book. I don't think it's Finnish in origin, even though no translator is mentioned.

I talk about the book more here.

A Leone tie-in

I just remembered reading that the Sergio Leone film Once Upon a Time in America had also a real tie-in, even though it was originally based on a book. (How often does this happen?) It was written by a paperback writer Lee Hays, who's done other tie-ins, i.e. Columbo and Partridge Family (!), and also other paperbacks as by Chad Calhoun (spy thrillers) and Hilary Desmond (romance). He did the Leone tie-in under his own name.

The book was published by Signet in 1984, the premier year of the film. Here's the cover.

The first Chandler in Finnish

Was Raymond Chandler available for the Finnish audience in the late 1940's when the book of my previous post was published? Yes and no. I believe the first instance when he was put out in Finnish was this rather obscure 72-page book from 1945: an abridged novelization of the film he wrote with Billy Wilder from James M. Cain's novel, The Double Indemnity (in Finnish The Woman Without Conscience, which is a fitting title). Chandler is mentioned only when the credits of the film are given, and I don't know who's responsible for the text.

Nainen ilman omaatuntoa came out in a series of similar condensed novelizations of popular films of the era. The series was published by Lehtipaino and it came out during the years 1944-1948. Some of the books in the series are quite easily found, but for some reason the Chandler-Wilder-Cain book is scarce. As you can see, my copy is not in a very good shape, but it's the only one I've been able to find.

The first real Chandler translations came out in 1950, in the pulp magazine Seikkailujen Maailma. As for the first Hammett translation, it has to be The Maltese Falcon in 1955. At least I haven't found anything earlier. (I seem to remember now that a friend of mine found an abridged version of one of Hammett's short stories, but the details escape me at the moment.) (Love Kirjat put out a good translation of Cain's novel in the early eighties, under the title Nainen ilman omatuntoa.)