Peter Benchley: 'I've never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchin," remarked Peter Benchley, who did very well from a novel depicting a Long Island beach which was terrorised by the shark of Jaws (1974).
At heart, Benchley, who has died aged 65, knew he had been unfair to a creature which is in fact rather fussy in its eating habits, and in recent years, in print and on film, he was prolific in a campaign to show the world that human life is dependent upon the oceans and all they contain.
With Jaws made into a blockbusting movie by Steven Spielberg the following year, the novel is all too often assumed to have been a cynically manufactured work. In fact, Benchley's novel was the result of over a decade's thought.
Benchley was born in New York. His father, Nathaniel, served in the Pacific before returning to continue a diverse journalistic career bolstered by a reputation as a man about town.
Brought up in the city, Peter Benchley was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and then, true to family tradition, at Harvard, where he studied English and, on graduating in 1961, travelled the world. This gap year was described in Time and a Ticket (1964).
On return to America, after six months reserve in the Marine Corps, he spent six months at the Washington Post and was then television editor at Newsweek for three years between 1964 and 1967, followed by a stint as a speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson at the White House.
After this, as a freelance writer now married and with children to feed, he was able to turn his hand to anything. All the while he was haunted by a magazine article which he had read about a 2,064kg great white shark caught by a fisherman off Long Island in 1964. This jelled in his mind with a piece which he himself had written about life in a similar resort, and he began to wonder about the effect a shark would have upon such residents.
In 1971, he was asked by Tom Congdon, an editor at the publishers Doubleday, if he had anything in mind for a book, and he pitched this as a "long story"; he produced a hundred pages, and, with a $1,000 advance, he reworked it steadily, holing up to do so, during the winter, in a room above the Pennington Furnace Supply Co in Pennington, New Jersey, and, by summer, in an old turkey coop at Stonnington, Connecticut. Partly drawing upon childhood memories of Nantucket, and resisting any urge to Melville-style digressions, he found that he had tapped into a widespread primeval fear of the deep.
Curiously, he was stuck for a title, at first thinking of Silence in the Water, and was hardly helped by his father's chortling alternative of Who's That Noshin' On My Laig? Another idea, The Jaws of Leviathan, seemed little better - until, stripped back, it was suitably nasty, brutish and short. It befits a novel whose clipped prose hardly survives out of context, but rattles along between the covers. Some sex was added to that brew, but was cut, to advantage, from the screenplay upon which Benchley collaborated with Carl Gottlieb for the movie to be directed by Spielberg. The production was ably chronicled by Gottlieb in his book The Jaws Log, recently republished.
The movie's power is not diluted by a series of increasingly dim sequels (in which neither director nor novelist had a hand). In the meanwhile, the memorable star Robert Shaw had resurfaced, with Jacqueline Bissett, in The Deep (1977), made from Benchley's 1976 novel.
By then, with Jaws sold around the world, he was an unfazed millionaire. He continued to write of the sea in such novels as The Island (1979) and, later, in The Beast (1991), dwelt upon a discontented squid made hungry by mankind's depredations upon its habitat while White Shark (1994) took a robotic turn. Shark Trouble (2002) collected true stories and for children there was Shark Life (2005).
Although The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (1982) was unduly whimsical, Benchley showed that he could rewardingly escape the water: along with Jaws, his most enduring fiction might yet prove to be Rummies (1989, also published as Lush), about the denizens of an alcohol recovery centre, and Q-Clearance (1986), a comic take upon his stint at the White House.
Although he continued to write, and in the 1990s was responsible for a television series, Peter Benchley's Amazon, about the survivors of a plane crash, he was as much concerned for the sea itself and all it contained. Perturbed that his most famous novel had brought worldwide baiting of sharks, he was at pains to urge their conservation. "They certainly don't hold grudges," he said, which was gallant of him, for he had a couple of awkward encounters beneath the surface during the 1980s in the Bahamas.
On one occasion, they took a look at each other and hastily swam in opposite directions, while on another, Benchley dropped a stick which he was bloodily holding after being hauled a short distance by it.
Among many activities, he made a series of films for the New England Aquarium, broadcast on a daily radio show, was a force in the Environmental Defence Fund and in WildAid. He had been given a taste of the actor's life with a cameo as a television interviewer in Jaws, and popped up afterwards in a number of movies.
He is survived by his wife Wendy and their three children.
Peter Bradford Benchley: born May 8th, 1940; died February 11th, 2006