The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins; the Original Novel (Collins, 1975): Book Review, Basis for the 1976 Movie

After an unscheduled but necessary Donald E. Westlake interlude (necessary because it allowed me to finish reading the novel I'm about to discuss), let's have the final book which begat a perhaps more famous film. And having begun this series of posts (over three weeks ago now) with a World War II-set a tale with an "Eagle" in its title of a daring raid by a squad of British (and one American) troops, I'm ending it with a World War II-set tale with an "Eagle" in its title of a daring raid by a squad of German (and one British) troops. Moreover, seeing as this is the grand finale of this series (for which I'm sure, by this point, we're all immensely grateful), I've managed to secure a copy of the first edition of the novel that's really quite remarkable...

First published in the UK by Collins in 1975 under a dust jacket illustrated by Barry Glynn, Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed didn't have long to wait to be filmed: the eponymous movie adaptation, directed by John Sturges – the final film of his stellar directing career (highlights including The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, Gunfight at the OK Corral, and one of my favourite movies of all time, the sort-of-sequel to Gunfight, the excellent Hour of the Gun) – arrived in cinemas the following year, starring Michael Caine as Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Steiner, Robert Duvall as Colonel Radl and Donald Sutherland as Liam Devlin.

Like Where Eagles Dare, The Eagle Has Landed is one of those terrific war films I'm always happy to watch when it pops up on telly on a Saturday afternoon. It's perfectly cast (Caine, Duvall and Sutherland all brilliantly personifying their respective characters – plus it's got Jenny Agutter in it, a woman who holds a special place in the hearts – and loins – of men of a certain age), nicely scripted (by Tom Mankiewicz), and of course solidly directed by Sturges. But the best thing about it is the story, and that's down to Higgins. With only minor differences – the removal of a character and subplot or two in the film – both book and movie follow the same trajectory: a plan is hatched by Himmler to either kidnap or kill British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who, the Germans learn from Joanna Grey, a spy living in the (fictional) Norfolk village of Studley Constable, will be staying with the local lord of the manor. Tasked with planning and carrying out this mission are Radl, Steiner – along with what remains of Steiner's paratroop assault group after having fought on the Eastern Front and then being assigned in disgrace (following a bust-up with the SS) to the Channel Islands – and Devlin, an IRA man resident in Berlin.

The planning actually takes up two-thirds of the novel, Higgins rattling through the final incursion into Studley Constable, its subsequent collapse after one of the German paratroopers rescues two kids who've fallen under the watermill, and consequent firefight with an American Ranger unit at a breathless pace. But both parts of the book are splendidly written – not especially stylishly, but populated with memorable, well-drawn characters and penned with the gusto of an author who knows he has a cracking yarn on his hands. That said, a yarn isn't how Higgins presents the tale: his Author's Note at the start claims that "at least fifty per cent of it is documented historical fact", while a framing device sees Higgins himself visiting Studley Constable in the then-present day, researching a magazine article and inadvertently uncovering Steiner's story.

Higgins wrote a belated sequel to The Eagle Has Landed, The Eagle Has Flown (1991), which apparently reveals that a protagonist who dies at the end of the original novel in fact didn't (I've got a copy on my shelves still waiting to be read); he also featured Liam Devlin in a handful of other novels. As for first editions of The Eagle Has Landed, those aren't exactly scarce – AbeBooks currently has around fifty listed – but my copy is unusual, in that it bears a signed Jack Higgins bookplate:

I know of only one other signed copy of The Eagle Has Landed in any edition – another Collins first, again bearing a bookplate, and offered by an American dealer for over £350, which is a hell of a lot more than I paid for mine.

And there'll be more signed editions on Existential Ennui shortly, after some further additions to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s...

Book Review: Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (Mitch Tobin #1) by Tucker Coe, alias Donald E. Westlake (Souvenir Press, 1967)

NB: A version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.

Slight change of plan here: I had intended to blog about the final book which begat a perhaps more famous film to start the working week, but unfortunately I haven't finished reading the bloody thing yet; you'll have to hang on another day or so for that. Instead, while we wait, I thought I'd veer off-topic and take a look at a novel that I showcased as a Westlake Score all the way back in September 2010 – in its 1967 UK Souvenir Press first edition – but never got round to reviewing – or indeed showing off properly, as the photographs I took of the book back then were fairly awful. And having since established my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery, and the jacket of this particular edition having been designed by an artist who's already in the gallery – S. R. Boldero – it struck me I could kill two birds with one stone... well actually, three: review the novel, add to the gallery, and fill an unexpected hole in Existential Ennui's schedule...

Originally published in the US in 1966, Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death was Donald E. Westlake's first novel under the alias of Tucker Coe, under which moniker he would go on to pen a further four books over the next five years or so. All star disgraced former cop Mitchell Tobin, who, as the series opens, has been off the force for six months following an illicit affair which led to the death of his partner. Mitch's wife, Kate, forgave him the affair (although he's unsure if his thirteen-year old son, Bill, has), but his former colleagues haven't forgiven him the death of his partner – and nor, for that matter has he forgiven himself, which is why he's spent six months doing virtually nothing other than, latterly, building a wall around his backyard.

So when a representative of New York mobster Ernie Rembek turns up at Mitch's house with a job offer, Mitch eventually – reluctantly – agrees – not because he has any interest in the job – which is to find out who within Rembek's organisation murdered Rembek's mistress – but because Kate thinks it will be good for him to do something other than build his wall. And so, attended by Roger Kerrigan – "an observer from the corporation", as Rembek puts it – Mitch sets about interviewing and eliminating suspects, in the process becoming a target for murder himself...

I must admit I was surprised by how good Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death is. Alongside the Parker novels – written, of course, under Westlake's rather better-known nom de plume of Richard Stark – I'd suggest that Kinds of Love is one of the best books Westlake wrote in the 1960s: a restrained yet quietly gripping murder mystery that's all the better for its sober, unshowy approach. Ordinarily my interest in mysteries is minimal – often as not I couldn't care less "whodunnit" – but Kinds of Love transcends its mystery trappings by dint of its fascinating take on mob life, which Westlake depicts as unrelentingly unglamorous. To take just one example, during an interview with one of the mobster suspects, Frank Donner, it arises that Donner and his wife have separate bedrooms, a detail that Mitch finds suspicious. But the explanation proves so mundane it becomes even more believable: Donner's wife admits with embarrassment that she snores.

For his part, Ernie Rembek is an unusual mob boss: he's intelligent and cultured, at one point referencing G. K. Chesterton in relation to overlooking background players in any investigation (a sly nod from Westlake to an influence, there). But each of the gangsters is well-drawn, Westlake-via-Tobin appraising each of them dispassionately – appraising everything dispassionately, in fact – deploying the occasional simile to add colour: noting how the glaring sun makes he and two other men lower their heads "like a trio of penitents", or describing a body, "its arms stretched out ahead of it", as "an acrobat still reaching for the trapeze".

Of course, Mitch's dispassion is a symptom of his lack of interest in pretty much everyone and everything – something that, conversely, serves to make him more interesting as a character – with the exception of his family and his wall, the latter of which he's back to building by the close of the novel. "Mitch, didn't it change anything?" Kate asks him of his investigation. "Change what?" is Tobin's blunt response, suggesting he has a long way yet to travel over the subsequent novels.

S. R. Boldero's wrapper for the Souvenir Press edition of Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death has now joined his one for Desmond Cory's Johnny Goes South in the Beautiful British Book Jacket Design gallery, taking the total number of covers up to 74. And I'll be adding another couple of Westlake dust jackets before too long, one of which, the British edition of the second Tucker Coe novel, I believe has never been seen online before. Next though: the final book which begat a perhaps more famous film...

Book Review: The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin; the Original Novel (Michael Joseph, 1976), Basis for the 1978 Movie

For this penultimate post on books which begat perhaps more famous films – yes, you read that right: we're nearly done now, thank the Lord – we turn from a 1970s thriller with a Nazi as its chief villain to another 1970s thriller with a Nazi as its chief villain – one who actually gets a mention – and is the model for – the Nazi in the previous novel-and-movie...

First published in the UK by Michael Joseph in 1976, Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil is the story of a crazed quest by Josef Mengele – the Angel of Death, and the basis for Christian Szell in William Goldman's Marathon Man – to bring about the Fourth Reich, and of the efforts of Nazi-hunter Yakov Liebermann – modelled by Levin on real life Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal – to stop him. There's much more to the book than that, of course – it's well written, quietly stylish and pacy, and even if you know the central conceit behind the story – which I'm not going to spoil, other than to say it involves cloning – the cat-and-mouse game between Mengele and Liebermann effectively ramps up the suspense, climaxing with a bloody battle of wits in a remote farmhouse.

But at root, The Boys from Brazil is a brilliant idea, one that's perfect for a film – which is precisely what it became (adapted fairly faithfully; there are only a few relatively minor changes) in 1978, directed by Planet of the Apes' Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Gregory Peck as Mengele, Laurence Olivier (him again) as Liebermann (renamed Ezra Lieberman, one "n") and featuring a young Steve Guttenberg in one of his earliest roles. Indeed, despite only having written four novels prior to Boys, Ira Levin already had serious form with adaptations of his work: A Kiss Before Dying (1953), Rosemary's Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972) had all been filmed (and A Kiss Before Dying would later be remade) to great success, while after a fifteen-year gap Levin would find himself in favour in Hollywood once again with Sliver (1991), adapted for the screen in 1993 – said adaption becoming mildly notorious for a racy Sharon Stone/William Baldwin sex scene.

A big part of the reason for Levin's Hollywood success is that his novels are perfect one-line high concept movie pitches: "Disgruntled suburban husbands replace their wives with robots"; "A woman learns her unborn baby is the devil", and so forth. Chuck Palahniuk put it another way when he said that Levin's novels were "a smart, updated version of the kind of folksy legends that cultures have always used" – basically what Stephen King, who called Levin "the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels", would be doing slightly later. Certainly The Boys from Brazil adheres to both those edicts, benefitting additionally from its use of real people in the narrative, which helps to anchor some of the more fantastical elements of the story. Mind you, cloning might have seemed far-fetched back in 1976, but it's rather less so now.

Speaking of mixing fantasy and reality, there's a fair amount of that going on in the final book-and-movie I'll be looking at: a World War II-set tale of a daring raid on Great Britain by German troops attempting to kidnap a world leader. Moreover, the copy of the first edition of the novel I'll be showcasing is pretty special, and acts as a precursor of the next series of Existential Ennui posts...

Before that, though: an unscheduled review of a pseudonymous '60s Donald E. Westlake novel...

Book Review: Marathon Man by William Goldman; the Original Novel (Macmillan, 1975), Basis for the 1976 Movie

NB: Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

After an announcement about the exclusive interview with Darwyn Cooke over on The Violent World of Parker – conducted by VWoP supremo Trent and myself to mark the publication of Cooke's latest graphic novel adaptation of a Richard Stark novel, The Score – it's back to the books which begat perhaps more famous films. And as with Alistair MacLean's Where Eagles Dare, Elmore Leonard's Mr. Majestyk and James Dickey's Deliverance, this next novel was actually adapted for the screen by its author. Unlike Messrs MacLean, Leonard and, to an extent, Dickey (he's as celebrated for his poetry as much as for his prose), however, the author in question this time is probably better known as a screenwriter...

First published by Macmillan in the UK in 1975 – the year after the Delacorte edition – under a dust jacket designed by Stan Fernandes, Marathon Man was William Goldman's ninth novel. Even by the mid-1970s, though, Goldman was already arguably achieving greater fame and attracting more acclaim and plaudits for his screenplays than for his prose; his adaptation of Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target – Harper, 1966 – had amply demonstrated his way with snappy dialogue, while his original screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) had netted him an Academy Award. And two years after initial publication, Marathon Man would itself be turned into a film, again scripted by Goldman.

Now, I must admit that before picking up this first edition of Marathon Man – which I spotted in the window of a Lewes antiques shop – I didn't realise there was an original novel, let alone that it had been written by Goldman; I always figured Marathon Man had been written for the screen. So it was a pleasant surprise to find there was a book, and an even more pleasant surprise to discover that the novel is even better than the movie.

In terms of plot, the two are almost identical: Thomas Babington Levy – "Babe" to his brother Henry, whom he calls "Doc" – a student and aspiring marathon runner hoping to write a thesis that will clear his father's McCarthy-muddied name, falls for a beautiful fellow student who, astonishingly (to Babe), falls for him too ("It was his fate, he knew," Goldman narrates in the novel, "to fall in love with Venuses and marry a plugger with a face like a foot"). Meanwhile, in Europe, an American assassin named Scylla finds he himself has become a target for assassination. These two strands intertwine when Doc turns up at Babe's apartment having been stabbed, dying in Babe's arms, after which Babe is abducted and tortured by a Nazi dentist named Christian Szell – a (fictional) former associate of Josef Mengele – who inflicts excruciating levels of pain by drilling into Babe's teeth whilst repeating a question: "Is it safe?"

If all that comes across as a little confusing, that's because I've left my synopsis intentionally oblique in case you've never seen the movie of Marathon Man – unlikely as that may be. Directed by John Schelsinger and starring Dustin Hoffman as Babe, Roy Scheider as Doc and Laurence Olivier as Szell, the film has become infamous for that aforementioned torture scene, but there's much to recommend it besides – the three leads' performances for one, and of course Goldman's sparkling script. But pretty much everything that's great about Goldman's screenplay has its basis in the book, which additionally benefits from its breathless style of prose: dialogue and description tumble across the page in a frantic fashion, as if the story flew from Goldman's fingertips and it was all he could do to rush to get it down on paper.

Moreover, because it's a novel and not a movie, Goldman is able to withhold the identity of Scylla until halfway through the book; obviously having already seen the movie adaptation, I knew who Scylla was, but even given that, I was able to appreciate the level of suspense Goldman maintains. And the ending is different too: Goldman has expressed his frustration at being made to tone down the finale – reputedly at Hoffman's insistence – and has also lamented the loss of a much earlier, violent scene from the novel which grants added insight into Scylla's psyche (although I must admit that Wikipedia's suggestion that a murdered character was Scylla's lover rather flew over my head).

Interestingly, Goldman wrote a belated sequel to Marathon Man – Brothers (1987), which apparently somehow resurrects the deceased Scylla, and which, if this note is anything to go by, sounds completely bonkers. Having enjoyed Marathon Man so much, though, I'm kind of minded to give it a go, and maybe one or two others of Goldman's novels as well.

Moving on, and we're staying with the villainous Nazis for our penultimate book-and-movie, in which, having only been mentioned in passing in Marathon Man, Josef Mengele takes on a starring role. But more than that, the film adaptation once again stars Laurence Olivier, this time playing an aging Nazi-hunter rather than an aging Nazi...

Richard Stark's Parker: The Score – Exclusive Darwyn Cooke Interview, on The Violent World of Parker!

Interrupting my ongoing series of posts on books which begat perhaps more famous films momentarily – the next instalment of which will be up shortly – an announcement: if you head over to The Violent World of Parker blog – where, lest we forget, I'm co-blogger – you'll find a massive, exclusive interview with comics creator Darwyn Cooke on his latest graphic novel adaptation of a Donald E. "Richard Stark" Westlake novel, this time the fifth Parker outing, The Score, which is published today by IDW.

The interview was conducted by Violent World of Parker proprietor Trent and myself, and covers all manner of topics, from the particular challenges adapting The Score presented, to Darwyn's history with Westlake and Parker, to which Parker novel he'll be tackling next; there's even a heretofore little-known piece of info concerning how Westlake came close to writing Batman comics. Darwyn only does one big interview each time he publishes a Parker graphic novel – previously he spoke to Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter for The Hunter (Parker #1) and Tucker Stone at Comics Alliance for The Outfit (Parker #3) – so it's a huge honour that Darwyn chose The Violent World of Parker to be his platform this time out, and, on a personal level, for me to have had some small involvement (witness this post and this post for a taste of my boundless enthusiasm for Darwyn's endeavours on the Parker books). Darwyn told us he's a lurker on both TVWoP and Existential Ennui, and while I'm sure the former is true, even if he was just being kind on the latter, it was still nice to hear.

Anyway, go read

The Violent World of Parker Darwyn Cooke Interview

and I'll be back in a bit with the next book which begat a perhaps more famous film...

Deliverance by James Dickey: the Original Novel (Hamish Hamilton, 1970), Basis for the 1972 John Boorman Movie; plus The Hunter by Richard Stark (1962), Basis for the 1967 Boorman Movie Point Blank

And so begins the third week of posts on books which begat perhaps more famous films. Bored yet? Well, tough: I've still got a handful of these to get through, so it's a case, I'm afraid, of like it, lump it, or find some other equally soporific and supercilious books blog to read (good luck with that). But I can at least promise that each of the remaining books/movies will be of the stone cold classic thriller variety, featuring as their villains a motley assortment of, well, Nazis, Nazis, and, er, more Nazis. Before we get to all those Nazis, though: some leering backwoodsmen! As, in the wake of David Morrell's First Blood, we head even deeper into the American south. Unlike Morrell's novel and its movie adaptation, however – indeed, unlike the vast majority of book-to-film adaptations – in this instance, I reckon the film – adapted by the author himself – is better than the source text...

James Dickey's Deliverance was first published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton in 1970, the same year as the US Houghton Mifflin edition. The jacket of the Hamilton edition was designed by Bernard Higton, a man who I've waxed lyrical about before, as he's based in Lewes, the East Sussex town in which, lest we forget (unlikely, I know, since, I'm always harping on about it), I live and work; he even, at one time, had his studio in the building in which I currently work. Anyway, Higton has had a hand in countless books over the years – not only as designer but also author and illustrator – among them the wrapper for the Hamilton first of Joseph Hone's The Private Sector.

Deliverance, as if you didn't know, is the story of a canoe trip by four white collar types through the Georgia mountains that goes disastrously – and horrifically – wrong; it was Dickey's debut novel, but he'd already had ten years as an acclaimed poet before Deliverance arrived, something which is evident in the prose of the novel: there are long descriptive passages peppered throughout. I actually found it somewhat overwritten, but then that probably speaks to my preference for leaner prose; in this 1976 Paris Review interview, Dickey claims that "Deliverance was originally written in a very heavily charged prose", but that he "spent two or three drafts taking that quality out". Certainly once the canoe trip gets underway there are passages of high tension and moments of memorable terror, notably one uncomfortable sequence that John Boorman's 1972 Dickey-scripted movie adaptation would turn into one of the most iconic cinematic scenes of the 1970s.

That scene is, of course, the assault by the aforementioned backwoodsmen on Ed (the book's narrator, played by Jon Voight) and Bobby (Ned Beatty), during which encounter Bobby is raped. It's a shocking episode in both the novel and the film, but it's lent an added horror in the movie by the ad-libbed "squeal, piggy" dialogue, which appears neither in Dickey's book nor, apparently, his screenplay. Indeed, stripped of Ed/Dickey's verbose narration, Boorman's film emerges as the superior beast, assisted by the genius casting. Voight and Beatty are great, obviously – as is Ronny Cox as the doomed Drew – but it's Burt Reynolds as the macho Lewis who steals the show, especially with the benefit of hindsight: all those action flicks he'd soon be starring in post-Deliverance, and here he's incapacitated and sidelined halfway through the movie. And the ending is rather more downbeat than Dickey's novel, too, suggesting that Ed is more scarred by his experiences than he is in the book.

Given my abiding preoccupation with all things Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark, it would, I feel, be remiss of me not to mention that besides Deliverance (and a good many other fine not-adapted-from-novels films, among them Excalibur, 1981, and – a personal favourite of mine – Hope and Glory, 1987), John Boorman also directed another notable adaptation: the 1967 film of the debut Stark/Parker novel The Hunter (1962), alias Point Blank. As I'm sure is the case for other Stark/Parker fans, Point Blank was my first unwitting exposure to Parker – renamed and fairly drastically remodelled for the film as Walker (Lee Marvin) – and though the book and the film are quite different and separate entities (and not all Parker aficionados are that keen on the movie), for me, Point Blank still stands as one of my favourite ever motion pictures. But more than that, it was falling for Boorman's adaptation decades ago that would eventually lead to my finding Westlake and Stark, and in turn becoming co-blogger on The Violent World of Parker. So in a way, you can blame John Boorman for all the Westlake blogging that's ensued.

Now then. A question: is it safe?