■ The big showdown, which takes place along Pacific Ocean beaches in the movie, happens at a salt-processing plant in the paperback. ■ McQ’s preferred gun, identified as an Ingram 9mm in the movie, is a Mauser in the paperback. (Let’s all agree we’re glad Wayne and Coleen Dewhurst kept their clothes on while filming.) ■ There’s a sex scene between McQ and and his aging-hooker contact Myra which, in the movie, mercifully happens offscreen. ■ The paperback McQ doesn’t live on a boat. Thus, there could be differences between what you saw on screen and in print. “McQ,” the paperback, has several glaring such instances. In those days, novelizations were sometimes written off of screenplays that weren’t yet finalized. Stroby adds that novelizations were often written by known novelists under nom de plumes. He learned that Alexander Edwards is a pseudonym for Leonore Fleischer, a prolific writer of novelizations (some under her real name). Stroby points out that novelizations flourished during a time before home video and YouTube, when opportunities to somehow relive a beloved current movie (short of buying another ticket) were rare. My friend, the novelist Wallace Stroby (“The Devil’s Share”), is an inveterate collector of novelizations, and something of an expert on same. (Cigarette-smoking likely figured in John Wayne’s 1979 death from cancer. In a cruel irony, there’s a glossy color ad for Kent cigarettes smack-dab in the center of the book. I am the proud owner of the “McQ” novelization written by “Alexander Edwards” (based on Lawrence Roman’s screenplay), which was published in 1974 by Warner Paperback Library with a cover price of $1.25. ‘McQ,’ the paperback: alternate-universe version of eventsīy Mark Voger, author, “Monster Mash: The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972″
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