Sidney Sheldon – May They Never Exhume You

The other day (January 2007) I picked up a Sidney Sheldon novel, for the first time ever, and started to read it. At the back of my mind I was thinking, “Surely this guy must be dead by now?" I looked at the page opposite the title page to see when the book – titled Morning, Noon and Night had been written. It gave the date as 1995.

“So the old guy was around at least until then," I thought, and after reading a chapter or two, I amended that to: “So he died and the heirs of the estate got in a bunch of ghost writers to produce Sidney Sheldon-like offerings so they could make even more millions."

I just didn’t think the novel was that good. This particular novel was all about ugly, immoral, greedy people and their monstrous doings, without a shred of levity or irony involved. These people billions of dollars from a nasty, evil man then had lots of people killed so they could get more dollars.

Just like that.

There was at least one exhumation and a DNA test was involved (the newness of the DNA test told me the book was definitely written in the nineties.) The book just went on and on, sawing from one ghastly plot point to the next, without a snicker or a cynical aside. So this is what people read on planes in the seventies and eighties (Sheldon’s halcyon days). That explained a lot.

This was one book I absolutely could put down. I did so, with the body freshly exhumed. Sod them all, I thought, and good for Sid, foisting all this trash on the undemanding public for decades and becoming the grand master of airport schlock in the process. He must have been quite a guy.

I picked up a newspaper instead. And there it was on the obituaries page: “Died this week, Sidney Sheldon: grand master of commercial fiction". That was put rather delicately, I thought. The obituary was quite informative. More so than the Sheldon novel I had taken a crack at.

Yup, when he copped it in Palm Springs, California at 89 he was worth over 3 billion dollars. He had had three wives (consecutively). He was a manic depressive (humourlessness is obviously one of the main symptoms of bipolar syndrome) and, as Sid was morosely quoted as saying of his memoir in 2004, “It’s about my sex life. It’s one page long." Bundle of fun. But moral, very ordinary and moral, if the obituary was correct, verging on dull.

His first leap to success was as “an Oscar and Tony-winning writer of squeaky clean fare for stage and screen" the obit said. Then he started writing novels and 300 million copies later he had made his name in 51 languages. Plus the movies, TV…. you get it. Sheldon was certainly one of the world’s sloggers: he progressed from an impoverished childhood to a series of menial jobs.

Sheldon’s last book was his memoir, entitled The Other Side of Me (2004), a play on the title of one his blockbuster novels, The Other Side of Midnight. The opening line reads: “At the age of 17, working as a delivery boy at Afremow’s drugstore in Chicago was the perfect job, because it made it possible for me to steal enough sleeping pills to commit suicide".

Wonder if he finally popped them? Should we exhume him to see. Nah, you old schlockmeister, we’ll not take the story any further. Let your end be a happy one. You did it, bipolar and all. Good for you. Three billion cheers for Sid.

About the author: Justine Nofal is a journalist and bookstore owner. She is also an online bookdealer and booksite specialist. See her blog at SearchBookSites and website aBillionbooks.com

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