Los Angeles- In 1994, Pablo Fenjves lived in a house about sixty yards away from Nicole Brown Simpson’s residence, at 875 South Bundy Drive, in Brentwood. Fenjves was a screenwriter, and on the night of June 12th of that year he was working on a script called “The Last Bachelor,” about an amorous baseball player. Shortly before eleven o’clock, he went from his office to his bedroom, where his wife, Jai, was watching “Dynasty: The Reunion.” As the credits for the program were rolling, Fenjves heard a dog barking. The sound of the dog, Fenjves later testified, was like “a plaintive wail-sounded like a, you know, a very unhappy animal.” Seven months before the murders of Simpson and Ron Goldman, Fenjves had written a script called “Frame-Up,” which became a cable-television movie. In the opening scene, Fenjves wrote, “We hear the plaintive wail of a police siren.”

The son of Holocaust survivors from Hungary, Fenjves had followed a circuitous route to “the Bundy location,” as it was known in the O. J. Simpson trial. He grew up in Venezuela, went to college in Illinois, and ventured to Canada for a first job in journalism. In the late nineteen-seventies, he moved to Florida to write what he called “human-interest stories” for the National Enquirer. There he covered such curiosities as the world’s oldest Siamese twins (they were in their twenties and worked in a travelling freak show), but he soon decided to devote himself to screenwriting full time.

While at the Enquirer, he became close friends with a colleague at the paper, Judith Regan. They kept in touch over the years, and when Regan became a success in the publishing world, as the custodian of her own imprint at Harper-Collins, she sometimes hired Fenjves. He ghostwrote the 2003 autobiography, “Maybe You Never Cry Again,” of the comedian Bernie Mac (sample passage: “Got-damn right muh’fucka, I got a level of crazy in me you ain’t begun to see”). Last year, Regan published Fenjves’s parody of James Frey’s work, called “A Million Little Lies,” which he wrote under the name James Pinocchio. All the while, Fenjves kept up with his screenwriting, providing the story for such films as “The Devil’s Child,” which was summarized by a leading Internet movie database as “A young woman’s mother wants her to bear Satan’s child.”

Not long ago, Regan approached Fenjves with an offer to serve as O. J. Simpson’s ghostwriter for the book that would become “If I Did It”-an account that apparently included a hypothetical confession to the crime by the acquitted defendant. Fenjves accepted. “I think you’d be hard pressed to find a reporter in this country who, given the opportunity to sit down and take a confession from O. J. Simpson, no matter how oblique, would have refused to do so,” he said last week, over the telephone. “It wasn’t a moral issue with me.”

Last Monday, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp., the parent company of HarperCollins, abruptly cancelled the book, along with Regan’s broadcast interview with Simpson, both of which had been scheduled for release this week. “I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” Murdoch said in a statement.

Having lived through the first O.J. frenzy, Fenjves seemed unruffled by the recent developments. He is now divorced from Jai, but he still lives with his son in the house where he heard the barking of the unhappy Akita, named Kato. (At the trial, Fenjves and several other “dog witnesses,” as they were known, testified as part of an attempt by the prosecution to pinpoint the time of the murders.)

Fenjves believes that, in the wake of Murdoch’s decision to cancel the book, another publisher may seek to release it. (Michael Viner, whose small press enjoyed success in the first Simpson era with the works of Faye Resnick, a friend of Nicole’s, said he had no interest in “If I Did It.” “This is the equivalent of a snuff movie,” he said.)

Still, Fenjves is undaunted. “It’s going to be bigger than ever,” he said. “It’s like ‘Ulysses,’ except without the talent.”