Henry Slesar (June 12, 1927 – April 2, 2002) was an American author and playwright. He is famous for his use of irony and twist endings. After reading Slesar's "M Is for the Many" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock bought it for adaptation and they began many successful collaborations. Slesar wrote hundreds of scripts for television series and soap operas, leading TV Guide to call him "the writer with the largest audience in America."

Life

Henry Slesar was born in Brooklyn, New York City. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, and he had two sisters named Doris and Lillian. After graduating from the School of Industrial Art, he found he had a talent for ad copy and design, which launched his twenty-year career as a copywriter at the age of 17. He was hired right out of school to work for the prominent advertising agency Young & Rubicam. It has been claimed that the term "coffee break" was coined by Slesar and that he was also the person behind McGraw-Hill's massively popular "The Man in the Chair" advertising campaign. After World War II, Slesar served in the United States Army Air Force, which influenced his story "The Delegate from Venus". Afterwards, he opened his own agency. Slesar was married three times: to Oenone Scott, 1953–1969; to Jan Maakestad, 1970–1974; and to Manuela Jone in 1974. He had one daughter and one son.

Pseudonyms

In addition to writing chiefly under his own name, Slesar published under several pseudonyms, particularly on early short stories. These included: Other house names Slesar employed were Jay Street, John Murray, and Lee Saber. After 1958, he wrote chiefly under his own name.

Career

In 1955, he published his first short story, "The Brat" (Imaginative Tales, September, 1955). While working as a copywriter, he published hundreds of short stories—over forty in 1957 alone—including detective fiction, science fiction, criminal stories, mysteries, and thrillers in such publications as Playboy, Imaginative Tales, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine; he was writing, on average, a story per week. Alfred Hitchcock hired him to write a number of the scenarios for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Two of his stories were adapted for the fifth season (1963-64) of Rod Serling's original Twilight Zone series, though Slesar did not write the teleplays. Much later, Slesar's short story "Examination Day" was used in the 1980s Twilight Zone revival. He wrote a series of stories about a criminal named Ruby Martinson for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine—"The First Crime of Ruby Martinson" (September, 1957), "Ruby Martinson, Ex-Con" (June, 1958), "Ruby Martinson, Cat Burglar" (June, 1959), "Ruby Martinson’s Great Fur Robbery" (May, 1962). He also penned the screenplay for the 1965 film Two on a Guillotine, which was based on one of his stories. His first novel-length work was 20 Million Miles to Earth, a 1957 novelization of the film. In 1960, his first novel, The Gray Flannel Shroud (1958), a murder mystery set in an advertising agency, earned the Edgar Allan Poe Award. In 1974, he won an Emmy Award as the head writer for CBS Daytime's The Edge of Night. His term as head writer (1968–84) was considered lengthy. Chris Schemering writes in The Soap Opera Encyclopedia, "Slesar proved a master of the serial format, creating a series of bizarre, intricate plots of offbeat characters in the spirit of the irreverent detective movies of the '40s." During that time, he was also head writer for the Procter & Gamble soap operas Somerset (on NBC Daytime) and Search for Tomorrow until John William Corrington replaced him on the latter. During the 1974–75 television season, he was the creator and head writer for Executive Suite, a CBS primetime series. He wrote mainly science-fiction scripts for the CBS Radio Mystery Theater during the 1970s. In 1983, Procter & Gamble wanted to replace him as the head writer for The Edge of Night, but ABC/ABC Daytime kept him. After his eventual replacement as head writer by Lee Sheldon, the network named him and Sam Hall the new head writers of its soap opera One Life to Live, but he left that show after only one year. He was later the head writer of the CBS Daytime series Capitol. His last novel was Murder at Heartbreak Hospital (ISBN 0-897-33463-9). It is based on his experiences as a writer for soaps. A homicide detective investigates murders on the set of a soap opera and meets a variety of amusing characters, including the bland leading man, a rapacious starlet, a couple of gay teleplay writers, and some executives. As so many of his works did, it features a twist ending. It was originally published in Europe in 1990 and the American version retains British spellings and some errors (possibly Slesar's, as when the detective's name is wrongly given in chapter three). The novel was adapted into a film, Heartbreak Hospital, by Ruedi Gerber in 2002; it starred John Shea as Milo, the leading man, Diane Venora as his wife, and Patricia Clarkson as Lottie. Other late works included "interactive mystery serial" stories for MysteryNet.com, which invited readers to contribute their ideas.

Novels

Short fiction

Plays

Radio plays

Teleplays

Most of the teleplays written for Alfred Hitchcock Presents were based on Slesar's own stories.

Adaptations

Awards and nominations

In 1960, he was awarded the Edgar Award for Best First Novel for The Gray Flannel Shroud (1958).

Death

In 2002, he died of complications due to minor elective surgery.