From the Small Screen to the Printed Page, Part 2

 As a kid, I loved Starsky and Hutch, mostly because of the cool car and the frequent gun fights. When I watched a few episodes as an adult, I wasn't as automatically impressed. The car is still cool and I still enjoy watching gun fights, but the scripts were sometimes sloppily written and cheesy. An episode in which they talk down a crazed criminal who is holding a woman at knife point by putting their guns down and raising their hands to show they don't mean him any harm is an eye-rolling experience. 

But when a strongly written episode shows up, the car, gun fights and the chemisty between the two lead characters can give you a very entertaining hour.  

Of the eight Starsky and Hutch tie-in novels published, I've recently found and read two of them. Both were written by Max Franklin (a pen name for Richard Deming) and both were novelizations of two of those strong episodes.

One of the interesting things to note when reading these novels was how Franklin expands a one-hour-long story into enough pages to make up even a short novel. Death Race (1976) does this by adding additional scenes from the point-of-view of the bad guys and changing them from the Red Shirt villains they were in the episode into more 3-dimensional characters. The result is a still entertaining and action-packed story with a little more depth to it than the original episode.

The author also adds one additional gun battle--on TV, the climatic fight is in a hospital corridor. This fight still happens in the novel, but it soon followed by one more gun fight in an airport parking lot. This is obviously done to pad out the page count, but the additional action is worked expertly into the story, so it doesn't feel like padding at all.

One inexplicable thing about the paperback is the cover. The story involves the two partners transporting a mob boss's daughter to Los Angeles, encountering hitmen along the way. There are several legitimately exciting car chases and gun fights along the way, all of which would have made for great cover images. But the novel chooses to show us a picture of Hutch dramatically... drinking coffee? I don't get that at all. 

In Bounty Hunter (1977--also by Franklin), the author once again turns a one hour episode into a short-novel by adding more scenes told from the points-of-view of the bad guys, fleshing out their characterizations quite a bit. 

This one involves a dishonest lady bail bondsman and her ruthless bounty hunter murdering a jewel thief and then hiding the body and pulling off some jewel heists to cover their tracks, making it look like the thief is still alive. Their plan is full of flaws, but they aren't meant to be super-crooks. Rather they are thugs who allow greed to overcome what intelligence they have. The story moves along at a brisk pace, using TV Cop logic to move the plot along and bring it to a satisfying conclusion.

I read the novel with no memory of ever having seen the episode it was based upon, so I found it on TubiTV and watched it. Like its novelization, it's a pretty good story. Also, there's the added treat of seeing a minor character reading a copy of Marvel's Werewolf by Night.

I haven't read the other six in the Starsky & Hutch novelization series, but all were written by Max Franklin, who obviously had a talent for producing entertaining episode novelizations. So if you see one of his Starsky and Hutch novels in a used bookstore, give it a shot.