James Howe McClure

It's the birthday of the South African journalist and crime writer James Howe McClure, born in 1939 in Johannesburg. In South Africa, he worked as a crime reporter and photographer.

One night, he was doodling, letting his mind wander, and he wrote a sentence: "For an undertaker, George Abbott was a sad man." The next weekend, he put some scratch paper in the typewriter and he typed that sentence, and then he kept typing and didn't stop for exactly two weeks, when he got to the words "The End." The novel he wrote, The Steam Pig, was published in 1971. Every year, he set aside two weeks for solid writing.
-Writer's Almanac