The Adventurer didn’t exactly inspire a great deal of tie-in merchandise back in the day, there was no Adventurer jigsaw puzzle, no Adventurer board game and no cartoon strip in TV Action. John Barry’s Adventurer theme tune was however released on the Polydor label (the B-Side being Barry’s theme tune from the 1972 film ‘Follow Me’) and a tie-in novelisation of the series emerged from Pan books in 1973. Hiding behind the ‘Robert Miall’ name was one John Frederick Burke (1922-2011) an extraordinarily prolific author under his own name, as well as several other names (as well as Miall he was also Jonathan George, Martin Sands, Owen Burke, Russ Ames, Roger Rougiere). Burke also had quite the career side-line going when it came to novelizing films and TV shows. He was there at the birth of the tie-in novelisation boom of the early 1960s (his earliest efforts included novelizations of The Entertainer and Look Back in Anger) and he was still turning them out decades later. His last tie-in novelizations being a series of ‘London’s Burning’ books from the mid-1990s. Somehow along the way Burke also managed to find the time to write the source story and original script to the 1967 cult movie The Sorcerers, and appear as a contestant on the TV quiz show Mastermind, a busy life for sure.
For the Adventurer novel, Miall/Burke drew on three of the earlier Adventurer episodes ‘Return to Sender’, ‘Thrust and Counter Thrust’ and ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’, seemingly on account of the fact that all those episodes take place in Nice. Forming what could be described as ‘the Nice trilogy’. Rather than portray these as three separate short stories part of Burke’s assignment involved trying to rework these three episodes into one continuous narrative, by having each storyline flow into each other. Despite Burke’s best efforts though, only the most unobservant reader could fail to notice how the narrative stops and restarts twice over during the course of the book.
The VHS era and the popularisation of off-air TV recording in the 1980s began to spell the end for tie-in novelizations, but prior to those innovations such books remained one of few ways people could keep the memory of a film or TV show alive. By rights these books should have been rendered obsolete once the public were able to own the actual films or TV shows themselves, but tie-in novelizations aren’t entirely without their value. As these books were written to cash in on the release of a film or TV series they were often likely to have been written whilst the projects in question were on-going and be based on early shooting scripts rather than the finished product. Tie-in novelizations therefore can usually be relied upon to feature subplots, scenes and characters that for whatever reason never made the final cut of the project that they were promoting. Given the troubled nature of the production it is no real surprise that the book version of The Adventurer does also differ and divert from what made it onto TV.
Here then is a brief breakdown of how the book differs from the TV series:
What is immediately noticeable about the book is that Gene Bradley isn’t called Gene Bradley in it, rather he is ‘Gene Brady’. As to why the main character underwent this slight name change, we can but speculate. The most obvious answer is that the Brady surname would have been synonymous to audiences of the time with the notorious child killer Ian Brady, and that having a lead character in a cheery TV action series whose name evoked memories of the Moors murderers may not have been the wisest decision. It is also worth considering that, what with the series having an eye on the US market, the name ‘Bradley’ had more of an all-American feel to it than Brady.
The book begins a few scenes into the plot of ‘Return to Sender’ with Gene arriving in Nice, and being mobbed by all and sundry in a hotel lobby “Gene Brady was completely surrounded. Fingers touched him, clawed at him. Someone was breathing reverently in his left ear”. By rights amongst the crowd should be Debbie Russ’ character Debbie Pinter, but rather than a starstruck Debbie Pinter, in the book Gene is confronted by a starstruck Danny Pinter. The character being a nine year old boy in the novelisation. Danny’s obsession with Westerns, and the fact that he is dressed as a cowboy, leads onto this aborted piece of dialogue that didn’t make it to TV.
The in-joke there being that the most famous portrayal of Bat Masterson at the time was on the eponymous TV series (1958-1961), where he was played by a certain Gene Barry. Hence Gene’s slight agitation at the kid favouring John Wayne over Bat Masterson. Presumably either Gene didn’t find the joke funny, or the chance to capitalise on Debbie Russ’ ‘Here Come the Double Deckers’ fame lead to Danny undergoing a gender switch to Debbie for the TV show.
Back when we looked at the Return to Sender episode, I wondered how Burke could bring the fight scene -in which Gene slaps a man around the face with a plant then falls off a curtain rail- to the printed word. Perhaps wisely, the book diverts slightly from the TV version. Instead of a curtain rail being the reason for Gene losing the fight, in the book it is a pesky mirror that proves to be his downfall.
Physically the majority of the characters in the book match up to the actors who played them in the TV series, the book even anticipates the problem Gene would have with Stuart Damon in its description of Damon’s character ‘Vince Elliot looked, as ever, like an overgrown jockey’. The only character who doesn’t closely resemble the actor who played him is Mr Parminter, who appears to have originally been envisioned as a hugely overweight man (he is constantly described in the book as ‘podgy’ and ‘plump’ and at one point has trouble getting up from Gene’s couch). Personality wise though, Gene ‘Brady’ is a rather different character to Gene ‘Bradley’. In the book Brady manages to conceal his double life as a spy by pretending to be something of a film industry jackass. Whenever his job as a spy forces him to walk away from acting jobs, Gene covers his tracks by pretending he has fallen off the wagon, had a nervous breakdown or run into ‘creative differences’ with the filmmakers. Thus, while he gets a reputation as a famous hell-raiser and a risky, pain in the ass to employ as an actor, at the same time he manages to keep the real reason for his frequent vanishing acts from movie sets a secret. As written, Brady has more in common with such bad boy actors of the day like Richard Harris, Oliver Reed and Richard Burton than the actor who eventually played him. Of course this aspect of the character is completely absent from the TV series, which favours a more squeaky clean portrayal of Gene, without a hint that his double life earns him a terrible reputation within the film industry. Absent also from the TV version, but retained in the novelisation, is a rather embarrassing subplot in which Gene gets out of an acting assignment by pretending he has contracted dysentery in Nice.
Whenever Burke’s writing expands on the Adventurer universe, the novelisation tends to get extremely meta. In the novel Gene’s acting career takes him to London where he is kept busy by playing the lead in an action packed British TV show called ‘Go Get Him’. The producer of Go Get Him being a fast talking Jewish impresario called Max Knight, a character who is err rather reminiscent of a certain Lew Grade (even the ‘Knight’ name seems to be a pointed reference, Grade having been knighted a few years earlier). It all gets rather self-referential with Burke even using the first names of actual Adventurer writers Donald James and Dennis Spooner for the much put upon writing due of ‘Don and Dennis’ who are knocking out all these Go Get Him scripts for Mr Knight.
Art also uncannily mirrors life when Gene causes problems during the making of ‘Go Get Him’, driving a regular director of the series to the bottle. A mere coincidence, or were horror stories from the set of The Adventurer filtering back to Burke and providing him with inspiration?
Burke’s most original contributions to the book are of course the chapters that link the three episodes together. After the incidents of ‘Return to Sender’ Gene has trouble concealing his double life as a spy to his girlfriend Valerie (played by Sharon Gurney in the TV episode) a character who hangs around a bit longer in the book than she does the TV series. Ever wondered how Gene met the Countess Krevisky from the episode ‘Thrust and Counter Thrust’?....Burke fills in those blanks too. After Valerie leaves for London, production of ‘Go Get Him’ switches to Nice. There Parminter cunningly arranges for a sword fighting scene in Go Get Him to be filmed outside of the Moravian embassy, knowing that this will bring Gene to the attention of the Countess Krevisky and earn him an all-important invite to the Moravian embassy.
While Gene and the Countess’ subsequent romantic interlude made it into the TV series, largely absent was much of their conversation about his singing ability. In the book, the Countess mentions being impressed by his singing in a film she saw, which leads to her asking him to perform a musical number at the Moravian embassy. Trouble is, in the book Gene is actually a fairly mediocre singer who admits to only sounding good on film due to backing singers and recording studio enhancement. In a further piece of backstory we didn’t hear about in the TV series, Gene reveals to the Countess that he turned down the role in another Max Knight TV action series called ‘The Troubadour’ due to reservations about his singing ability. (Should anyone wish to have an idea of what The Troubadour would have looked like, check out the 1958 poverty row thriller ‘Hong Kong Confidential’ in which Gene plays a spy who masquerades as a famous lounge singer).
All references to Gene being just an average singer were wiped clean from the TV series, with Gene Barry preferring to play the character as an excellent singer who can effortlessly bring the house down. In doing so, forgoing a great deal of suspense the book manages to generate over whether Gene might possibly give an awful performance, and risk both embarrassing himself and causing his motivations for being at the Embassy to come under scrutiny.
As the book appears to pre-date the issues Gene had with Stuart Damon, his character Vince is present throughout the book including its version of the ‘Thrust and Counter Thrust’ story. By the time that episode went before the camera, Damon was off the show and ‘Vince’ had become ‘Gavin’ with Garrick Hagon taking over the role. This isn’t the only name change the character underwent however, and while in the TV series Gavin goes undercover as hippie musician ‘Wild Man Jones’ in the book Vince adopts a more risqué stage name.
Concerns about TV censorship are the likely reason for why Reefer Jones was rechristened Wild Man Jones for the series. There are a few mild expletives in the book (esp. ‘bastard’) but it is hard to know whether these were in the original scripts and taken out, or whether Burke inserted them himself in order to give the book a more ‘adult’ tone. The only other scene from the ‘Trust and Counter Trust’ part of the book that didn’t make it into the TV episode involves Gene over hearing the Countess bad mouthing him to others, hurting his feelings in the process. Presumably this scene really did hurt Gene’s feelings, hence its exclusion from the TV episode.
I suspect that Catherine Schell was probably glad the following piece of dialogue never made it to TV, this is hardly a line befitting someone descended from Hungarian nobility.
Speaking of which, it has to be said that this book’s description of the characters Diane Marsh and Suzy Dolman doesn’t exactly flatter Catherine Schell and Judy Geeson.
In order to merge the plots of ‘Trust and Counter Trust’ and ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ the book introduces the character of Suzy Dolman at the Moravian embassy, where her low opinion of Gene’s singing marks the beginning of her emotionally fraught relationship with Gene. ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ is the Adventurer episode that looks to have suffered the least when it came to being rewritten to appease Gene. This part of the book plays pretty much like a straightforward transcription of the TV episode, its only serious diversion from it occurs when Gene gets Suzy out of the mock-jail he’d had Vince lock her up in. In the TV episode, Gene pretends to bribe Vince (who is dressed as a gendarme) in order to get her out of jail, but in the book Gene pretends to overpower Vince and breaks her out of the prison cell. Given Gene’s issues with Stuart Damon’s height it doesn’t require any amount of detective work to get to the bottom of why a physical confrontation between Gene and Vince was nixed by Gene for the TV version.
If truth be told, Burke probably didn’t regard writing The Adventurer novelisation as anything more than a pay check assignment. Saying that the often hilarious self-referential aspects of the book do suggest a man who was having allot of fun writing it, especially when it came to tackling the troubled production of ahem.. ‘Go Get Him’. The Adventurer book is an example of good, efficient hackwork, tailor made for sale at airports. A relatively brisk read, it is likely you could get through the entire book during just one flight, especially if you’d seen its plot(s) played out on TV a few weeks earlier. Burke’s loving descriptions of foreign holiday destinations no doubt wetting his audience’s appetite for their own forthcoming sunny adventures. Where, unlike Mr Brady/Bradley, they were hopefully left alone by giant Hungarian women with bobbing heads and far out hippie musicians with stage names that couldn’t be said on British TV in 1972.
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