Henry Slesar - Career

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.

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)—and later worked on Rod Serling's Twilight Zone series. He also penned the screenplay for the 1965 film Two on a Guillotine, which was based on one of his stories. His short story "Examination Day" was used in the 1980s Twilight Zone revival.

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 (1956–84) 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.