Fred B wrote:
"I'd like to see someone reprint the Roy Huggins novel and
novellas."
From Howard Browne's "A Brief Memoir" in Incredible
Ink:
One day I got a manuscript in the mail from a guy named Roy
Huggins. In a cover letter he said, "You like the hardboiled
style--here's one I've written. You can send me the check.
P.S. My grandmother didn't like the book."
I read it, and it was great--until you got to the last
quarter of the book, where it completely fell apart. He
didn't know how to finish it and had called up a private
detective friend of his and had him solve the problem for
him! I wrote him back a seven letter, saying, in part,
"I enjoyed the book--until I got to the last quarter, where
it fell apart. Had I been writing it, I would have done A, B,
C, D" . . . right on down the line.
He sat down, rewrote the ending, sent it back to me and said,
"Now you can send me my check." I did--and paid him a cent a
word for the The Double Take, which was serialized in Mammoth
Detective. He then sent it to Wm. Morrow and they brought it
out as a hardback book in 1946, giving it the largest first
printing of a mystery that they'd ever done up to that time.
Columbia Pictures bought it, but he wouldn't sell it to them
unless they'd let him write the screenplay, and he'd never
seen a screenplay! He did write the screenplay; the movie was
made and titled I Love Trouble--a horrible picture, because
by the time everybody got through changing his script it
wasn't his script anymore. That got Roy started in
Hollywood.
Mark
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