The Killing – Do you prefer the TV series or the book? Read about the adaptation and enter our competition to get both book and DVD with our giveaway

I was sent the link to a post by David Hewson where he talks about how he adapted the TV series “The Killing” into books.  I was quite curious and before I clicked on the link was thinking about the idea of taking a TV series and turning it into a book – this is the opposite of what usually happens when books are adapted for screen.  For me, a book leaves a huge amount to the reader’s imagination, whereas in TV and film you see so much on the screen.

My initial thoughts were that “bookifying” a series would be pretty easy – perhaps taking the script, mapping out the action and dialogue, then just adding a few bits of description.  

When I read Hewson’s post, it was pretty obvious that really I’d not appreciated the level of skill and craft that goes into making this kind of adaptation successful.  Far from this being a bit of jobbing writing, just filling in gaps here and there, Hewson started from scratch, by thinking carefully about the way that books and film engage differently with the audience and what this meant for creating a book of “The Killing”.  The “bookification” involved far more than just expanding on the script, but taking the whole series apart, critiquing and developing the story, characters and location before putting it back together in book form.

What I came away thinking about is the level of creativity that has gone into this process.  Hewson talks about not writing “an act of homage” to the TV series and fans, but creating “a good intelligent original story”.  This says a lot about the quality of the end product and why the books have had positive reader feedback and are solid books in their own right.

I hope I’ve not given too much away as I think the blog post about this is really worth a read.  Here’s the link – it’s not a long article and Hewson writes quite eloquently about “bookification”.

http://davidhewson.com/2013/10/06/adapting-a-tv-masterpiece-its-the-changes-that-count/

Finally, the competition! The Crime Warp is giving away The Killing books 1 and 2 plus a DVD box set of the TV series for one lucky Crime Warp reader – it could be you!  To enter, just send an e-mail with "The Killing Giveaway" in the title before midnight on 30 October to:

romancrimeblogger@gmail.com

The competition is open to all Crime Warp readers - it doesn’t matter which country you live in (remember Yvonne who won the Baldacci giveway, lives in the USA!).  I’ll draw names at random over the first weekend in November and send the bundle out to the lucky Crime Warp winner as soon as possible the following week.  I'll also reply to everyone's email to let them know whether they've won the draw or not.

Good luck!

Romancrimeblogger