Bill Adler, agent and editor, died of abdominal cancer last week at eighty-four. Adler was full of book ideas, praised for his innovative sales ideas and sometimes criticized for the light material he chose to publish.

He edited sports and political books, including letters from children to JFK, Smokey the Bear, and Santa Claus. As an agent, he represented the Reagans, Ralph Nader, Howard Cossell, and many others. (He admitted to sending friends $5,000 to get one book, The I Love New York Diet, on the bestseller list.)

If you were in the business in 1983, this is old news to you. But his obit introduced a publishing gimmick I hadn’t read before.

A lawyer Adler knew insisted he needed to take on his friend Thomas Chastain, a mystery writer. Adler balked at the idea, thinking sales from a mystery book would be modest. But he commissioned Chastain to come up with a murder mystery that readers would have to solve themselves.

What was in it for the reader? Cold, hard cash.

In the mystery, eight members of a family would be murdered or would disappear. No answers would appear in the text. One lucky reader could earn $10,000 for explaining how and why each member of the Robins family met his end.

Before the book was sold to anyone, Adler gave Chastain $10,000 of his own money to begin writing. They eventually sold Who Killed the Robins Family to William Morrow for $8,000, with the condition that Adler himself would have to pay the reader’s reward.

That’s a loss of $12,000 for Adler, but it was a smart gamble. The book hit #1 on the bestseller list and was in its seventh printing within six weeks. Adler paid for front page ads in the New York Times from the pub date through Thanksgiving. People are still solving this thing! Here’s a blog post with theories written in 2006.

Reviews agree the book is riddled with cliches, but the book campaign was a wild success. In the words of People Magazine, this was “the first book in American publishing history designed to make its creator, its author and at least one of its readers rich.”

In the People profile from 1983, Adler says (between bites of shrimp fried rice at a fancy restaurant), “It’s easier to make a deal for $100,000 than for $10,000. For $100,000, you can call up with a good idea, get somebody enthusiastic about it and make the deal right there. For $10,000 they want a proposal, they have meetings, and people find reasons to shoot it down.”

This wasn’t even his biggest success. Later he sold The Kennedy Wit to Citadel, published right after the Kennedy assassination. It sold 1.4 million copies.

Big idea people are hard to find in any industry, and it’s too bad we’ve lost Adler. But stories like his will stick around a long time.