Publishers Weekly is reporting the death of publishing professional and author H.B. Gilmour on 21 June 2009, of complications from lung cancer. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1939, her first publishing job was at E.P. Dutton. She moved to Bantam Books in 1964 as an assistant to the publisher, and then proceeded to move up the ranks in many departments. She was an associate director of marketing/mass market when she left Bantam in 1992. She went to Scholastic, where she worked for three years, retiring in 1995 to be a full-time writer.
Her writing career started two decades earlier: her first novel, The Trade (Warner Books, 1973), was “an insider’s snapshot of working in the paperback business.” It sold 400,000 copies. She wrote another 50 books for adults and children, and was best known for her novelizations of the movies Saturday Night Fever and Pretty in Pink. Other novelizations include Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) and Fatal Attraction (1988).
She also wrote the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice nominee Godzilla (Scholastic, 1998), The Muppets Take Manhattan (I.J.E., Inc., 1984), Curse of Katana (1999), Spontaneously Combustible (1999), and several books based on the Clueless movie and television series. Recently, she collaborated with Randi Reisfeld in writing the T*Witches series (Scholastic, 2001–2004), which spawned two hit movies on the Disney Channel.
Gilmour is survived by her husband John Johann (they married in 1999), her daughter Jessi, two brothers, a stepbrother, four stepchildren, and four grandchildren.