The ghost of Jerry Boyd is ready to go a few more rounds.

Boyd, the Los Angeles boxing “cut man” who wrote short stories as F.X. Toole, was working on a nearly 900-page manuscript when he died in 2002, some two years before part of his debut collection, “Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner,” was adapted for the screen as the Academy Award-winning “Million Dollar Baby.”

Now Boyd’s New York literary agent, Nat Sobel, has sold an edited-down version of the novel, “Pound for Pound,” to the HarperCollins imprint Ecco Press, which published “Rope Burns.” Film rights to “Pound” were sold to Albert S. Ruddy and Tom Rosenberg, who produced “Million Dollar Baby.”

“It’s about an Irish American trainer who, because of a personal tragedy, has given up on boxing,” Sobel said. “A Mexican American fighter from San Antonio seeks him out in Los Angeles and somehow persuades him to take him on.”

The novel is scheduled to be published in June 2006.