Mark Hellinger

[Pulpmeister]

Mark Hellinger: 1903-1947

Next year the written works of the Broadway columnist, short-story writer and movie producer will enter the Life+70 public domain.

New Yorker Hellinger had a short but startlingly successful life. In his 20s he was taken on by the New York Daily News to write a weekly Broadway column, which he quickly turned into an outlet for short-short stories with a twist in the tail, which were very popular. He was a great admirer of O Henry.
In time he was writing as many as 7 or 8 of these approximately 1,000 word stories a week, and he kept it up for many years. In one of his stories he wrote:

"I've been writing these alleged short stories for more than 13 years. When I first started people looked at me, shook their heads, and said: 'My, my! I don't see how you do it!"

Since those early days, as nearly as I can figure it, I've banged out some six thousand of these little yarns. There was a long period when I did one of them every day in the week, and then pounded out an extra one for Sunday. That made eight short stories a week, and one just about as bad as another."

Just two collections were made of his stories, both early in the 1930s. They are out of print: "Moon over Broadway" (1931) and "The Ten Million" (1934).
The stories were syndicated widely, and reached as far afield as Australia, where they appeared in all manner of city and provincial newspapers, specially during WW2.

He also wrote sketches for the Zeigield Follies and indeed married a Ziegfield showgirl. In the late 30s came a career change. He was head-hunted by Warner Brothers and became a movie producer. He wrote the story for the James Cagney movie "The Roaring Twenties", and produced no less than seven movies, some with Humphrey Bogart. His finest (without Bogart) was "The Naked City", a semi documentary style movie filmed on the streets of his beloved New York instead of the Warner Bros backlot. He spoke the voice-over narration, and the final lines: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." He died after the completion of the movie, but before its release. He had always had problems with a bad heart, which had kept him out of the war.

It's doubtful is anyone has ever collected together all the thousands of his stories, or even has a list of titles. I have managed to collect 100 of them from Australian sources, and made my own private book.

It is also doubtful if any are still copyright in the USA. It's most unlikely that copyright was ever renewed on any of them. They went into the public domain in Life+50 countries in 1998, and are in the public domain in Australia, which didn't become a Life+70 country until many years later, and not retrospectively.

If indeed the copyrights were not renewed, there is an excellent opportunity for someone with access to US newspapers to start up a collection or two.

[GrannyGrump]

Sounds like it would be an intriguing project --- But the problem is that it is very difficult to find freely accessible downloadable texts published in the US later than 31 December 1922. Even newspapers.

In the past, I have used Library of Congress site, Trove (Australian site), Digital Library of India, and others --- LOC doesn't provide public access beyond 1922; DLI only holds books and some magazines. Most newspaper archives are paid access only. It is too bad.

[Pulpmeister]

The 100 stories I collected came from Trove, and all date to the WW2 era. (There are probably more, but 100 seemed like a nice round nmber, and about 100,000 words.) They are naturally variable in quality, but many are very snappy, and some would not be out of place in the latest Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

There is by the way a New Zealand version of Trove with on-line OCR. I have yet to browse it.

Come 2018 I will probably upload my collection of Hellinger to the Mobileread Library in epub and kindle format.