Baseball Writer Picked for Godfather Sequel

Mark Winegardner, a 41-year-old novelist who directs the creative writing programme at Florida State University, has been chosen to write the next Godfather novel.

Winegardner, whose previous subjects include baseball and organised crime, has won a literary contest organised by Random House and the Puzo literary estate to continue the saga of Mario Puzo's fictional crime family, the Corleones.

In an email sent to literary agents last autumn, Random House editor Jonathan Karp wrote that he was looking for "someone who is in roughly the same place in life Mario Puzo was when he wrote The Godfather - at mid-career, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, who writes in a commanding and darkly comic omniscient voice."

Puzo, who died in 1999, had five children and $20,000 of debt when he sat down to write The Godfather, which came out in 1969. "It was really time to grow up and sell out," he later said. The Godfather went on to sell more than 20 million copies worldwide and led to a pair of classic American films.

Karp said he received more than 100 proposals, many of them quickly rejected, including one in which Michael Corleone falls in love with an American Indian activist. Two were turned down because the authors were British.

The other finalists included James Carlos Blake, author of several violent thrillers set in the American west, and Vincent Patrick, author of The Pope of Greenwich Village.

"We were looking for an original writer who would bring his own vision to Mario Puzo's mythic characters, just as Francis Ford Coppola did in the films," Karp explained. "He's got a big heart, and that's important when you have to kill a lot of characters."

Winegardner's books include the baseball portraits Prophet of the Sandlots and The Veracruz Blues, as well as Crooked River Burning, a novel about social upheaval set in Cleveland, Ohio. Like Puzo, he has a knack for writing about crime. Unlike Puzo, he is not Italian.

"I'm not a Sicilian, it's true," said Winegardner. "Not even Italian-American. I'm just a novelist with a vision of how to write this book. I am, however, German-Irish, just like Tom Hagen. And he did just fine in this world."

Random House hopes to publish Winegardner's novel, The Godfather Returns, in autumn next year. The book will continue the story of the Corleone family, picking up where the action in Mario Puzo's original 1969 novel ends.