A.I. Bezzerides

A.I. Bezzerides, 98, a novelist-turned-Hollywood screenwriter best known for post-World War II film noir classics, such as

Kiss Me Deadly,

On Dangerous Ground

and

Thieves' Highway,

has died.

He died Jan. 1 at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital in Woodland Hills after a brief illness, daughter Zoe Ohl said.

Mr. Bezzerides was working as a communications engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power when his 1938 novel Long Haul was turned into They Drive by Night, a 1940 melodrama starring George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as struggling trucker brothers hauling produce.

Warner Bros. paid him $2,000 for the rights to his novel and put him under contract as a $300-a-week screenwriter.

Mr. Bezzerides' first film credit was Juke Girl, a 1942 story of migrant farmworkers starring Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan.

After leaving Warner Bros., Mr. Bezzerides, nicknamed Buzz, wrote or co-wrote such films as Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, Desert Fury, Sirocco and Track of the Cat.

He got into television in the 1950s, writing for such series as Bonanza, DuPont Theater, Rawhide, 77 Sunset Strip and The Virginian.

He was perhaps best known for Thieves' Highway, director Jules Dassin's thriller based on Bezzerides' 1949 novel; On Dangerous Ground, Nicholas Ray's 1952 crime drama; and Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich's 1955 crime thriller loosely based on the Mickey Spillane novel.

Mr. Bezzerides was born in Turkey. His mother was Armenian and his father a Turkish-speaking Greek.

He moved to America with his parents by age 2, and they settled in Fresno, Calif., where his father worked in the fields before becoming a produce-hauling trucker.

He began writing short stories while studying at the University of California at Berkeley.

In addition to his daughter Zoe, he is survived by another daughter, a son, a granddaughter and four great-grandchildren. - AP