Those film tie-in novels...

Napoleon Plural

I was moved to make this thread by rewatching The Wild Geese on DVD recently, that's the 1978 film with Roger Moore, Richard Burton and Richard Harris.

I remembered buying the book after seeing the film on TV, I got it for 10p or thereabouts from an antique shop aka junk shop aka secondhand bookshop near my school, where I picked up Bond paperbacks from time to time.

Back then, before video, DVD or internet, getting the book was the closest a kid could get to seeing the film again when it had left the cinemas. The book of The Wild Geese had Moore, Harris and Burton on the front cover in a pose from the film...

Yet, reading the books usually brought mixed feelings. Often they weren't much like the film at all, and you'd look in vain for your fave scenes. Moore's character, Sean Fynn, was a younger, more heartless womaniser with no real charm or humour. During prep for the mission however Fynn falls for a more gawky girl, big time, perhaps with intimations of mortality (it's implied at the end of the book that he dies in the Dakota...)

Yet the books also had a bit of smoky, sexy soft porn of the kind prevalent in 1970s paperbacks and missing today, for better or worse. For a teen, this would offer some recompense... There was also the dark underbelly exposed in these books, an inference that the world out there had shades of nastiness.

In the novelisation of Dallas, young blonde Lucy is a nympho, grapping at a guy's jeans and trying to undo his fly... then there's Airport when this woman is married to a 50something who can't rouse himself, so she finds this guy in a club and uses him for sex after which, she's quoted as saying "if she's died then, life would not have cheated her..."

Of course, the Bond books had loads of this stuff in them. Yet I have to wonder about the young fan who may have bought a Fleming novel with pics from the films on the front, from say DAF onwards... often they had no resemblance to the films at all. What would they have made of it? TMWTGG isn't even set in the same locations, no Nik Nak, no car chase, and Felix Leiter who's not in the film.
Ditto DAF, and of course YOLT. Dr No, FRWL, TB and OHMSS are the only ones that resembled the films, but all the others have loads of photos promoting the movies on them.

Golrush007

I have never really liked the idea of these tie in covers for that very reason - they tend to be misleading about the content of the book. For example - I can imagine a reader getting to the end of the film tie edition of Casino Royale and thinking, 'Where was the Aston Martin DBS in the story?' - since there is one on the cover of the book. )

Loeffelholz

I've actually always been under the impression that The Wild Geese was a novel first---the edition published concurrently with the film merely featured movie 'tie-in' cover art---but it's been almost three decades since I've read it, and I could well be wrong.

Golrush007

As far as 'The Wild Geese' is concerned - The film was based on an unpublished novel titled The Thin White Line by Rhodesian author Daniel Carney. The film was re-named The Wild Geese and Carney's novel was subsequently published under that title.

Napoleon Plural

Ah yes, I didn't mean tie-in in that sense, but I wasn't sure how else to phase it. They're certainly not book of the films...