Elliot West(I)

Elliot West, 79, novelist, screenwriter Elliot West, a brilliantly reviewed novelist of international intrigue and suspense, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. His works are collected by Boston University and have been featured by Book-Of-The-Month-Club, and purchased by Hollywood Studios. Mr. West attended Erasmus High before heading to Hollywood in his teens, where he worked in the story department of Metro Goldwyn Mayer studio. By 1943, he was an infantry rifleman in the Army, serving in four World War II campaigns across northern Europe, beginning with the invasion of France on D-Day ("walking ashore on day two" as he reminded people). He was wounded at the battle of Saint-Lo. After the war, Mr. West published his first three short stories in Esquire magazine, beginning a prolific writing career in radio, film and television. While he wrote more than 100 television scripts for such shows as "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Playhouse 90" and "Lou Grant," his primary vocation was writing novels. His first three novels, "Man Running," "The Night is a Time For Listening" and "These Lonely Victories," chronicled the complexities of the postwar world - the malignant reverberations of Nazism commingled with the escalating threat of communism - in a modern style of economic eloquence that drew comparisons with Erich Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, and Graham Greene. "The Night Is a Time for Listening," which the New York Times' Anthony Boucher called "the major spy novel of 1966" and which Yale's Robin Winks called "a classic in the field" on its 14th publication in 1985, was a Book-of-Month-Club alternate and, in Great Britain, a Book Society Choice. He also wrote one detective novel "The Killing Kind" and an unusual crime drama set in Brooklyn during the 30's call "Blanche and Nicky." Mr. West was completing his most ambitious work - an epic of World War II to be titled "No More Words" when he passed away in 2003 at the age of 79. Mr. West is survived by his wife of 55 years, Barbara; a son, Jed West of Los Angeles; a daughter, Diana Watson.