Vincent Patrick, an author and screenwriter "who set pins at a bowling alley, peddled Bibles door to door and helped start a mechanical engineering firm before finding critical success with his first novel, The Pope of Greenwich Village," died October 6, the New York Times reported. He was 88. Son of a Bronx pool-hall owner and numbers runner, Patrick "was raised in a milieu sprinkled with the grifters, hustlers and mobsters who would eventually become characters in his novels, which also included Family Business (1985) and Smoke Screen (1999)."
He wrote the screenplays for the film versions of both The Pope of Greenwich Village, starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts; and Family Business, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick. His son, Richard Patrick, told the Times that his father understood the compromises required to make it in Hollywood, and convinced producer Scott Rudin that he would not treat his novels as sacrosanct works of literature, telling him, "I have no compunction at all about cannibalizing my own work in order to bring it to the big screen."
During the 1950s, Patrick put himself through New York University, earning a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, after which he and a partner started a successful firm that designed, among other things, an assembly line for caskets. By his mid-30s, however, he had left engineering to write professionally. "I wasn't really happy, and I knew if I didn't begin to write something, it wasn't going to be written," he told People magazine in 1979.
While he was initially drawn to screenwriting as a means to adapt his own work, Patrick developed a successful side career as a screenwriter. Among many other projects, he contributed to the script for The Devil's Own (1997).
Patrick once told the Los Angeles Times that Hollywood was both a fabled land of opportunity and a trap: "Once you start, it's hard to get out." Discussing his novel Smoke Screen, he observed: "Yeah, this is my third novel in 20 years. But I think when you look at it, from the point of sheer craft, I've gotten better. And that's because, Hollywood or not, I write every day. It's different writing, but it all boils down to plot and characters."