It's been a while since I've talked about my Beach House Books project...
That was my ongoing, endless project to read the novels I've collected over the years and formed into the To Be Read Mountain...
Well, even though I've not talked about it so much, the project has been going on and on... and just lately I've been reading a bunch of TV and Film Tie-in novelisations that have been awaiting my attention. I've been thinking a lot about the whole phenomenon of the tie-in, and it seemed like a good time to write about what i've been reading recently...
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Cagney and Lacey - Serita Deborah Stevens
In some ways it’s almost the perfect Tie-In
novel. It gives us stuff that the TV show never did and never could. It segues
perfectly with everything we saw on screen and, as we read it, becomes kind of
indispensible: I can’t picture those people without these histories now. Serita
Deborah Stevens’ 1985 novel, ‘Cagney and Lacey’ is one of those Tie-Ins that
gives us the origin story of its protagonists, beginning two decades before the
TV show ever did. It provides us with stories not necessarily too ‘broad and
deep’ for TV, but too early and too youthful.
There’s
a special joy in getting to know the principal characters of Christine Cagney
and Mary Beth Zmgrocki in their early years. In alternating chapters we meet
very recognisable versions of the women we know from TV. Before their lives are
twined together they are in very different circumstances: Chris having a high
old time in Paris and then London in the Swinging Sixties as a society
photographer; poor Mary Beth is struggling along as a secretary living alone
with her ailing, abandoned mother.
In
some ways it’s a very simple story, leading us through the life changes that
bring both women to enroll in the NYPD’s training program. We get set backs and
triumphs, first and second loves, first collars… and we get smashing, snarky
dialogue – especially when the two women are first assigned to the beat
together and don’t particularly hit it off.
There’s
so much to love in this short, readable volume. I loved the scenes dealing with
Mary Beth’s falling in love with Harvey – the much put-upon house-husband
familiar from the show. When she first walks the beat with a nightstick and a
gun she finds him tailing her in their car, trying to bring her coffee and a
corned beef sandwich. It’s a very touching scene.
I
also really enjoyed the early scenes with Cagney in London, living in a kind of
racy Danielle Steele novel, before what she decides she really wants is a Ed
McBain kind of life. It’s a novel about back stories in which two women decide
what kind of story they want to be living their adult lives inside and, what we
get, by the end, is a rather gritty crime story involving hookers, pimps,
concentration camp survivors, Nazis and diamonds. In fact, though some later
chapters are based on early episodes it’s rather grittier in places than the TV
show would get.
By
the very end, with the women’s promotion to detective status, and the shifting
of their desk to the space beside the coffee pot, we dovetail neatly with the
beginning of the TV show. It makes me rather sad that there were no print
sequels from Stevens or anyone else. There were TV movies to tell us what
became of Mary Beth and Christine in their later careers, but a TV movie isn’t
quite the same as a novel. TV movies fly by so quickly and they don’t give you
the dull little moments of downtime that novels do so well.
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