The Third Man, by Graham Greene, 1949

I’ve read plenty of novels that have been turned into films and I have even read one or two novelisations, but this is a one-off: Greene was commissioned to write a screenplay and given a location in which it should be set, but before writing the script he wrote the novel on which the screenplay was going to be based. It is almost as if he couldn’t cut out this initial part of the process. In the preface to the novel he explains:

“‘The Third Man’ was never written to be read….To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story.”

That didn’t prevent him agreeing to the publication of the novel of course!