Bill Fitzhugh — Books and things…
UPDATE: JANUARY 28, 2026…
“The Altruist is a brilliant new musical from NoHo’s very own Group Rep. It is a funny, heartbreaking, innovative, and absolutely unmissable delight. I highly recommend it!!” (NoHoARTSDistrict.com)
Here’s some shocking news for anyone expecting a new novel from me… I wrote a play instead. More shocking still is the fact that it is being produced in Los Angeles at The Group Rep Theater. “The Altruist” is a play-with-music bordering on being an actual musical. How it came to be is a longish story beginning about 20 years ago…
The late, great playwright Leonard Gershe (“Butterflies Are Free”) read my oddball novel “The Organ Grinders” (set in the world of xenografting and featuring transgenic baboons…) and he wrote me a funny email suggesting I turn it into a musical. He even supplied some lyrics to a possible song. It was quite funny but since I’d never written a play, let alone a musical, I just chuckled and put the email in a file.
Some years later I read a story about a man diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) who decided he had a better idea than simply dying of the disease. He wanted to have surgeons remove all his organs to save the lives of others and to keep him from suffering death-by-ALS. I never saw any follow up coverage of this story (Did he contact an attorney? Did he go to court?) all I know is he died of ALS and didn’t save anyone’s life. This struck me as a fantastic story but not one I saw a humorous angle to – and since that’s my strong suit, I filed the idea away.
A few years later, California passed what was called AB-15, a physician-assisted death law. And for reasons beyond understanding, a light bulb went off for me.
I put the three ideas together and wrote “The Altruist.” A man is diagnosed with fatal disease. He decides he wants to donate all his organs instead of dying of the disease. The state says he can’t do it, so he sues the state. The public gets word of this and goes nuts. And before you can say Jesus Christ Superstar, a Broadway producer shows up wanting to buy the rights to the story so he can make a musical.
Imagine taking a John Grisham medical-legal plot and giving it to Monty Python and asking them to turn it into a musical. It’s like that. If you’re anywhere near Los Angeles in early 2026, you should come see it!
I had a first draft completed in 2016 and while I worked on rewrites I shopped it to theaters around the country to no avail. Eventually I sent a query letter to the artistic director (Doug Haverty) at The Group Rep because it was in the NoHo Arts District where, years earlier, The NoHo Arts Center, had produced “Pest Control The Musical” based on my first novel.
Doug invited me to join The Group Rep which I did. We promptly had a table reading of the play and then… Covid. Theaters shut down worldwide.
What’s a boy to do? Well, I took the opportunity to adapt the play into a novel (since Farrago Books in London had just asked to reprint my back list and asked if I was working on anything new). The result was “A Perfect Harvest” which has several characters who aren’t in the play. It also has about eight songs that were in an earlier draft of the play but which have since been cut and replaced by other songs. I’ve also renamed all the primary characters for reasons that don’t particularly matter. Keep reading if you’re curious about the book.
A PERFECT HARVEST was published on August 12, 2021. It’s the fourth and final novel in what I’m calling The Transplant Tetralogy following up on HEART SEIZURE, HUMAN RESOURCES, and THE ORGAN GRINDERS.
A tale of Cold-Blooded Altruism.
A PERFECT HARVEST is the story of Miguel Padilla who has been diagnosed with two terminal diseases. Miguel decides he has to do something meaningful before he dies. When his best friend suggests donating a kidney to someone, Miguel seizes on the idea and ultimately decides he wants to donate… everything! In other words, he says he would prefer to be ‘harvested to death’ than to die of his diseases. When news gets out about his outrageous plan, a Broadway producer shows up wanting to buy the rights to turn the story into… an opera! Okay, maybe something more like Les Miserables… Alright, fine, closer to A Little Shop of Horrors, but classy. It’s a tragicomedy in two acts with a surprising number of songs, at least for a novel.
The idea came about like this: After the publication of THE ORGAN GRINDERS, I received an email from the lyricist and playwright Leonard Gershe (“Butterflies Are Free” among other things). He said he enjoyed the book and suggested in jest that I turn it into a musical. He even wrote the lyrics for one of the songs. He further suggested rewriting some of the Great American Songbook (“Love is just around the cornea…” and “I left all my parts in San Francisco…” and “All of me, why not take, all of me…). It was all very funny but, as I had no intention of trying write a musical, I filed the email and moved on.
Some years later, I saw a story about a man in Georgia who was diagnosed with a terminal disease and who wanted to donate all of his organs to save the lives others instead of dying and taking the organs to the grave with him. (Since then, several other people in the U.S. have wanted to do this but none have been allowed.)
It was a great story but I didn’t know how to tackle it comedically until I remembered Leonard’s idea about turning THE ORGAN GRINDERS into a musical. A PERFECT HARVEST is the result. Instead of rewriting tunes from the Great American Songbook, I opted to rewrite tunes in the public domain (so, you know, it could actually be performed without any copyright issues). There are about a dozen songs in the book, all of which would be right at home in a Monty Python movie about the transplant industry. Here’s a link to order your copy today: BUY IT NOW
Speaking of THE ORGAN GRINDERS… Farrago Books is reissuing this wild and funny tale of murder, xenografting, eco-terrorism, and transgenic baboons in mid-July 2021. But it’s NOT THE ORIGINAL version; this is a newly edited version (the writer’s remix). It’s shorter and more focused than the original, somewhat sprawling, tale. In coming up with new covers for the transplant books, Farrago’s artists used up all the obvious organs (heart, lungs, kidneys) for HEART SEIZURE, HUMAN RESOURCES, and A PERFECT HARVEST. Let’s face it, after using those organs there aren’t a lot of recognizable organs left. I mean, livers? They’re just shapeless blobs. So they went with a BOLD option: the intestine!
HUMAN RESOURCES… (Book 2 of The Transplant Tetralogy)…
Jake Trapper isn’t your average organ acquisition specialist. He’s the best in L.A. But Jake has a soft spot for underdogs and his current case is a young girl from a broken home. She needs a kidney. So Jake makes a deal with a broker and gets seduced into the gray-market kidney business. When a potential organ donor is killed, Jake meets LAPD Homicide Detective Megan Densmore who enlists Jake to help with the investigation. Enter Special Agent Fuller, a Fed looking into the black market angle. He’s an oddball with an architecture fetish and an endless supply of strange tales to tell. As more bodies surface, Special Agent Fuller turns a suspicious eye toward Jake and the noose tightens, threatening to reveal Jake’s dirty little secret. Human Resources is a darkly comic thriller with heart, and lungs, and kidneys…and a botched monkey kidnapping.
HEART SEIZURE (Book 1 of The Transplant Tetralogy). This was an idea I came up with while writing THE ORGAN GRINDERS. I like to describe it as “Midnight Run” with a human heart instead of the late Charles Grodin. Here’s the pitch: Grandma Rose needs a new heart and has finally made it to the top of the transplant list. Unfortunately, the President needs the same heart, so his Chief of Staff sends the black helicopters to snatch it. Rose’s son (Spence) discovers the plot and hijacks the heart from the hijackers and the chase begins. Along the way, Spence inadvertently kidnaps a young transplant surgeon who decides to throw in with them. Meanwhile, the President’s people are trying to get the heart back while the President’s political opponents are trying to make sure whoever stole the heart gets away. It’s a wacky road trip with lots of heart.
https://farragobooks.com/book/heart-seizure/
My new friends at Farrago Books are reissuing all of my novels during the course of 2021. They started with The Assassin Bug books and asked me to write a short story that would serve as the prequel to the story of Bob Dillon and his pal, Klaus. The result was The Bug Job which you should be able to get for free if you sign up with Farrago here: https://farragobooks.com/fb-author/bill-fitzhugh/
Book 1 of The Assassin Bug series is the infamous PEST CONTROL (the only known comic suspense novel involving insects and assassins to be turned into a stage musical…). Bob Dillon just wants a truck with a big bug on top for his All Natural Pest Control company, one that employs the predacious insects known as assassin bugs. As you might imagine, things go awry and hilarity ensues as the CIA attempts to hire the man they think is The Exterminator. The world’s most dangerous assassins descend on New York, hunting Bob who they see as competition. Fortunately Klaus, the world’s best assassin, sees what’s happening and he comes to Bob’s rescue.
Book 2 of The Assassin Bug series picks up right where PEST CONTROL left off. This time the government wants Bob and Klaus and their assassin bugs to lend a hand in the War on Terror. Things do not go exactly as planned…