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.
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, one 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.
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.
Perhaps his most often-recurring character was the wannabe criminal Ruby Martinson, who starred in fourteen Hitchcock's stories between 1957 and 1968. These comedic jaunts, in which Martinson and the narrator—his weak-willed, chronically unemployed cousin Joey—would inevitably attempt an overambitious crime and never successfully profit, were especially popular in Germany and Japan, inspiring respectively the television series Parole Chicago and the film Kaitō Ruby.
Domestically, Slesar also adapted one of his Amazing Science Fiction stories, "Legacy of Terror," for the screenplay of the 1965 film Two on a Guillotine.
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.
