Another Tie-In Writer

You can add the name of best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Herman Wouk to the list of tie-in writers. SLATTERY’S HURRICANE is something of an oddity in Wouk’s career. It’s usually not included in the lists of his novels, and I’d never even heard of it until I happened to run across a copy recently. As it turns out, this paperback original published in 1956 is a novelization of a 1949 movie based on a story by Wouk that was published in the slick magazine AMERICAN. Why there was a seven-year gap between the movie and the novelization, I have no idea. But while this is a minor work compared to Wouk’s blockbusters like THE CAINE MUTINY and THE WINDS OF WAR, it’s a highly entertaining book and well worth reading.