A.I. Bezzerides, 98, a novelist-turned-screenwriter best known for post-World War II film noir classics such as Kiss Me Deadly, On Dangerous Ground and Thieves’ Highway , died January 1, 2007, after a brief illness.

Albert Isaac Bezzerides was born Aug. 9, 1908, in Samsun, Turkey. His mother was Armenian and his father a Turkish-speaking Greek. He moved to America with his parents by age 2, and they settled in Fresno, where his father worked in the fields before becoming a produce-hauling trucker.

He is perhaps most remembered for a style he applied to his best-remembered work, the 1938 novel Long Haul , which became the 1940 movie They Drive by Night , starring George Raft and Bogart. A tale of sleepless, crash-haunted drivers, it was a box-office success and became a cult classic.

Bezzerides, nicknamed Buzz, wrote or co-wrote films such as Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, Desert Fury , Sirocco and Track of the Cat.

The 1954 film Track of the Cat was certainly cryptozoological on some levels. It deals with the character Curt Bridges (Robert Mitchum) tracking down the panther that killed his brother Arthur (William Hopper). As the marketing for this film mentions, this movie was “noted for its subdued color cinematography and psychological subtexts, director William Wellman’s compelling frontier drama is set in a snowbound farmhouse in 1880s northern California. As jealousies and rivalries tear at the family members trapped inside, a deadly panther waits out in the wilderness.”

But it’s setting in northern California did not mean it could not be a metaphor for others seeking hard-to-find cats or the monsters outside.

In Illinois, in the 1960s, this film was often shown as a television movie around the times when there was a series of sightings of panthers. The encounters of the mystery cat kind would come first, and one got the sense that the local station’s programmers were leasing the film to take advantage of the flaps going on locally.

Weathermen (there were no weatherwomen back in the early 1960s on most stations) would discuss the “mystery panther” sightings with the news broadcasters. Sometimes they would tell viewers about the books they were reading and the viewers should read on the subject. This is how I first learned of Bruce S. Wright’s Ghost of North America, which focussed on the sightings of cryptid eastern panthers.