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Prisoner Cell Block H: The Frankie Doyle Story
224 pages, Paperback
First published July 17, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 11, 2021
This is the third book that I’ve read based on the original Prisoner TV series and I’m starting to realise something - there’s a lot of crossover in these books. From reading the other two books, the first and The Frustrations Of Vera, they are all based around the same time.
Vera and Franky have the same conversation at one point, while she is in solitary; Bea gets paroled and shoots her ex husband; Franky tries to jump off the roof. All of these and similar storylines turn up in this book and I imagine there will be similar crossovers in the other books in the series.
Franky was never a character I liked in the original series and I don’t know if a lot of the flashbacks to her early life occurred on screen. When I first started watching Prisoner, I was probably too innocent to know that Franky liked women. You can see how her only years continued to affect her later in life and much like The Frustrations of Vera, I did feel a lot of sympathy towards Franky. It does go quite crude like the first two books, and some of the language used isn’t pretty.
If you know the series well enough, you’ll know that Franky’s storyline is quite a sad one and this takes you right to the end. The final lines of the book were quite heart wrenching and as I’ve said about the previous two books, the characters are so well described that they just came to life in my head. (Although the cover of this is not how I knew Franky at all!)
It is fairly repetitive if you have read certainly the first and fourth books - I have not been able to find The Story of Karen Travers, but a lot of her story is told in these books. Just each book is told from a different perspective and there is some background/fleshing out of the characters accomplished by the authors.
As I’ve said before, this series is expensive - this was one of the actual cheaper books that I was able to get my hands on. It is worth hunting down if you are a fan of the TV series and definitely a good accompaniment.
Vera and Franky have the same conversation at one point, while she is in solitary; Bea gets paroled and shoots her ex husband; Franky tries to jump off the roof. All of these and similar storylines turn up in this book and I imagine there will be similar crossovers in the other books in the series.
Franky was never a character I liked in the original series and I don’t know if a lot of the flashbacks to her early life occurred on screen. When I first started watching Prisoner, I was probably too innocent to know that Franky liked women. You can see how her only years continued to affect her later in life and much like The Frustrations of Vera, I did feel a lot of sympathy towards Franky. It does go quite crude like the first two books, and some of the language used isn’t pretty.
If you know the series well enough, you’ll know that Franky’s storyline is quite a sad one and this takes you right to the end. The final lines of the book were quite heart wrenching and as I’ve said about the previous two books, the characters are so well described that they just came to life in my head. (Although the cover of this is not how I knew Franky at all!)
It is fairly repetitive if you have read certainly the first and fourth books - I have not been able to find The Story of Karen Travers, but a lot of her story is told in these books. Just each book is told from a different perspective and there is some background/fleshing out of the characters accomplished by the authors.
As I’ve said before, this series is expensive - this was one of the actual cheaper books that I was able to get my hands on. It is worth hunting down if you are a fan of the TV series and definitely a good accompaniment.
September 6, 2018
Interesting
April 8, 2020
this book explains frankie doyle growing up than it seems to go over the same information that the first book had which was boring because I already knew this and read it
January 27, 2012
Bladdy brilliant.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews