George Kitchener Bulman: ex Detective Chief Inspector of the Intercity Squad, aka "Knuckles" to the criminal fraternity, recently resigned from the Met for the express purpose of pursuing a new career as a repairer of clocks. But although a man may leave a job Bulman soon discovers that an inherent sense of duty and justice is not so easily discarded. And it isn't very long before Bulman finds himself drawn into investigating the disappearance of his landlady. At the same time the unheralded arrival of one Lucy McGinty - the effervescent daughter of a murdered friend - eventually prevails upon Bulman to accept a reinvention of himself as a private investigator. This is a career choice met with deep suspicion by both old colleagues and criminal associates alike.
Ah, the good old tv adaptation novel of cherished memory. Does anyone anywhere still produce them? I am sure youngsters today would be aghast to be asked to contemplate a time when one's favourite tv show simply couldn't be summoned up or downloaded at the touch of a button. Nor could it be found endlessly circulating on a loop on some cable channel or other. There wasn't even the recourse to a dvd or (cue hysterics) something as primitive as a video tape. No my children, before the Murdoch Monolith brought enlightenment to
Homo Fourchannel Restricticus if one found a tv show one liked then unless one was favoured with a solitary repeat the original airing was all one got. If one wanted to prolong the excitement engendered by
Starsky & Hutch, or
Kojak, or, er,
Take the High Road, then one hotfooted it down to WH Smiths and jolly well snapped up the tv tie in novel.
It wasn't really so wonderfully long ago that the market was awash with such things. Nowadays the only place you tend to see them is on auction sites or at memorabilia fairs at inflated prices. One has to imagine that it was a lucrative little gig once for a jobbing writer. A couple of weeks work hunched over coffee stained scripts and a few reference photos, a dashed off draft and a handy pseudonym to hide one's embarrassment behind.
There were some writers of course who were only too happy to turn such assignments into a career and cheerfully acknowledged authorship of them. John Burke and the human conveyer belt that is Terrance Dicks most readily spring to mind. Robert Holdstock slipped out most of his commercial work anonymously but for some reason - perhaps basking in the success of
MYTHAGO WOOD - chose to own up to this one. As well he might for there is nothing here for anyone to feel ashamed about.
BULMAN is a concertinaring of three of Murray Smith's tv scripts into a surprisingly coherent and readable novel. Any faults in the storytelling originate with the scripts themselves. The three stories adapted here dont really hold up to much scrutiny and are contrived and pretty much nonsensical. In his first case Bulman is hired to discover why a businessman has been blackballed by his new employers despite presenting glowing references from his previous firm. Then Bulman is reluctantly persuaded by a racketeer called Ma Rafferty to find out how her thug of a son ended up hanged in a police cell. The answers in each case strain credibility. And yet this is of little consequence to an enjoyment of the book. The pleasure of the novel, as with the tv show, stems from dogging the plodding footsteps of the gruffly charismatic Bulman and in observing how he operates.
Truth to tell there isn't very much of the ingenious or inspirational about Bulman. He does nothing clever in the book whatsoever and is spoonfed all the information he requires by a succession of old colleagues and acquaintances. This is lazy shorthand storytelling of a sort that you probably can get away in a weekly tv series but it shows up glaringly in print. Nevertheless Bulman still remains a mesmerising creation.
Bulman is a shaved ape with pretensions of culture: an Open University student who spouts obscure poetry and yet who meets a request to be quiet in a library with a curt "How would you like the
Origins of Man stuffed down your left earhole?" His methodology is a mixture of intimidation and effected ignorance. Holdstock does a great job of invoking Don Henderson's captivating screen performance with all its mannerisms and affectations. He also succeeds in inserting, what I presume, are some good jokes of his own. My favourite was Bulman's comment confirming his resignation from the Met, "The force is no longer with us": actor Don Henderson having been in the original
Star Wars of course.
The character of Bulman actually began life in far cruder form as a minor figure in Kenneth Royce's Spider Scott novels. When the books transferred to tv as
The XYY Man Henderson was cast in the part and made such an impression that he graduated to a subsequent show called
Strangers. When that came to an end a further show was developed just around him. At the time such developments were largely confined to comedy shows;
Robin's Nest being spun out of
Man About the House for example, or
The Fenn Street Gang out of
Please Sir! The only precedent for the sort of development Bulman experienced in a drama series that I can think of is DCI Barlow played by Stratford Johns who made the leap from
Z Cars to
Softly Softly to his own eponymous series.
Bulman only lasted for a two series run of twenty episodes in the mid 80s. This seems a great pity in hindsight as it was a show with great potential and had all the makings of a natural replacement for
Minder which was in terminal decline at the time. But instead Itv elected to keep flogging their dying horse whilst experimenting with short-lived alternatives like
King & Castle.
Its sobering to reflect that everyone indeliably associated with the development of G K Bulman is now dead: creator Royce, scripter Smith, actor Henderson and novelizer Holdstock. Perhaps the time is ripe for some enterprising individual to resurrect the character. In print at least. It would probably be impossible to find anyone to eclipse Henderson's captivating portrayal. Tv being the lazy unimaginative industry that it is now they'd probably cast Ray Winstone.
And that would be plain wrong.
