Courtesy of two of our IAMTW members, we’re pleased to present the following interview:
David Spencer, author of The Novelizers, talks with John Peel
David Spencer’s The Novelizers is a hefty, packed tome of over 400 pages, released by Bear Manor Media. It’s the first book to cover the field that we all work in (and presumably enjoy) from both historical and literary points of view. It clearly represents a huge investment of time and effort.
So – what inspired you to begin this work?
Well, there’s actually three parts to that.
Part One is how I came to write the book.
I joined IAMTW in 2007; I had sponged up so much about tie-ins since I was a kid, that I was quickly recognized as the vintage era answer man; and Max Allan Collins even dubbed me “historian general.” In 2010, I wrote an essay on TV tie-ins, primarily of the ‘60s, for Lee Goldberg’s IAMTW anthology Tied In—and he liked it so much that he started a ten-year campaign of cyber-noodges to get me to write the definitive book on tie-in history. Which I resisted, thinking, niche subject, how would I structure it, allathat.
Yet, during that decade, I had been commissioned to write essays—for publication—on various aspects of tie-ins, and come 2020 or 2021, there were five of significant length, including that first one. And then in a Facebook thread, I think responding to another prompt from Lee, Ben Ohmart, head honcho of the Bear Manor Media imprint, remarked that if I wanted to write the book, he wanted publish it. And since by that time I had enough material for the core of a book, it seemed silly to resist the opportunity—especially because I knew it would be a passion project. And with the explosion of ebooks—both commercial ones and fan-made conversions of the vintage stuff—it seemed like the right time, because I’d be writing not only about collectibles, but readily available classics. And their authors. And the authors were my way in. Because—
Part Two is how much inspiration tie-ins have given me as a writer.
I’ve made most of my career writing for the musical theatre—as composer-lyricist and lyricist-librettist (for example, in the latter capacity I’ve collaborated on two produced and recorded shows with composer Alan Menken, that some reading this may know of: Weird Romance [co-librettist: Alan Brennert] and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler)—also teaching the craft…and of course much of musical theatre thrives on adaptation; certainly my resume does…And the best tie-in authors and their books, especially the ones with muscular, unique styles, had as much influence on me as any of the great musical theatre composers, lyricists and librettists; I’m as stoked up on Michael Avallone, Jim Thompson, Linda Stewart, Walter Wager, countless others, as I am on Stephen Sondheim, Bock & Harnick, Frank Loesser and…you get the idea…
But Part Three…
Your question is: what inspired me to begin it. But for my odd case, I wonder if the framing isn’t: what inspired me to begin with? Because it goes way back. And though I expound upon Parts One and Two in my book, and have touched on them variously elsewhere…Part Three is something I’ve never told before. Alluded to it, but never flat-out told it. Not even in private. Anecdotal history. And I’m not sure how actively conscious it was as a spur to the writing …but the anecdotes are snapshots in time that, no question, stoked my determination. Because a good deal of the inspiration involved channeling, toward a positive goal, the resentment I used to feel at the attitude, expressed by others, over decades, that when I was reading tie-ins, I was reading garbage. (And I bet lots of IAMTW members have similar “snapshots” of their own.) Here are a few. And it’ll give you some clue as to how much these encounters bugged me, because I even remember the books I was reading.
As a kid and through college, I played trumpet in academic bands and orchestras, one of which was The Little Orchestra Society; and the guy in the trumpet section with me, good musician, smart guy, was a moppet-headed smuguloid. He’d always kind of smirk at the books when, during rehearsals, I’d pull one out to while away long passages in which the brass didn’t play; and there was this occasion where the orchestra had been bussed upstate for a concert. The night before it, we were all put up in patron houses; Smuguloid and I were sharing a guest room with two beds. And before going to sleep, I was reading one of the Star Trek books by James Blish. (A later one, 8 or 9, so it was probably mostly by his wife, J.A. Lawrence, but I didn’t know that then.) Anyway, the guy looked at me, this time not smugly, but with what’s-that-on-the-microscope-slide wonder and remarked, “You really enjoy those, don’t you?” As if the idea was too absurd.
Another: 1969, civil rights issues were explosively relevant—and I had an 8th grade teacher who became very snooty about seeing me with a copy of Change of Mind—a novelization by Richard Hubbard (as “Chris Stratton,” his usual tie-in byline) of the science fiction/social issue mashup movie about a dying white attorney whose brain is transplanted into the body of a black man—who then has to defend a racist sheriff accused of murdering his black mistress. She called it sensationalistic crap or something. (I feel defensive describing it even now, as if I have to make excuses for the premise and the fact that I was curious about how such a story might be told. Especially then.) For goodness’ sake, the sensationalism was the point. (By contrast, there was a much kinder teacher—the first one’s nemesis, ironically—who asked me to get her a copy of Patricia Welles’ novelization of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice when she saw mine.)
Many years later, a friend of mine, a colleague, a force for good, saw me reading a William Harrington Columbo original and he said, “You are so strange.” On another occasion, yet another friend, also a writer, looked at the prodigiously full tie-in shelves in my apartment—at my library, at a lovingly preserved mass of books clearly demonstrating decades of enthusiasm—and blithely claimed she’d never read tie-ins because it would bring down the quality of her own work. People say this stuff and it’s not just that they’re under-informed; it’s that they have no idea how insensitive and hurtful it can be. You make light of it, you joke along with them maybe, but it’s a false nonchalance.
Jump to the new millennium and there was a somewhat nicer encounter with a colleague who had done a little tie-in comic book writing, to whom I mentioned that I thought the Torchwood novels were far better than the TV series. “You have the Torchwood novels?” he asked. “All of them.” I replied. And he said: “Your geek colors are flyin’ high, you know that.” Which was at least funny.
And you know…to cap this…even a few tie-in writers with whom I came in contact over the years have pissed me off for trashing their own work. There was a fellow—I won’t name him, he’s still around, though I believe retired—who wrote some aggressively awful tie-ins, originals and adaptations; but he also wrote mainstream potboiler suspense novels and was a veteran TV writer (I have to keep his CV that vague; it wouldn’t take much detail for him to be easily ID’d). Annnnd we kind of became friendly-ish, via AOL chat (it was that long ago). So I went to a Barnes and Noble in NYC where he was signing books, to meet him. I brought along a pair of his least offensive TV tie-ins, written 20ish years before, adapting episodes of a particular, popular TV series I liked.
Now, to be perfectly fair, he couldn’t have been nicer—and even gave me a copy of his latest potboiler. But when I produced the tie-ins, he gleeped at them, then called out to his domestic partner, loudly, like you’d call out from the living room to the kitchen, “Come look at the crap I used to dash off on a weekend when I needed money!” And of course, his tie-ins read as if he’d done exactly that.
It’s disappointing enough when a guy like the late Keith Laumer tries to distance himself from his tie-in work (The Invaders, The Avengers), which he did, in a late-in-life interview (for Randall D. Larson’s “analytical bibliography” Films Into Books), because even revisiting those novels today, I get the impression he cared, having been unable to turn off being a solid craftsman, good dramatist and stylish wordslinger…plus, when I corresponded with him as a kid, he spoke of that work very differently than he would decades later. Stuff he said in that interview (e.g. denied having watched the shows, said he based what he did on previous tie-ins) simply was not true; total freaking baloney. The books themselves—not just their high quality, but their actual content, and publication data—were the evidence. And of course his letters to me. (In one of my book’s endnotes I go into this a little more deeply.)
But when the lack of effort and passion actually shows in the book, like those by the Barnes and Noble guy…that’s the writer treating me, as a reader, with disdain for my time on the back end. Especially when, like him, you’ve slapped your own name on it as if that doesn’t matter and then bray about your feckless venality in a public place!
By contrast, that’s why Michael Avallone (“I always gave it my best shot”), Walter [“John Tiger”] Wager (“I had a marvelous time”) and William Johnston are still regarded lovingly as icons to this day. And why my getting to interview Linda Stewart about writing her tie-ins in the ‘70s—and I’ll return to that in a bit—was such an exhilarating vindication. Because she put so much care into it.
So—when the opportunity to write The Novelizers came along, a part of me thought, I’ll show ‘em. I’ll write a book about this stuff and its authors so persuasive that nobody who reads it will dismiss tie-in writing ever again, that anybody who reads it—be they fan or person with no prior interest—will find it captivating, and that everybody who reads it will have some aspect of their outlook toward prose writing and crafting stories affected, perhaps even changed to some small or large degree. And based on literally every reaction I’ve gotten so far, formal and informal, that seems to be what I’ve done. Gratifyingly. And amazingly.
In fact…NOW colleagues of mine in the theatre, who’ve read The Novelizers, who didn’t previously know or care much about tie-ins, have expressed to me how blown away they were at the quality of the tie-in excerpts the book presents, by the likes of those already mentioned, plus others such as Stuart James, Tom Graham, Martin Noble, Con Sellers, Leonore Fleischer, you…and going back to the early 1900s, pioneers like Eustace Hale Ball, Arline de Haas, Guy Fowler…and some of my colleagues have even told me The Novelizers changed the way they were thinking about their own adaptive work as dramatists! To be honest, that objective—The Novelizers not only as history, analysis and celebration, but as craftbook—was very conscious on my part. But to be told that you’ve actually achieved it…well, for the teacher in me, it doesn’t get better than that.
Most people probably believe that tie-in novels are a result of the paperback “explosion” that began in the early Fifties. Is this the case?
Gosh, no. The term “tie-in” itself is a little tricky, because it’s historically fairly recent (I’d say it started to enter colloquial usage in the ‘70s); but if we take the liberty of using it to retroactively describe fiction based on pre-existing dramatic works, the practice goes back to about 1880, with the novelizations of plays. Screenplay novelizations started to take over the genre around 1915, with the silent era, moving with cinema itself into the age of talkies. All properly licensed and the books all hardcover. Though many of them first saw print as newspaper serializations. There’s also a long and fascinating history of novelizations for magazines (some devoted to them). And in England, between 1945 and 1950, a “bookazine” series of novelizations, that were a kind of a transitional bridge to traditional paperbacks, called Book of the Film. And every one of those eras had its own spectacular tie-in writers—both dedicated specialists and those who were also known as established novelists, dramatists, screenwriters and/or journalists—and in every genre.
Hundreds – if not thousands – of people have written tie-ins. It’s terribly unfair, but could you pick out three of four people that you think have been very important in the field?
It depends on how “important” is defined, and at what point in history. I’d say that in the early 20th century, Arline de Haas (who had an international bestseller with The Jazz Singer), may have been the first to become a high-profile and sought-after career novelizer (as a book author, she did almost nothing but that), whose byline was so identified with work of a certain consistent quality that the novel could sell irrespective of the film’s quality—along the lines of a contemporary “brand name” like the wonderful Alan Dean Foster (who has of course written dozens of his own original novels too).
If by “importance,” you mean impact—stylistic influence drawn from the quality and characteristics of a given writer’s tie-in prose per se…that’s a more generational assessment. And like anyone else, I look to the tie-ins that affected my generation (I was born in 1954). And I’d posit that authors with that kind of juice—whom you’d associate with tie-ins specifically—started to establish themselves throughout the ‘60s. And of those, I’d say the two most ubiquitous—each of whom has a chapter-length profile in my book—were Michael Avallone and William Johnston. Who couldn’t be more opposite.
Avallone (The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Hawaii Five-O, Mannix, many others) was an aggressive stylist, his voice unmistakable even when writing under a pseudonym; the self-styled “fastest typewriter in the East,” he flew by the seat of his pants, just sat down and wrote in a white heat.
Whereas Johnston (the most prolific tie-in novelist in world history, best known for his Get Smart! novels) deliberately sought to employ a transparent style that would keep his authorial presence as anonymous as possible. Yet that too constituted a style, full of brisk wordplay in the dialogue, efficient, clean imagery and impeccable plotting. His son, Philip, told me that his father used to deflect compliments about his work by saying that it was “just laying pipe.”
(And honorable mention has to go to Walter Wager—who also has a lengthy profile in my book—and more about him in an answer to follow. But in a mere nine tie-ins, his style—terse, cosmopolitan, quippy—also had a resonance that lasted decades after their publication.)
I think in more recent years, as tie-in-loving readers started to become the commissioning decision-makers—who recognized the marketing value of tie-ins on a much wider, multi-media canvas—you might confer “importance” upon those writers who not only made their mark in the field—but stood up and are still standing up proudly, prominently, for tie-ins as real literature; who continue writing them even if they don’t have to, because as artists, they find their skills and souls enriched by the challenges and joys of playing in new and favorite sandboxes conceived by others. There are many such writers, but I suppose the two who must be named here are the bestselling authors and co-founders of IAMTW: TV dramatist and show-runner Lee Goldberg (originals based on Diagnosis: Murder and Monk), and Edgar Award-winner Max Allan Collins (originals based on Dark Angel, CSI: Miami, NYPD Blue, Criminal Minds plus dozens of screenplay novelizations, along with at least one original prequel, for G.I. Joe). And just because their by-lines on bestselling tie-ins have been ubiquitous for decades unto the present, there’s Kevin J. Anderson and the aforementioned Alan Dean Foster. (Not incidentally, Foster wrote an entire, brilliant book dedicated to his own career as a novelizer, The Director Should’ve Shot You.)
Are tie-ins just cheap attempts to cash in on the popularity of hit movies and TV shows?
Well, you of course, know they’re not, but to answer for those new to the terrain…Let’s remove the word “cheap” from the equation. First of all, because they aren’t necessarily cheap. Two ends of the same spectrum: When my friend, the late Walter Wager, was writing his seven original novels based on I Spy (1965-1968 and still my favorites) plus his two (of the four) Mission: Impossibles, both for Popular Library, he wrote them under the pseudonym “John Tiger”—earning a straight, flat fee: $1,000 or so; and no royalty. By the time 1986 rolled around, he had long since become a brand-name thriller writer—and he accepted a commission from Warner Books to novelize the screenplay of the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, Raw Deal. This time for a much larger fee and a royalty. He wondered aloud to his editor if he should be “John Tiger” again; and his editor replied: “For $50,000, you’ll be Walter Wager.” (To put that in even more perspective, 1965’s $1,000 and 1986’s $50,000 are, in 2024 money, about $10,000 and $145,000 respectively.)
(Interestingly, Walter didn’t devise the pseudonym to distance his identity from his tie-in writing. He was very fond of the books, so one day I asked him what the pen name was all about. He said he came up with “John Tiger” because for espionage novels, he thought that sounded appropriately tough. And he defaulted to it because, “I didn’t want anyone to think I [was taking credit for having] created I Spy.” To which I responded, “Well the book covers flat-out say ‘based on the TV series’; readers would have been hip enough to get it. And they might have followed your by-line to your own original work.” He thought about that for a moment, and then exclaimed, seriously and charmingly: “Maybe I made a mistake!”)
Returning to the topic, though—if we swap in words like mercenary, cynical or just commercial (rather than cheap), well, any kind of writing whatsoever can be that (to wit: the Barnes and Noble guy)—so now let’s take the pejorative sting out of it too, because most tie-in writers are not hacks. They care about what they do. I can tell you first-hand, selling out is much harder work than writing with passion. And the money you get for trying to make stuff you don’t care about work—which never works because you don’t care, among other, external reasons out of your control—isn’t worth what it does to your soul. (You can take on a project for the intriguing challenge of it, find your way in and consequently develop your passion for it, but that’s another subject.) So why shouldn’t tie-in writing be commercial? Why shouldn’t a television or film property be exploited in book form for its appeal to a built-in audience? For its appeal to you as writer? Why should that exploitation be prejudged as any less legitimate than development in the other direction? If you think about it logically, any such prejudice is founded upon an inherently false premise.
But let’s dig even deeper. There are a number of factors that feed the false premise. I explore them exhaustively in the book—but I’ll just land on one here. The presupposition that the tie-in novelist didn’t “make it up himself.” Well…neither does a screenwriter who adapts a play or a novel. Neither does the television writer, creating original stories, who joins the staff of a hit series or takes over as showrunner. Yet that writer will be celebrated and lauded.
Tie-in novelists bring just as much skill and craft to their work—and just as much individualism. Just as no two screenwriters would approach A Christmas Carol the same way, no two novelists would approach Ghostbusters or Capricorn One the same way. As indeed, my book particularizes with five side-by-side examples of how the same exact screenplay sequence was novelized by two different writers for two different audiences (all but one being US vs UK).
Even jumping from adaptations to the realm of original stories in an established storytelling universe—where the concepts and characters are the common factors every novelist must represent to the reader’s satisfaction—there could not be a more stark difference, in the world of Star Trek, between the books of John Peel and Peter David. Between the two Ironside novels by Jim Thompson and William Johnston. Between the Man from U.N.C.L.E. stylings of Michael Avallone, David McDaniel and Joan Hunter Holly. The trappings are lovingly familiar, yet the individual voices, as I keep saying, are as unique and legitimate as can be found in any literature. Indeed, they are literature, and can have as much impact on a reader’s appreciation of style, or on an aspiring writer’s developing imprimatur, as any great work of world literature. And sometimes tie-ins attain the level and status of world literature. And I’m not being hyperbolic. There are dozens of titles that stayed in print for years, decades. Some have never gone out of print.
Not to put too fine a point on it: if all this were not true, why have an IAMTW at all? And why would so many millions of readers, over generations, remember these books fondly, and as seminal reading experiences?
You wrote your own tie-in – how did this happen?
I was a big fan of the TV series Alien Nation and wanted to write for it. It was based on the film written by Rockne S. O’Bannon (which had been novelized by Alan Dean Foster!) about two cops in Los Angeles, five years after an alien slave ship has crash landed in the Mojave desert; one cop is human and the other is a Tenctonese “Newcomer.” When Kenneth Johnson was approached to develop the film as a series and be its showrunner, he got intrigued by a passing shot of the alien cop saying goodbye to his family before heading off to work in the morning, wondered who those characters might be, and wanted to explore them alongside the buddy cop relationship; have as a main theme the social ramifications of being the new ethnicity. And he devised this cop/SF mashup to be a metaphor for race relations in America.
So I wrote a letter to Johnson, saying, in essence, “Here’s the prejudice I have to deal with. My career is in New York because I write for the musical theatre. Yet they say if you don’t live in Los Angeles, you can’t write for series television. How unfair is that? I think I can give you a great Alien Nation episode.” My agent, the late, great Scott Shukat, sent it along—this was 1989, snail mail—and a few days later, Johnson’s assistant called my agent and said Johnson loved the letter and was very open to the idea. So I got together with my friend and sometime collaborator Bruce Peyton, and we cobbled together four fairly nifty stories. (He’d get co-story credit but I’d do the actual teleplay writing.) And the next thing I knew, I was on the phone, in my kitchen in Sunnyside, pitching to Johnson and his staff in California.
One of the stories clicked, which led to a second session, at which further refinements were requested. A third session was scheduled…which could mean either a sale or that I’d have to be paid for my time…when I got a call from one of the staffers saying that, despite decent ratings, the Fox network was canceling the show. (Lower-than-expected advertising revenue had Fox dropping all their series dramas.)
So my Alien Nation stories languished in a purple, spiral notebook, not doing anything for a living…until about a year later, I read in an issue of Starlog magazine that Kevin Ryan, who was then the editor of Pocket Books’ dedicated Star Trek department, had decided (correctly) that Alien Nation was “too good to let die,” and had thus secured the rights for a series of eight tie-in novels: three adaptations of unfilmed teleplays, to tie up loose ends (the first season had ended on a cliffhanger) and five originals. I had met Kevin somewhere, forget how, but I knew I could call him—so I did, and asked what he’d require of me to pitch an original Alien Nation novel. He said, “The usual, three chapters and an outline.” Thus I took the story I liked best and cared about most, fleshed out its structure and essentially began to novelize it. It was the last significant thing I ever wrote on my IBM Selectric typewriter. (Bruce was out of the process at this point. We’d talked about continuing together, but he had contracted AIDS under traumatic circumstances, and had entered into a manic-depressive stage that derailed his ability to constructively concentrate.)
It took Kevin a good number of months to get to my proposal; I finally called to nudge him, because Weird Romance was about to go into rehearsals and if I was going to get the gig, I had to block out time to write the novel thereafter; he said, “You’re right, I’m not being fair.” He hung up, read the proposal, and the next day called me up. He said, “I like your style very much. Have you ever written fiction before?” I said, “Not for publication,” which surprised him. He gave me one technical, fanboy note—the story involved aliens passing for human, and he asked me to account for the larger size of the Tenctonese cranium, “to really sell it,” by which he meant the premise—and then told me what the advance fee would be, and the royalty breakdown. I said, “That’s okay with me, if it’s okay with my guy.” And he said, “Scott Shu-kat! I forgot you had an agent! We never had this conversation!” Then he hung up. And less than an hour later, Scott called me and said, “He was tough, but I got another thousand dollars out of him.” (And some of that went to Bruce, who really needed financial help at the time. And of course I made sure he retained byline co-story credit.)
And after Weird Romance closed off-Broadway, late Summer of 1992, I wrote the Alien Nation novel on my first computer: a Mac Powerbook 100. I was armed with cassettes of the episode (VCR days!) and all the teleplays that were unfilmed and all the story treatments that hadn’t been scripted. And I borrowed a little lore continuity from one of those. It took me a while to discover my fiction-writing mojo, but I finally settled on one scene per day. Long scene, short scene, didn’t matter; my goal was reaching either the next doublespace or the end of the chapter. Drafting it took about six weeks, it was among the most fun and epiphanal writing experiences I’d ever had and I was really sad when it was over, because I couldn’t play with the characters anymore.
Alien Nation #6: Passing Fancy was published two years later——in 1994, just when the Alien Nation revival TV movies started to air, something no one foresaw when the books were being written and commissioned—so the timing could not have been better; and it even got a rave review in Science Fiction Journal; there may have been one other review, also positive (Kevin said to me, “That’s amazing. No one reviews the sixth book based on a one-season, canceled TV series”). And while I can’t say with assurance that Passing Fancy stayed in print for five years, it did stay available and visible in stores that long. Which of course made me quite happy.
And about a decade ago, I discovered that it had been very professionally fan-ebooked—along with hundreds of other vintage tie-in titles. (And thousands of other vintage paperback originals.) Not ripped, but manually scanned, proofed and converted to EPUB and MOBI. I know there are all kinds of opinions about that, and your mileage may vary…but I was flabbergasted and grateful to have it preserved for posterity thus—because now, 30 years later I can share it whenever I like, with anyone in the world.
You ended up designing the look of the book yourself… Lots of book covers and author photos and interviews!
The design happened by accident, conflating tragedy, serendipity and self-defense.
I’d written copious conceptual notes for the original designer/typesetter assigned to the book, himself a small press publisher out of California. A kind of curmudgeonly dude, but I liked him. We corresponded a bit. He was about to get started. And then he went into the hospital and died, days later.
A second designer/typesetter was assigned, this one a free-lancer located in India; but though she was a more than able tech-jockey, she had no aesthetic sense of the book at all—neither via disposition nor cultural reference—and there was no way I’d be able to talk her through it. I suppose I might have requested yet another practitioner—but clocking the disparity between what I wanted the book to be and what she could deliver made me realize that no matter who wound up being assigned—even if I and that person were joined at the hipness (see what I did there?)—my conception of the book was so specific…that I would only be trying to finesse a new person into coloring on their canvas by my numbers. Which seemed not only a waste of time, but unfair…especially since I did have the eye for layout and skill set to design in Microsoft Word.
So, path of least resistance, I continued to work with her, she operating strictly in the capacity of tech-jockey. Instead of designing the book, she policed my design drafts for technical issues. And that worked out fine.
Meanwhile, the more deeply I got into the design, the more I abandoned the conceptual notes I had started with—which were feeling increasingly academic and schematic—and just went Zen, feeling the design flow as an extension of the text. I had always intended that the pictures wouldn’t be just accompanying illustrations, but would help speed the narrative along—and now that I was hands-on, the integration happened very organically. There were some tentpole design motifs (like opposing full page illustrations on the left against chapter-start pages on the right), but within each chapter, form followed function and content dictated choice.
There was a lot more involved, though, than just placement, sizing, format and balance. There was also a great deal of restoration and clean-up. A majority of the book covers pictured in The Novelizers are my copies, and a majority of those are still in mint condition…but even so, there were things like reflected light, fingerprints, low-rez photos and washed out contrast on the covers as published…and of course, collectible and “antiquarian” covers from the beginning of the 20th century through the Book of the Film series, which ended in 1950—whether they were my copies or images acquired elsewhere—could be in condition ranging anywhere from ruffled to rough. And I didn’t want those imperfections of age and (ab)use to be preserved. It was VERY important to me that The Novelizers not be a walk down Memory Lane by way of Avenue Obscuranta. I don’t even like using the word antiquarian. Tie-in literature has always been very alive and present for me; and I wanted that dynamic to be equally alive and present in The Novelizers…so I made sure that, as much as possible, every cover image looked as if the book came off the spinny rack or display shelf in pristine condition, just this morning.
I did similar work with vintage author headshots; a lot of old ones of spotty quality went through meticulous digital restoration. A number were colorized, if the colorization didn’t alter the character or balance of the picture. The jewel in my crown was Australian author Dora Birtles, who novelized the 1946 Kangaroo Western The Overlanders (one of those novelizations that actually became a world literature classic). There were a number of clean online pictures of her looking—well, older and not at her best—and I wanted to show her as she was when she wrote the novel. I finally found a picture of her from an Australian newspaper article about her and her novelization of The Overlanders, right when it had been published; faded and dotty. The restoration I did still looks, stylistically, like a photo taken in the late 1940s, and she looks like a woman of that era; but the resolution is so upscaled that it’s probably even more vivid than the source photo was. She looks very alive and joyous in it.
And as I was doing all this, I individually adjusted each picture again, in greyscale, because I wanted the trade paperback images to be as vivid in that palate as the ones in the color hardcover.
As to the interviews: What a joy that was. I made a conscious decision, early on, that while I would give due deference and mention to some of the brand name specialists currently in the game, I wouldn’t exhaustively survey them as a category—because the star players have been interviewed and profiled elsewhere. (As mentioned previously, Alan Dean Foster took care of his own tie-in career in a dedicated book.) Since so much about what drove my passion for this literature was the discovery of new voices, I wanted to take my readers on a similar path of discovery. To celebrate, for posterity, voices they might not otherwise encounter.
And as it turns out, by design of intent but by accident of personal choice, the still-living writers I corresponded with—whose work had always blown me away—turned out to provide exactly the deep, deconstructive analysis I was hoping for. There was you, on the subject of writing for younger audiences. Tom Graham (the Life on Mars novels) about the goals of capturing a TV series and infusing that with high literary allusion. Martin Noble, among the very best British novelizers of the 1980s—himself an editor, with a very deep literary perspective—in my chapter about novelizing the miniseries, on the incredible journey of circumstance leading to, and then exploration during, his writing my favorite miniseries novelization ever, Private Schulz, based on teleplays by Jack (I Claudius) Pulman. Which is still in print!
And finally—treasure of treasures—there was Linda Stewart (aka Sam Stewart, aka Kerry Stewart). She novelized in the mid-to-late ‘70s, eight adaptations…five of which are essential (she thinks of the other three as just triaging the problems of inferior source material)…and those five were so bracingly stylish and so brilliantly conceived—and due to idiosyncratic circumstances and approaches, so boldly her own—that I had to ask if she’d be willing to discuss them. I had met her half my lifetime ago, and when I called her—at the same NYC number—she not only remembered me, but did so vividly. And the subsequent correspondence was just, I don’t know what, spectacular. Not only is she still sharp as a tack, not only did she still remember everything about the conception and process of writing her books…but she still had all her notes, the scripts she worked from, her letters to her editors detailing what she was doing and why. Her chapter of The Novelizers is literally a master class.
There must have been surprises for you along the way…
Just about every damn day. Everything about the tie-in genre’s history from earlier than 1950 was new to me, except for a few broad-strokes facts here and there, so all that first-half-of-the-century stuff was derived from reading the early literature and research. And while I’ve always been pretty good at looking things up, thinking of ways to get at data that’s in obscure places, this was my first time doing it on a sustained basis with an epic mission…and I realized that, whatever else I had been in my writing career, I was also a historian. By which I mean, I discovered the jazz career historians must feel when they connect dots that no one has connected before, which happened over and over and over again.
Here’s one example. I was writing what is now the third chapter, on screenplay novelizations from 1950 forward. I forget how I stumbled upon owning my first Book of the Film novelization, but I started a parenthesis or slightly detour-ish paragraph, mentioning them as a transitional line leading into 1950; and the detour kept getting longer; a second paragraph; a third. Finally the detour became so bloated that, like Bugs Bunny in the gremlin cartoon, I exclaimed “What am I DOING?” Realizing at last, dummy, that Book of the Film had to be a chapter in itself. So I started looking into this forgotten yet influential British line of tie-in titles, most written under house pseudonyms…and I learned about contributor-editor Eric Warman, who may have been the first book packager ever, and about how he did what he did and revolutionized the marketing of tie-ins…renowned poet, teacher and lecturer Kenneth Hopkins, who not only novelized, but declared his tie-in work proudly (and with revealing historical detail!) in his autobiography…American expatriate light mystery novelist Delano (aka D.L.) Ames, the only person in the world to novelize a Marx Brothers movie…and the aforementioned Australian writer Dora Birtles.
It seems an odd thing to say about writing a book about other books…but I guess, in part, because The Novelizers sits at a peculiar crossroad—the intersection of stories for the communal screen and stories for the individual mind’s eye—the experience of writing it was like going on one bold, new adventure after another. A rush. I loved it. And I was obsessed with it.
Did working on this book change your thinking about tie-ins in any way?
It didn’t change my thinking so much as reinforce it from new angles. And expand it. The more I wrote, the more I realized needed to be written to make the book truly comprehensive. In fact, I was very close to believing I was finished when I thought…oh wait; I’ve made such a big deal about how influential tie-ins can be on impressionable young minds, yet I haven’t explored writing for young audiences—which led to my interviewing you. And somehow, from there, maybe because shorter-form writing led naturally to thinking about long-form writing, I realized that the longest form of novelizing is often the miniseries, which comes with its own unique challenges…and that I needed to write about that…leading to the chapter in which Martin Noble is a guest star. Those two chapters were the last tiles of the mosaic.
And in a way it changed my thinking about myself. Near the end of writing it, I realized The Novelizers was my cultural autobiography. I’d nursed and nourished my affection for these books all these years, and it never occurred to me, until I said yes to the project, that this not-so-side passion I often felt I had to defend, could lead to a massive, published celebration. But now that it has…I marvel at its inevitability.
