Sidney Sheldon, a writer whose keen grasp of popular tastes fuelled a string of feverishly romantic and suspenseful books that made him a perennial bestseller with millions of copies in print around the world, died Tuesday. He was 89. Sheldon died of pneumonia at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, according to his friend and publicist Warren Cowan.A multifaceted writer, Sheldon won a screenwriting Oscar and a Tony award and had created popular television sitcoms before starting his first novel at the age of 52. But it was through the novels that he gained his overriding fame.His books usually revolved around characters of great wealth, beauty, brilliance and bedroom prowess — none of which protected them from infidelity, betrayal and indiscretion. Sheldon’s protagonists were usually women and his plots were so artfully constructed that his books are the very definition of a page-turner.He was one of the world’s most translated authors, selling more than 300 million books in 180 countries. They were printed in 51 languages, including Urdu, which is spoken in Pakistan and India, and Swahili.With his second novel, The Other Side of Midnight (1974), Sheldon broke into the blockbuster ranks; the book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 53 weeks — a record at the time.About half of his 18 novels — with such titles as Rage of Angels and Memories of Midnight — were turned into television movies or miniseries. Demand for his stories was so great that CBS executives reportedly paid Sheldon $1 million for the rights to make a miniseries of 1985’s If Tomorrow Comes before they had even read it.Some critics said his dialogue was banal and his plots were unbelievable, but many grudgingly acknowledged the author’s unusual talent at producing what the Washington Post once called “good junk reading time after time”.After Sheldon’s 1987 novel Windmills of the Gods debuted at No. 1 on bestseller lists, Charles Champlin, then The Times’ arts editor, wrote that Sheldon had found “a statistically wider audience each time, evidently satisfying everyone except most literary critics, who regard popularity and quality as incompatible”.Fans admired plotlines that were amazingly complex yet easy to follow and the colourful characters who could never be counted on to do the expected.“Sidney’s longevity secret is that he is a great storyteller, a master of the narrative tale,” his literary agent, Mort Janklow, told The Times in 2004. “Readers care about his characters, many of whom are women under threat. He has an instinctive ability to read women’s emotions”. For his part, Sheldon said: “I don’t write for critics. I write for readers.”His wry and witty script for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947) won him a 1948 Academy Award for original screenplay. The farce, which starred Cary Grant and Shirley Temple, was “uncloyed with cuteness”, the New York Times review said at the time.He was born Sidney Schechtel on February 11, 1917, in Chicago, the son of Otto, a salesman, and Natalie, a homemaker. Unable to pay the rent, the family kept moving and Sheldon attended about a dozen schools. Sheldon later remarked that his career as a writer was rather improbable considering his background.“Both my parents were third-grade dropouts,” he said. “My father never read a book in his life and I was the only one in my family to complete high school.”Sheldon won a scholarship to Northwestern University. Although he was forced to drop out halfway through his freshman year because of the financial pressures of the Depression, he recalled having an epiphany of sorts as he walked on campus one day.“I saw all these well-dressed students, and I thought that years from now, no one will ever know they existed,” he wrote years later. “I wanted to leave a mark, I wanted people to know I was here.”He made up the last name of Sheldon in the mid-1930s when he entered an amateur radio contest as an announcer.
