Novel(ized)

Speaking of Jonathan Coe, his essay on Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes reminded me of one of the few books I regret not buying: the novelization of the BBC Pallisers miniseries. I came across this astonishingly slender paperback in a public library booksale and, at the time, felt instinctive English-major revulsion. Now, I'd be more inclined to purchase it as a useful curiosity, representative of that odd subsubgenre known as novelizations of film adaptations of novels. Thus, there have also been novelizations of Frankenstein and Little Women--although, one would have thought, Mary Shelley and Lousia May Alcott surely did a perfectly adequate job the first time around. The most extreme example I've encountered so far is a variation on the theme: Edward Fenton's Anne of the Thousand Days, based on the film of the same title, based on the play by Maxwell Anderson, itself based (according to Retha Warnicke) on Francis Hackett's novel Queen Anne Boleyn. Rather far from the truth, to be sure.