Benchley: Shark tale

New York, Feb. 13 (Reuters): Peter Benchley, author of the bestseller Jaws that was the basis for the blockbuster movie that terrified beachgoers and kept many out of the water for years, died at his home at age 65, his family said yesterday.

Benchley, well-known for other water-based suspense fiction including The Deep and The Island, which also spawned films, died of complications from pulmonary fibrosis, his son-in-law Chris Turner said.

Benchley was diagnosed with the condition last autumn and his health had been diminishing, but his death at this time had not been expected, according to Turner.

“It was peaceful,” he said, adding that the writer’s wife Wendy and other family members were by his side at their Princeton, New Jersey, home.

In addition to the fame he achieved as a novelist, Benchley was a reporter for the Washington Post and Newsweek.

It was the 1974 novel Jaws, about a series of gruesome shark attacks that cause panic in a placid beach resort, that Benchley won the kind of fame rarely accorded any writer of popular fiction.

The book has sold more than 20 million copies.

Benchley said he had been interested in sharks since his childhood days spent on the island of Nantucket off Massachusetts. Then, in 1964, he read about a fisherman who caught a 4,550-pound great white shark off Long Island.

“I thought to myself, 'What would happen if one of those came around and wouldn't go away?' That was the seed idea of Jaws,” he said in an interview on his web site.

But he didn’t pursue the idea until 1971. By the time the book, his first novel, came out in early 1974, it had earned more than $1 million before the first press run, including $575,000 for the paperback rights and from sales to books clubs and the film's producers.