Novelisation Review 2: The Professionals 4: Hunter Hunted, by Ken Blake

The second in an occasional thread celebrating old-school paperback novelisations from the 70s and 80s, which are now mostly forgotten.  We're not talking great art but these books have their place - they were a fantastic resource from a time when you couldn't watch your favourite film or TV show whenever you felt like it - and I think they deserve to be remembered.

This time, I'm looking at The Professionals 4: Hunter Hunted, by Ken Blake, adapted from the excellent UK TV series.

front and back cover of the Sphere paperback, 1979 reprint (cover scans of my copy)

Once again written by Kenneth Bulmer under the Ken Blake house name, this volume is based on the shooting scripts for three episodes.

The first is First Night, where an Israeli minister is kidnapped from the Festival Hall on the Southbank and, to avoid an international incident, it’s down to CI5 to find him.  After an action packed opening, we then see some dogged detective work (the kidnappers are tracked by a Polaroid picture they’ve sent), which works slightly better in the episode than it does here.  Great pacing, some humour and some nice observations on contemporary London.

Kathie Mason (Cheryl Kennedy) from "Hunter Hunted"

The second, eponymous episode has CI5 charged with testing the new laser-sighted 180 and Cowley hands it to Bodie & Doyle.  Whilst at headquarters, they encounter Kathie Mason, an ex-colleague of Doyle’s who’s interviewing to become a CI5 agent.  After a night at her place, Doyle discovers the gun is missing and it seems someone is out to get their revenge on him.  Brisk, involved and good fun, this cracks along with some nice dialogue, excellent set pieces (especially the demise of Doyle’s E-type)  and some good interactions between the agents.  I really liked the episode itself (especially Cheryl Kennedy as Kathie) and this does it justice.

The Rack is the final episode.  Following a raid on ex-boxer (now criminal and drug dealer) John Coogan’s mansion, he and his brother are taken to CI5 for interrogation.  The brother has a go at Doyle then punches him, in self defence Doyle retaliates and the brother dies of a ruptured spleen.  A tribunal (the ‘rack’ of the title) is then set up, wherein prosecution lawyer Geraldine Mather decides to take on the Action Squad and cut them down to size.  Briskly told, with good characterisation, this works well to flesh out Doyle and his feelings over perhaps (without giving away spoilers) causing the death of a man while Cowley has a great grandstanding speech on just why CI5 is so important (and, sadly, the words ring as true today as they did forty years ago).

All three are competently written (and Bulmer continues his fascination with Bodie’s ‘famous’ face and mobile lips) and feature some nice bits of poetic prose when describing a London that has mostly long since disappeared.  The action scenes are deftly handled as are the locations (judging by certain aspects - the constant rain in The Rack, for example - it seems they were written from the shooting scripts rather than seeing the episodes) and there are some smart little character pieces that flesh the dynamic duo out well (it’s mentioned again that Doyle paints).  Brisk, violent, occasionally amusing, I’m not sure how these would work if you’d never seen the programme but as an unabashed fan of the series, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Recommended.

The novelisation is "based on the original screenplays by Brian Clemens, Anthony Read and Gerry O'Hara" (taken from the title page)

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from left - Doyle (Martin Shaw), Cowley (Gordon Jackson) and Bodie (Lewis Collins)

The Professionals ran for five series, from 1977 through to 1983, shown on ITV.  Brian Clemens, perhaps best known for The Avengers, created the series (which was originally to have been called The A-Squad) and became executive producer with his business partners Albert Fennell and Laurie Johnson (who also provided the excellent theme music) for London Weekend Television (LWT).  The first series was produced by Sidney Hayers with Raymond Menmuir producing the rest, with 57 episodes made in total.

Although the first series used a lot of studio-based filming (to the extent Cowley had a secretary), Menmuir did away with standing sets and the remainder of the series was filmed in real buildings and homes.  This lent a grittiness to the programmes and now, forty years later, provides a wonderful snapshot of a London that's mostly been lost to progress.  The series focussed on the exploits of CI5 (Criminal Intelligence 5), led by George Cowley (Gordon Jackson) and centred around his two best agents, Doyle (Martin Shaw) and Bodie (Lewis Collins).  The two actors, whose initial abrasiveness towards each other led to their casting, worked well together and a lot of episodes included dialogue ad-libbed by them.

While earlier episodes (certainly series one through to three) saw a wide range of plots and scripts, with some good directors involved (Martin Campbell was both a main and second unit director), the later ones used more script devices as time wore on.  The final episodes were filmed in May 1981, by which time Collins and Shaw both stated publicly they thought the show had grown stale, though the final broadcast run ended in February 1983.

The series is repeated often on ITV4 in the UK and is well worth a watch, though the Network Releasing Blu ray restorations are your best bet.  These not only have great quality image and sound but thorough production notes (in book form) by Andrew Pixley.

The Corgi collection.  I had the bigger model (with figures) when I was a kid but didn't pick up the smaller version until a couple of years ago

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From 1978 through to 1982, Sphere released 15 paperback novelisations (with seven of them also receiving hardback release), adapting 38 of the series' 57 episodes.  Ken Blake was the house-name covering all of these with Kenneth Bulmer writing the majority of them and Robert Holdstock contributing numbers 10, 13, 14 and 15.

(Henry) Kenneth Bulmer was born on 14th January 1921 in London and worked in the paper industry before serving with the Royal Corps of Signals during the Second World War.  Having been a fan of sf before his service, when demobbed in 1946 he began writing for fan magazines and his first novel, Space Treason, was published in 1952 (and co-written with A Vince Clarke).  Turning freelance in 1954, he wrote dozens of novels and comic strips, a prolific output he maintained throughout his career.  In the 70s, as part of the Piccadilly Cowboys group, he wrote across genres for various series (including The Professionals) under a host of pen and house names, whilst also publishing a substantial amount of work under his own name.  In addition, he edited nine volumes in the New Writings in Science Fiction anthology series during the 70s, succeeding John Carnell.

He suffered a stroke in 1997 which halted a writing career that saw over 160 novels (and countless short stories) published.

Awarded the TAFF in 1955 (a fund to send prominent fans to international conventions), he was the British Guest Of Honour at the World SF Convention in Cleveland, Ohio and made a life member of the British SF Association in 1974.  He married Pamela Buckmaster in March 1953, with whom he had two daughters and a son but they were divorced in 1981.

Kenneth Bulmer died on 16th December 2005.

for further bibliographical details, the SF Encyclopedia has a good entry on him and the Guardian has a thorough obituary

For a few years now, after finding out charity shops sometimes pulp old books because the market for them is so small, I've been collecting 70s and 80s paperbacks through secondhand bookshops, car boot sales and ebay.  I set up a thread for the horror titles (which you can see here) but novelisations were a rich vein in those decades, before the advent of home video, when viewers wanted to revisit the adventures of their favourite TV show or film.  I realise we might not be talking great art here but, on the whole, I think these books deserve to be remembered.

To that end, on an irregular basis, I'm going to review these "old-school" tie-ins with, hopefully, some background material on each one.

You can read the other posts in the thread here