William Harrison

I noticed the other day that author / screenwriter William Harrison died a week or so ago. Don’t know much about him except for one thing that was huge for me and my friends in the late-70s: he wrote a short story called “Roller Ball Murder”, in which the James Caan futuristic SF / sports film of 1975 was based.

That movie was big with me and my friends c. fourth grade. First of all, it was rated R, I believe, so in order to watch it you had to sneak it on your parent’s Cable TV, a relatively new feature in the Jersey suburbs of those days. In fact, I’m not quite sure when exactly I saw it (it may indeed have been a pared-down edited version on regular teevee), but I knew everything about the movie from my friends. We drew pictures of games-in-progress in art class. We discussed a kissing scene from it. We played a version of it on the blacktop playground.

A year later, I had a friend whose stepdad was a huge paperback book collector. Must’ve had a couple of hundred books on shelves in his den, where me and my chum would sit and draw and play board games. I spotted Harrison’s book Roller Ball Murder and decided I must read it. My friend plucked it off the shelf and tossed it at me. “Go ahead, no big deal,” he said.

I experienced a similar confusion as with William Nolan’s Logan’s Run – the book didn’t match up with the movie. Being just a kid still in his single digits, this greatly perplexed me. Worst of all, “Roller Ball Murder” was just a short story, the very first one in the book, fifteen or twenty pages if I remember correctly. Huh? I read halfway through the second story and realized it had absolutely no connection to the James Caan futuristic SF / sports film of 1975 which me and my buddies loved.

What the h?

So I just let it roll, so to speak. Over the years I’ve seen Rollerball perhaps three or four times. Last time probably twenty years ago, and I did not see the atrocious remake of a few years’ back. But I have never re-read the short story, first and only experienced during those warm spring days of 1978.

Now Harrison has died after a long and fruitful life. I think I owe it to the man to search out the story – and the anthology paperback it gave its name to – and give it a re-read.

It’s placed on the Acquisitions List! Maybe as a Christmas present to me from me.