So far this year, my never-ending quest for the 1991 Diamond Brothers TV series had had two big breakthroughs: the sleeve for a Spanish VHS release surfaced in March, and then the actual title sequence followed suit in May. Short of the actual full episodes turning up, I thought maybe we'd had all the discoveries we were ever going to have.
I was wrong, for today Christian-Bernard Gauci got in touch to tell me he owned a TV tie-in edition of the book. Thanks to him, I am able to shed a little more light on this lost series. More pictures and my "analysis" follow under the cut.
Now, it shouldn't be too surprising that something like this exists, but if you remember the very first post I did on this series, over three and a half years ago, there is one curious loose end we've yet to tie up: the book South by South East was originally published on 14 March 1991. The TV adaptation began broadcast just twelve days later, on the 26th.
Trying to work out what exactly was going on here gave me a major headache, but eventually I think I worked it out. I don't think what Christian-Bernard has is specifically a TV tie-in edition; I think it's the only version of the book that was originally published in 1991. What I originally believed to be a 1991 edition is pictured below:
But if I'm right, then that's actually just the cover for the first Walker Books edition, which was published in 1997. I thought the Tony Ross covers were the original ones, but that is easily disproved by the first edition of the first book in the series, The Falcon's Malteser:
The book was originally published by Grafton Books, which according to Wikipedia was a subsidiary of Granada Group Ltd; at some point later it was republished by Walker. After doing some extensive research into first editions of Horowitz's various books, my conclusion is that he probably signed with Walker Books around 1994-95, and they republished many of his older works with new covers.
EDIT: As it turns out, I was correct in this thinking -- the original 1987 printing of Public Enemy Number Two was also published by Grafton, and Christian-Bernard was able to provide an image of the cover:
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My initial thought once I'd got my head around this was: was the original book of South by South East actually a novelisation of the TV series? Surely that'd explain everything? The 'about the author' page of later editions states that "South by South East was dramatized in six parts on TV", but I'm not sure that's entirely contradictory with the idea that the TV show came first and the novel was released to tie in with it.
And finally. If you look in the copyright page of a later printing of South by South East, you will see that it bears two copyright dates for the text: Text (C) 1991, 1997 Anthony Horowitz.
To explain that, I now present the first page of Christian-Bernard's 1991 printing, followed by the first two pages of my own reprint from 2002.
So, it seems that when Walker reprinted the book in 1997, there were some tweaks to the text, notably removing a line which ties the book down to a specific year. Not only that, the revised version establishes that the Brothers have just moved to Camden Town, which doesn't appear to be the case in the 1991 printing. This makes me think quite strongly that the original 1991 version was indeed a novelisation of the TV series, and the change for the 1997 version was to bring it in line with the continuity of the first two books. (If you look at your copy of The Falcon's Malteser, you will also find the copyright page gives two copyright dates for the text of 1986 and 1995; I suspect these were similar changes to the removal of the '1990' line, to date the book less, but if I manage to get hold of an '86 printing I'll let you know for sure.)
Look, that's just my theory so far. I don't know how different the '91 and '97 texts are (I decided not to ask Christian-Bernard to scan the whole book in). But the idea that the TV series came first, not the book, rather than vice-versa as I previously thought, does seem to fit the facts, and explain why the "adaptation" apparently started broadcasting less than a fortnight after the book it was based on was published -- because that's not what actually happened at all. The book just happened to be released first, but was actually written afterwards. Any further information, regardless of whether it backs up or disproves that, would be welcomed.
Enormous thanks again to Christian-Bernard, for making me aware of the existence of this at all and providing so many high-quality pictures
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