By Hillel Italie
The Associated Press

NEW YORK - Mark Winegardner is joining the Corleone family business: He's been selected to write the next Godfather novel.

Winegardner, a fiction writer whose previous subjects include baseball, Cleveland and organized crime, was proclaimed the winner Friday of a contest to continue the saga of Mario Puzo's fictional crime family.

The decision was made by Random House and the Puzo literary estate. The Godfather Returns is tentatively scheduled to be released in the fall of 2004.

"There are many stories left to tell," said Winegardner, 41, director of the creative writing program at Florida State University.

Enviable chance

Little known until now, he has the enviable chance to reach millions of new readers and the unenviable chance to let them down. Numerous fictional characters have been perpetuated after the author's death. There have been notable commercial successes, such as Alexandra Ripley's Scarlett, but few in the publishing industry found the posthumous books worthy of the originals.

Random House plans a "big" first printing, but some question the level of curiosity about the Corleones. While Gone With the Wind famously ends with the future of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler in doubt, few wonder about the future of the Corleone family.

Matching Puzo

In an e-mail sent last fall to literary agents, Random House editor Jonathan Karp wrote that he was looking for "someone who is in roughly the same place in life Mario Puzo was when he wrote The Godfather - at mid-career, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, who writes in a commanding and darkly comic omniscient voice."

Puzo, who died in 1999, was $20,000 in debt and supporting a wife and five children when he sat down to write The Godfather, which came out in 1969.

Winegardner's books include the baseball novel Prophet of the Sandlots and Crooked River Burning, a class conscious story set in Cleveland. Like Puzo, he has a knack for writing about crime. Unlike Puzo, he is not Italian.

"I am, however, German-Irish like (Corleone consigliere) Tom Hagen, and he did just fine in this world," Winegardner said.

The Godfather has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and led to a pair of classic American films with nine Academy Awards.