Ken Follett's Amok - King of Legend

These days, Ken Follett is a successful thriller writer, but in the mid-1970s, he was just starting out as a novelist and wrote a handful of pulp crime and espionage novels – some under his own name, but most under pseudonyms after his agent advised him that it might be a good idea to keep these trashy novels separate from the (hopefully) better and more respectable novels that he would write as his career progressed.

In 1976, Futura Books – like most publishers – had been sniffing around the forthcoming remake of King Kong, which everyone assumed would be a huge box office hit along the lines of Jaws (in the end, the film made money, but nowhere near as much as everyone expected). There had already been a couple of different novelisations of the original 1933 film – sometimes credited to Edgar Wallace, though he had only written a rough draft of the film at most before his death – and despite the film remake, there seemed to be some confusion over the ownership of the story, a situation that saw two rival King Kong projects underway before the Dino De Laurentiis won out. Certainly, it wasn’t possible to copyright the idea of a giant ape, despite Laurentiis’ best efforts to keep Kong imitators (Queen Kong, The Mighty Peking Man, A*P*E*) out of cinemas with the threat of legal action. While the movie version of Queen Kong was effectively buried for decades, the novelisation by James Moffatt – better known under pseudonyms like Richard Allen, under which he penned the wildly popular Skinhead novels of the 1970s – was widely available. I guess De Laurentiis’ legal efforts were focused on rival movies.

With this legal ambiguity in mind, Futura contracted Follett to write a giant ape novel, Amok – King of Legend, which was shamelessly promoted as a Kong-alike, complete with a cover image by legendary fantasy artist Chris Achilleos that showed a giant ape atop a building battling helicopters – just as Kong would do in the new film. The ‘King of Legend’ was presumably added to the title just in case anyone failed to make the connection to King Kong.

Credited to ‘Bernard L. Ross’ (a pseudonym Follett would later use for the novelisation of Capricorn One a few years later), Amok – King of Legend turns out to be a rather different beast from Kong – like many a rip-off, the book quickly goes in its own direction, with the cover doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to reminding people of King Kong. The giant ape here is a genetically altered chimp, the result of mad scientist experiments in the African jungles. Biologist Harry Kaminsky, filmmaker Warren Macalpine, love interest Purity Lane (yes, really) and a supporting cast of shallow, egocentric and corrupt characters head off in search of the mythical beast called The Amok by local natives and have assorted scrapes with pygmies, guerillas (the human kind) and each other en route to finding the giant monster. Along the way, we get stuff like this:

The doctor was not perturbed. “It’s a common thing for young girls to fall in love with someone completely unattainable, like a film star.”

“She’s not as young as she looks”, Warren said. She’s twenty-two or -three. And a giant ape is not a pop star.”

Essentially, Amok – King of Legend is entertaining pulp fiction – not as grubby or perversely readable as the best New English Library titles, but good fun nonetheless. Follett was paid £1500 for the novel, which took him four weeks to write – not a bad deal in 1976. The book was, I recall, everywhere in the winter of 1976. Interestingly, the 1976 King Kong was never novelised, though Lorenzo Semple Jr’s screenplay was published in the US (in a version that used alternative Frank Frazetta art instead of the iconic movie poster, which instead appeared on a hefty ‘making of’ paperback). While both existing novelisations of the original Kong were reprinted, the absence of an official 1976 movie novelisation is curious.