Good Neighbor Sam

Sam Bissell is a young man with everything a young man needs: a lovely wife, an up-and-coming job in a San Francisco advertising agency, a respectable house across the Golden Gate, and a fairly elastic sense of humor. He also finds that he has acquired one thing a young man doesn't need: his wife's best college chum, an utterly ravishing divorcee who moves into the house next door, and just happens to require a male stand-in for her ex-husband during the final stages of a multimillion-dollar will settlement. By the time Sam muddles his way through a wild, wacky week of trying to be everybody's man (including his own), the funniest sex-situation comedy since Some Like It Hot and The Apartment unrolls before your eyes. (Good Neighbor Sam will also be made into a major Columbia Pictures film by David Swift.) Jack Finney's reputation as a writer whose inventive imagination is almost unmatched has long been established by the publication of such entrancing adventure stories as Five Against the House, The Bodysnatchers, and Assault on a Queen. Turning to a completely new genre in Good Neighbor Sam, he has fashioned the kind of once-in-a-decade farce that could easily laugh its way into becoming a classic.