You Can’t Win ’Em All

Photographs of 82-year-old American actor Tony Curtis at Harrod’s in London--“frail, bald and wheelchair-bound”--have stirred author Ed Gorman (Sleeping Dogs) to remember how, back in the early 1990s, when both of them were represented by the William Morris Agency, their respective agents tried to get him to collaborate with Curtis in writing a series of mystery novels.

By then, Curtis had starred not only in such memorable pictures as Sweet Smell of Success (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958), and Some Like It Hot (1959), but he’d also headlined in a pair of TV crime-related series, The Persuaders! (which also starred Roger Moore) and the short-lived NBC Mystery Movie component McCoy. Curtis had also of course played a killer in The Boston Strangler (1968) and co-starred in the detective drama Vega$ with Robert Urich (who was later to take the lead in Spenser: For Hire). It would’ve been interesting to see how those experiences flavored the fiction he wrote with Gorman (or, rather, let Gorman ghost-write).

But such was not to be. It seems that Curtis’ 1993 autobiography “didn’t live up to publisher expectations,” Gorman notes in his blog, “so our mystery series came to naught.” Too bad. I, for one, would be interested to know what they might have produced.