A very sad note to bring to your attention – a Chris Powell GATA dispatch:
GATA's great friend, novelist Arthur Hailey, dies at 84 at home in Bahamas
9a ET Friday, November 26, 2004
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
The novelist Arthur Hailey, a great and long-time supporter of GATA and gold, died Wednesday. His obituary from today's edition of The New York Times is appended. We will convey our condolences and gratitude to his family.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
* * *
Novelist Arthur Hailey of 'Airport' Dies at 84
By Michelle O'Donnell
The New York Times
Friday, November 26, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/26/nyregion/26hailey.html? pagewanted=all
Arthur Hailey, the best-selling author whose exhaustively researched suspense novels like "Airport" and "Hotel" also became screen hits, died in his sleep on Wednesday at his home in the Bahamas, his agent, Nancy Stauffer, said yesterday. He was 84.
His wife, Sheila, told The Associated Press that doctors believed that he had suffered a stroke.
Mr. Hailey produced a string of best-sellers, achieving international fame in 1968 with his novel "Airport" (Doubleday), a page-turner about an airport manager's ordeal after a bomber boards a plane flown by the manager's womanizing brother-in-law. It inspired a 1970 movie starring Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin.
Other novels by Mr. Hailey include "Hotel" (Doubleday, 1965), "The Moneychangers" (Doubleday, 1975), and "Overload" (Doubleday, 1979). There are 170 million copies of his books in print, The Associated Press reported.
Critics often dismissed Mr. Hailey's success as the result of a formulaic style in which he centered a crisis on an ordinary character, then inflated the suspense by hopping among multiple related plotlines. But he was so popular with readers that his books were guaranteed to become best-sellers.
If there was a formula to Mr. Hailey's work, it was certainly in his approach to each book. Mr. Hailey, who dropped out of school at 14, would spend about a year researching a subject, followed by six months reviewing his notes, and, finally, about 18 months writing the book, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
That aggressive research -- tracking rebel guerrillas in the Peruvian jungle at age 67 for "The Evening News" (1990), or reading 27 books on the hotel industry for "Hotel" -- gave his novels a realism that appealed to readers, even as some contemporary critics complained that he used it to mask a lack of literary talent. Such criticism seemed to hardly thwart the prodigious Mr. Hailey, who twice came out of retirement to produce top sellers.
Arthur Hailey was born to working-class parents on April 5, 1920, in Luton, England. At 14, after he failed to win a scholarship that his family's poor finances required, he left school, despite a strong interest in reading and writing. "The saddest day of my life," he told The Daily Telegraph of London in 1998.
He overcame his lack of education -- and an inclination to airsickness -- to become an airman in the Royal Air Force during World War II.
After the war, disillusioned with what he saw as a socialist trend in postwar Britain, he moved to Canada, where he worked first at the Maclean-Hunter Publishing Co., then in sales.
Although he had written on the side, he remained largely unsatisfied in his work until a psychological profile suggested that his vast creativity needed another outlet, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
The turning point came in 1955, when he was aboard a flight and began daydreaming about what would happen if all the passengers and crew were incapacitated and if it were left to him to land the plane.
In a blitz of work over two weekends and five weeknights, he produced a teleplay that became "Flight Into Danger," produced to critical acclaim by the Canadian Broadcasting Co. and later sold to NBC.
"I was now able to write full time," Mr. Hailey wrote in Maclean's in 2000. "That was all I ever wanted to do."
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hailey is survived by six children: Roger, John, and Mark, from a marriage that ended in divorce; and Jane, Steven and Diane, from his second marriage.
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Arthur came to visit Reg Howe and me at a London Gold Conference several years ago. What a nice guy and a HUGE GATA supporter. During the Denver Gold Group conference he announced in a public letter that he dumped all his Barrick Gold stock because of their hedging policies and bought into the non-hedgers. A great move financially and one which received a good deal of publicity.
We shall really miss this good man who was constantly in contact with Chris Powell and me over the years.
