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A Book by its Cover (2)
In the comments section of A Book by its Cover, Gail Renard wrote: “Oddly enough, I first read Thunderball and a few other James Bonds when I was 10. Do you think he was the Harry Potter of our generation?” Dammit, yes! Why didn’t I think of that? Potter may be children’s fiction openly read…
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Third Acts in Writers’ Lives
While we’re on a thriller theme… I’ve always thought of Bond as a ’60s phenomenon but of Fleming as a ’50s writer. A quick check shows that he died in 1963, the same year that Gavin Lyall turned to full-time writing. Lyall was my favourite of the postwar adventure writers, though Alistair Maclean was probably…
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A Book by its Cover
In a recent piece in The Financial Times, James Lovegrove cites Raymond Hawkey’s 1963 Pan cover for Thunderball as one of the all-time greatest paperback designs. (In case you’re not familiar with it, those ‘bullet hits’ are actual holes in the cover.) I so agree… although for me it’s one of those cases where your…
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Monster Munch (2)
Although prolific British thriller writer Edgar Wallace has a ‘conceived by’ co-credit on the 1933 film, Merian C Cooper later denied that Wallace had any hand in the finished product. “Edgar Wallace didn’t write any of Kong,” he said, “not one bloody word.” Wallace died before production began, but in his diary mentioned completing a…
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Two Make a Pair
Ira Levin died on November 12th. His obituary in The Times refers to Polanski’s film of Rosemary’s Baby and suggests that “the atmosphere of evil that pervaded the screen had its origins in Levin’s fictional skills.“ Indeed – one of the most seamless book-to-film transitions around, and an adaptation that honours its source material to…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
