Friday, September 10, 2010

TV tie-in editions cover gallery 3

Wheels by Arthur Hailey (London, Michael Joseph, 1971)
Pan 0330-23294-0, 1973.
----, 11th imp., 1979, 415pp, £1.25, [anon].
Detroit is motor town.
__From the grime and crime of the assembly line to top-secret design studios and executive boardrooms... and bedrooms, the biggest name in blockbusting bestsellers takes the lid off the automobile capital of the world.
__Here is the heart of the motor metropolis, its men, women and machines, ambitions, treacheries, successes, disasters and passions...
Wheels was an NBC 5-part mini-series featuring Rock Hudson, Lee Remick, Blair Brown, John Beck, Ralph Bellamy and Scott Brady.Originally broadcast in May 1978 in the USA and on London Weekend in the UK in Jun 1978. IMDB.

About the author [1979]:
Arthur Hailey was born in 1920 in Luton, England, where he attended school, then worked as an office boy and clerk. At age nineteen, at the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force and rose through the ranks to become a pilot and Flight Lieutenant. In 1947 he emigrated to Canada where he was successively a real-estate salesman, business-magazine editor and a sales and advertising executive. He became a full-time author in 1956 following the overnight success of his television play Flight Into Danger which was performed world-wide, later becoming a novel and a film. Since then his outstandingly successful novels - which appear in twenty-seven languages - include The Final Diagnosis, In High Places, Hotel, Airport, Wheels and, his latest, The Moneychangers. Seven of Hailey's stories have been bought for production.
__Arthur Hailey married his wife Shiela - also British born - in 1951 and they have three children, Jane, Steven and Diane. Since 1969 the Haileys have made their home at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas.
__(Hailey died in 2004.)

Penmarric by Susan Howatch (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1971)
Pan 0330-23221-5, 1972.
----, 14th imp., 1979, 718pp, £1.95, [still]. Cover photo by Douglas Playle
"I was ten years old when I first saw the inheritance and twenty years old when I saw Janna Roslyn, but my reaction to both was identical. I wanted them."
__The inheritance is Penmarric, a huge gaunt house in Cornwall belonging to the tempestuous, hot-blooded Castallacks: Janna Roslyn, a beautiful village girl who becomes mistress of Laurence Castallack, wife to his son...
__From 1890 to the end of World War II the fateful passions and chequered fortunes of this rich, landed family (and their illegitimate Parrish brothers) are recreated with the clash of character and the sweep of narrative that are the hallmarks of a master storyteller.
Penmarric was a BBC TV serial broadcast in 12 episodes in October to December 1979 produced by Ron Craddock, directed by Tina Wakerell and Derek Martinus and dramatized by John Prebble, Michael Robson and Julian Bond. It starred Annabel Leventon (Janna Roslyn), Peter Blake, Thomas Ellice, Rupert Frazer, June Ellis, Roger Milner and Maurice Quick. IMDB.



About the author [1979]:
Susan Howatch was twenty-nine when she completed Penmarric: it took her five years to write. Born in Leatherhead, Surrey, in 1940, she was an only child and her father was killed in the Second World War. After leaving Sutton High School, she took a degree in law at London University but after working for a year as an articled clerk she was bored with practical law and decided to devote herself to writing. In 1964 she went to America and within a year her first novel was accepted for publication. While working on Penmarric she wrote six other novels. These, as well as her saga Cashelmara, are all available in Pan. Her latest novel is The Rich are Different.
__Susan Howatch now lives in Ireland.

Ben Hall by Frank Clune (originally as Wild Colonial Boys, London, Angus & Robertson, 1948; abridged, Pacific Books, 1970)
Futura 0-8600-7251-7, 1975, 496pp, 95p.
Australia in 1860. A time of exploration, gold rushes, gun fights and the cruel tyranny if the cat over transportees. A time when gangs of outlawed robbers and escaped convicts roamed the outback, bushrangers achieved an immortalisation in song and legend. Men like Donahoo, Frank the Darkie and bold Ben Hall - men who'd rather die in a bloody battle with the traps than perish in irons.
__This is the true story of those pioneer days, of the men and women who took the challenge of their new, wild, unmapped continent and tamed it.
Ben Hall was a 13-episode ABC/BBC series which was originally broadcast in 1975, created and produced by Neil McCallum and starring Jon Finch as Ben Hall. IMDB.

Clune's Wild Colonial Boys was a non-fiction book about the activities of Benjamin Hall, born in Bristol in 1802 and sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia after being convicted of stealing clothes. Julian Croft, writing in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, claims that Clune had a tendency to embroider his research, but was nevertheless a hugely popular historian and writer in Australia; there was even a Frank Clune's Adventure Magazine published around the same time as the appearance of Wild Colonial Boys.

Clune published over 70 books, a good listing of which can be found at Wikipedia. He was awarded the OBE in 1967.

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