A. I. Bezzerides, 98, Creator of World-Weary Characters, Dies

by DOUGLAS MARTIN

A. I. Bezzerides, whose gritty, often savage depictions of long-distance truckers, weary waitresses and others of the American proletariat appeared in taut, nimble novels and grimly expressive movies inhabited by the likes of Humphrey Bogart, died on Jan. 1 in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 98.

The death was confirmed by his son, Peter.

A reviewer once said that Mr. Bezzerides wrote at the pace of a riveting hammer, a style adroitly applied to his best-remembered work, the 1938 novel “Long Haul,” which became the 1940 movie “They Drive by Night,” starring George Raft and Bogart. A tale of sleepless, crash-haunted drivers, it was a box-office success and became a cult classic.

Warner Brothers paid Mr. Bezzerides $2,000 for rights to the novel and offered him $300 a week to become a studio screenwriter, then told him that the writers Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay had already written a screenplay based on the book.

Mr. Bezzerides (pronounced bez-AIR-a-dees) swallowed hard at not being hired to adapt his own work and took the job. It beat what he called his “putrid career” as a communications engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “I had no idea whether it was guilt or conscience, or greed to swindle more stories out of me, for peanuts,” he wrote in a reprinting of his 1949 novel “Thieves’ Market.”

A famously cantankerous character, nicknamed Buzz, Mr. Bezzerides had an old-fashioned, bare-knuckles approach to life that was reflected in the typewriters scattered about his home in Woodland Hills, the ink stains on his fingers and the abandoned cars littering his front yard. Lewis Gannett, in The Herald Tribune in 1938, said his characters carried “a grudge against the world.”

In addition to “Long Haul” and “Thieves’ Market,” Mr. Bezzerides’s novels include “There Is a Happy Land” (1942). His most enduring movies are probably “Thieves’ Highway” (1949), Nicholas Ray’s 1952 thriller “On Dangerous Ground” and “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955), which the director Robert Aldrich loosely adapted from a Mickey Spillane novel.

Mr. Bezzerides cited an example of how he added suspense to a film: In a scene of a man being thrown over a cliff, he told Mr. Aldrich to focus on the men committing the crime, then keep the cameras on them as they watch the victim fall. He said this would make the viewers lean forward in their seats, as if they might catch a glimpse of the plummeting man, according to Barry Gifford, who told the story in a 1991 review of the Elmore Leonard novel “Maximum Bob” in The New York Times Book Review.

Albert Isaac Bezzerides was born Aug. 8, 1908, in Samsun, Turkey, then part of the Ottoman Empire. His father was Greek and his mother Armenian. The family fled Turkey to escape violence against Armenians when he was less than a year old.

His father first worked as a fruit peddler, and Mr. Bezzerides got a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley. He left three months before graduation. In an interview with The Times in 1938, he said he saw no point to “starving and studying,” once he realized that the engineers he worked with at a night job had forgotten their studies.

He went to work as a mechanic and driver for the trucking company his father had started and later joined the water department. He sold short stories to Scribner’s, Story, The New Republic and Esquire.

Later, while working for the studios, Variety reported he privately charged stars like Edward G. Robinson $5,000 to rewrite their dialogue. During the McCarthy period, Variety said, he had trouble getting movie work because of his known leftist sympathies, but continued to pick up television jobs. He was co-creator of “The Big Valley,” a 1960s western series starring Barbara Stanwyck.

When William Faulkner was a scriptwriter in Hollywood, Mr. Bezzerides drove him to work, played dominoes with him and, for several months, put him up in his own home.

Mr. Bezzerides’s first marriage, to Yvonne Von Gorne, ended in divorce. He is survived by their children, Peter, of Woodland Hills, and Zoe Ohl of West Los Angeles. His second wife, Silvia Richards, died in 1999. He is survived by their daughter, Rachel Morgan of Los Angeles. He is also survived by a granddaughter and four great-grandchildren.

Mr. Bezzerides was the subject of two recent documentaries, “The Long Haul of A. I. Bezzerides” (2005) and “Buzz” (2006).

Reviewers often complained about the throat-grabbing violence in some of Mr. Bezzerides’s work, but few criticized his authenticity, much less his seemingly hard-won world-weariness.

A scrap of dialogue from “Long Haul”:

“Paul’s not well,” she said. “He keeps laughing all the time.”

“Well what’s wrong with laughing?”

“There isn’t anything to laugh about.”