Why do they do that?

Lynne Patrick

Last night I began to watch a TV adaptation of a novel by a crime writer whose series I enjoy. According to the credits, the screenplay was based on a book in that series, so being naturally curious, during the first commercial break I looked at the list in the front of the most recent to see where it fitted in.

By then I’d already worked out that one of the leading characters was pure invention, and doesn’t appear in the books at all. It also turned out that another leading character doesn’t make her first appearance in the books until about three or four after the one they claimed to be adapting.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not being impossibly naïve and demanding here. I do know it’s not possible to translate the page to the stage (or the screen) literally and in every detail. I’ve just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s majestic Bring Up the Bodies, and we have tickets for the stage version next month. I’m absolutely intrigued to know how they’re going to dramatize nearly 600 pages of rich, complex prose with a cast of several dozen if not hundreds. I’m certainly not expecting all the minutiae that make the book special – but if they didn’t present Henry VIII’s first three wives in the correct order, it would be a travesty of the original and also of Tudor history. Fortunately, I can’t see that happening.

To return to the case in point: OK, so the demands of the different forms make it impossible to reproduce everything accurately. Up to a point I understand why the character from later in the series is there. There have already been several adaptations, and they’re using the books out of order; they need her for continuity and ongoing sexual tension. But introducing a random new character when one of the author’s strengths is peopling his plot with sharp, rounded personae? Why?

Something else I never quite understood was why TV adaptations of Reginald Hill’s colossus among police procedural series, Dalziel and Pascoe, dispensed with Ellie, Pascoe’s wonderfully sparky and abrasive wife. More: I don’t recall that they ever introduced Cap, Dalziel’s Amazonian love interest. If, heaven forfend, it had ever turned into a long-running soap-style series, there might have been some point in the interests of variety in the drama, but for a few episodes every couple of years, you’d think they could leave well enough alone, especially since it was already better than well enough.

Successful series are successful for a reason, and I’m pretty sure that for most readers that reason mainly revolves around character. The puzzle, the adventure, the action all matter in each individual book – but what makes us keep coming back, and actively seeking the next in the series, is that we care about the characters. And that’s down to the author, whose job it is to make us care; when they do that job well, it pays off.

So why do adapters feel obliged to meddle? If it ain’t broke, it must be working.

And if I may be allowed to add my own two penn’orth to the latest episode in the continuing saga of whether crime fiction has any literary value (how could the damned woman doubt it? Hasn’t she read any Reginald Hill?) I’d just like to say this: my lovely co-blogger Jeff Cohen observed earlier in the week that detractors of our beloved genre feel books should be more concerned with the unfairness of life and the corruptibility of people. (That is what you said, isn’t it, Jeff? At least in part?)
Can’t those detractors see the irony of that? What else is crime fiction about, for goodness sake?