The books

Gash on screen

Jonathan Gash wrote twenty-four Lovejoy novels between 1977 and 2008. The BBC made seventy-one episodes. Working out which of the second came from the first is harder than it sounds.

A warning about this page. The bibliography below is solid. The mapping is not. The BBC never credited source novels on screen, and neither IMDb nor TMDB records a "novel" writing credit for a single episode — every writing credit goes to the screenwriters, with Gash acknowledged only for the characters. So attributions here are marked Adapted when a published source says so and Probable when the correspondence is strong but nobody has written it down. Corrections very welcome.

As it stands: 3 adapted, 1 probable, and 20 with no known television version at all. Every one of those mappings falls in Series One. From Series Two onwards the show ran on original scripts, which is why the television Lovejoy is so much jollier than the one on the page — the books stopped being the source and became the seed.

The mapping

#	Novel	Published	Episode	Status
1	The Judas Pair Gash's first Lovejoy novel and the one the series named an episode after. Wikipedia states the episode is based on it.	1977	S1E05 · The Judas Pair	Adapted
2	Gold by Gemini (US: Gold from Gemini) Retitled for television. Wikipedia states the episode is based on this novel.	1978	S1E04 · Friends, Romans and Enemies	Adapted
3	The Grail Tree Third of the three novels collected in the Lovejoy at Large Again omnibus. No known episode.	1979	—	No known adaptation
4	Spend Game	1980	—	No known adaptation
5	The Vatican Rip	1981	—	No known adaptation
6	Firefly Gadroon The series opener's title is a near-miss on the novel's. Suggestive, but no source confirms the adaptation.	1982	S1E01 · The Firefly Cage	Probable
7	The Sleepers of Erin	1983	—	No known adaptation
8	The Gondola Scam Venice, forged Old Masters and a conspiracy around fake Renaissance art. The eighth Lovejoy novel and the basis for the Series One two-part finale.	1984	S1E09–10 · Death in Venice (Parts 1 & 2)	Adapted
9	Pearlhanger	1985	—	No known adaptation
10	The Tartan Ringers (US: The Tartan Sell)	1986	—	No known adaptation
11	Moonspender	1986	—	No known adaptation
12	Jade Woman	1988	—	No known adaptation
13	The Very Last Gambado	1989	—	No known adaptation
14	The Great California Game	1991	—	No known adaptation
15	The Lies of Fair Ladies	1992	—	No known adaptation
16	Paid and Loving Eyes	1993	—	No known adaptation
17	The Sin Within Her Smile	1993	—	No known adaptation
18	The Grace in Older Women	1995	—	No known adaptation
19	The Possessions of a Lady	1995	—	No known adaptation
20	The Rich and the Profane	1998	—	No known adaptation
21	A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair	1999	—	No known adaptation
22	Every Last Cent	2001	—	No known adaptation
23	Ten Word Game	2003	—	No known adaptation
24	Faces in the Pool	2008	—	No known adaptation

Why the gaps are the interesting part

Twenty of these novels never reached the screen — including The Grail Tree, which completes the opening trio, and The Vatican Rip, whose premise is exactly the sort of thing the series would have relished. The reason is chronology as much as choice: by the time the show hit its stride in the nineties, Gash was still publishing, and the production had long since found it easier to invent than adapt.

If you have a citable source for any attribution here — a DVD sleeve, a Radio Times listing, a contemporary review — it would improve this page considerably.