Morton Freedgood was a best-selling author who wrote The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and many other detective and mystery novels under the pen name John Godey.
Biography
Freedgood was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1913 and began writing at a young age. In the 1940s, he had several articles and short stories published in Cosmopolitan, Collier's, Esquire and other magazines while working full time in the motion picture industry in New York. He held public relations and publicity posts for United Artists, 20th Century Fox, Paramount and other companies for several years before he decided to focus on his writing. His novel The Wall-to-Wall Trap was published under his own name in 1957. But he decided to use the pen name John Godey — borrowed from the name of a 19th-century women's magazine — to differentiate his crime novels from his more serious writing. As John Godey, he later achieved commercial success with the books A Thrill a Minute With Jack Albany, Never Put Off Till Tomorrow What You Can Kill Today and The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, his novel about the hijacking of a New York City subway train, was a best seller in 1973 and was made into a hit movie starring Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw in 1974. His work was later referenced in the film Reservoir Dogs and by the Beastie Boys. He died April 16, 2006 in his home in West New York, NJ.
