The Buchwald Stops Here

As nearly every living, breathing American must know by now, Art Buchwald--the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist and Washington Post columnist--died this last week at age 81 after a long bout with kidney failure. Although I found Buchwald quite entertaining over the years, and admired his tenaciousness in the face of terminal illness, I didn’t write anything in this blog about his passing. I just couldn’t come up with a crime-fiction angle. But I must not have looked hard enough, because Steve Lewis of Mystery*File found the connection I wanted: It seems one of the more obscure titles among the 30-plus books Buchwald wrote during his lifetime was a sort-of crime-fiction tale called A Gift From the Boys (1958).

By way of explaining the plot of Gift, Lewis quotes this paragraph from Buchwald’s New York Times obituary, in which former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee recalls the inspiration of Buchwald’s novel:

“A guy showed up in my office covered with bandages and blood and told me he was a recent graduate of Sing Sing,” Mr. Bradlee said. “He had done time for murder and was broke. He became a thorn in my side, and I got sick of him, so I sent him to Buchwald, just to get him out of my office. Art locked him up in a room and wrote a book about him, ‘A Gift From the Boys.’ The guy had been deported and his mob friends gave him a girl as a goodbye present.”

Furthermore, Wikipedia suggests, the character of the “gift” in Buchwald’s novel was based on a very memorable young actress-singer. During the late 1940s and early ’50s, the site explains, Buchwald was living in Paris, where he “was rumored and reported to have [had] a very short-lived affair with Marilyn Monroe. The affair, if it occurred at all, apparently only lasted a few weeks, and it was said that Buchwald introduced Marilyn to Judaism (to which she later converted). Marilyn is said to be the basis in part for a character in Buchwald’s novel ‘A Gift From the Boys’ ...”

That novel became the basis of the 1960 movie Surprise Package, starring Yul Brynner, Mitzi Gaynor, and Noel Coward.

Read about Lewis’ thorough investigation into Art Buchwald’s crime writer creds here.