The Real McGraw

The New York Times reports that Harold W. McGraw, long-time head of McGraw-Hill Publishing, had died at home in Connecticut on Wednesday. He was 92-year-old. From the NYT obituary:

Self-effacing, formal in bearing and courteous in an old-fashioned way, Mr. McGraw seemed an unlikely candidate to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. He was the eldest son of the only second-generation member of the family who had never run the company. The man he worked for in the book division, Edward E. Booher, thought little of his abilities. “It just never occurred to me that Harold would one day be my boss,” Mr. Booher told Fortune magazine.

McGraw’s son, Harold W. McGraw III, is now the chief executive of McGraw-Hill. The Times obituary tells the dramatic story of a life richly lived behind the scenes in publishing, and it’s here. Meanwhile, the McGraw-Hill Web site offers a lengthy obit of their late leader. It includes this passage that seems to speak directly to some of the current confusion over electronic books:

Mr. McGraw always believed that the quality and content of the message, rather than the mode of delivery, were most important. “Although the medium might change,” he said, “content always must be determined by the same standards -- it has to be accurate, objective, authoritative, comprehensive, current, and reliable.”

Passages: Lucille Clifton, Dick Francis

Two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, winner of the National Book Award (for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000) and former poet laureate of Maryland Lucille Clifton passed away on February 13 at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. She was 73 years old.

According to one news item, Clifton was born “Thelma Lucille Sayles in Depew, N.Y., 9 miles east of Buffalo on June 27, 1936. Her father was a steelworker, and she was raised and educated in the Buffalo area before receiving a scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C.”

From The Baltimore Sun:

With a mix of profundity, earthiness and humor -- amply evident in her 11 books of poetry -- Ms. Clifton often defied conventional notions of poetic expression, but in many ways her themes were traditional, Wallace R. Peppers wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

“She writes of her family because she is greatly interested in making sense of their lives and relationships; she writes of adversity and success in the ghetto community; and she writes of her role as a poet,” according to Mr. Peppers.

Clifton was the author of 11 collections of poetry and 20 books for children. As well, her poems have appeared in over 100 anthologies.

Also this past weekend, British jockey-turned-novelist Dick Francis passed away at his home in the Cayman Islands. From the author’s Web site:

Dick Francis was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt jockeys. The winner of over 350 races, he was champion jockey in 1953/1954 and rode for HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. On his retirement from the sport he published his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, before going on to write forty-one bestselling novels, a volume of short stories (Field of 13), and the biography of Lester Piggott. He is rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest thriller writers in the world.

The Rap Sheet has more about Francis here.

Death of a Crime Writer

(Editor’s note: In the two weeks since author Robert B. Parker suddenly passed away, there’s been a significant outpouring of appreciation for what he contributed to the detective-fiction genre. Most of that has come from American writers, but not exclusively. The following tribute was penned by Jim Napier, a mystery and crime fiction critic who lives in Quebec, Canada, and contributes to the Sherbrooke Record.)

In the literary landscape of crime fiction, Robert B. Parker stood as tall and proud as a Sequoia, firm and never wavering, impossible to miss and commanding our admiration and respect. But on Monday, January 18, the 77-year-old Parker died of a heart attack while sitting at his computer in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, working on the most recent of his numerous novels. Although it came far too soon for his many readers, it was a predictable and fitting end to an impressive life.

Over the preceding 37 years, Parker had written 74 books, some award-winning, almost all of them bestsellers. The bane of creative-writing instructors, he was famous for writing without an outline or notes, even without a story line when he started a book; instead, he would begin with a simple opening premise and just see where it led him. Yet Parker was a disciplined writer, turning out five pages a day (others have said 10) for 50 weeks per year, giving his readers up to three novels annually. As he put it, “I don’t get better by taking my time. My second draft is not an improvement, so I don’t do one.” Hardly good advice for most aspiring writers, but in Parker’s case it served him well.

After a stint with the U.S. Army in Korea during the 1950s, Parker entered Boston University, where his doctoral thesis -- written in just two weeks -- explored the world of such hard-boiled crime-fiction writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. He might easily have remained an academic, but Parker chose instead to swim in the deep end of the pool: he abandoned teaching to turn out increasingly subtle yet readable novels that both developed the detective-fiction genre and entertained millions of fans for the next four decades.

Well into his writing career, Parker was approached by the administrators of the Raymond Chandler estate, who asked him to complete Poodle Springs, a manuscript left unfinished at the time of Chandler’s death in 1959. He did so (the resulting book was published in 1989), and then followed that up with an entirely new Philip Marlowe novel, Perchance to Dream (1991), a sequel to Chandler’s 1939 first novel, The Big Sleep. Both are tributes to his mentor, affectionately and impeccably written.

Although firmly in the hard-boiled camp, Parker gave the literary world a kinder, more romantic and far more complex hero than had most of the writers who came before him. His 37 tales about a Boston private eye known only as Spenser (which inspired a popular late-1980s TV series) include subplots that revolve around the P.I.’s private life, and show a gentler, nuanced figure (though he could be tough when he had to be) who treats women as women rather than as objects, and knows his way around a kitchen. And as society evolved, Parker transformed along with it: when his two sons acknowledged that they were gay, Parker found a way to explore that fact through his novels, and did so with insight and sensitivity.

While continually adding to the Spenser oeuvre, in the late 1990s Parker began to pen a couple of other series, including half a dozen stories featuring Sunny Randall, a female Boston ex-cop turned gumshoe. Although some people criticized the protagonist as merely Spenser in drag, after awhile the series took on a unique persona, and now stands on its own.

Branching out in other directions, Parker also wrote nine rather darker novels about Jesse Stone, a flawed small-town police chief based in New England, and more than a dozen standalone works.

Let’s be clear: Parker’s books don’t qualify as great literature, whatever that may be. But they are well-written, entertaining yarns that often raise important issues, which is all Parker ever sought or claimed for them. If his plots sometimes seem a bit mundane, it’s because he dealt with events involving believable people caught up in the ebb and flow of real life. And his seemingly light, breezy style often masks some tough questions more frequently found in so-called literary novels. Parker’s skillful use of a first-person viewpoint and sharp, witty dialogue recalls the best of the American hard-boileds, yet his books are unmistakably of our time. In the last Spenser novel published before his death (2009’s The Professional), the hero never uses his gun, and only uses his fists once, to avoid having a conflict escalate into gunfire. True to the hard-boiled mantra, the resolution of the conflict is by cosmic, rather than legal, means: a killer is made to pay for his crimes and justice is served, but in a way that the judicial system could never accommodate. It is a book that profoundly explores manipulation, guilt and accountability in the context of shifting social mores.

Not only did he receive two Edgar Awards for his novels, but in 2002 Parker was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, an honor he shared with such luminaries as Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, John Le Carré, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James and Stephen King. The event acknowledged his place in the pantheon of great crime writers. Yet throughout his career he remained approachable and helpful to emerging authors.

Parker’s influence in the crime-writing fraternity has been enormous. With Spenser he liberated the character of the hard-boiled protagonist from the one-dimensional portrayals of the 1930s and ’40s, and transformed him into a likable, even admirable figure: an ex-boxer with an addiction to cinnamon doughnuts, who was also an accomplished cook, a dog lover, and not least of all, a man who could admire beautiful women while staying true to his partner -- all without weakening his hero’s masculinity. This opened the door for other writers to take similar paths, adding to the richness of the genre. Parker’s impact has been acknowledged by such renowned crime writers as Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane and Harlan Coben. In a 2007 interview with Atlantic Monthly, Coben said that “When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he’s an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.”

Survived by his wife, Joan (to whom he dedicated almost all of his books), and his two sons, David and Daniel, Robert B. Parker left the literary world a legacy that, happily, will continue to shape detective fiction for a very long time.

(Author photo by John Earle. Used with permission.)

J.D. Salinger Dead at 91

Almost 60 years after the publication of his only novel, the seminal Catcher in the Rye, the mysterious and reclusive Jerome David Salinger is dead, just a few weeks after his 91st birthday. The New York Times obit is here:

Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Last year, Salinger's name came up on these pages quite often in relation to an unauthorized sequel to Catcher that generated comment around the world. We talked about it here, here and here.

Today, the world mourns Salinger, possibly as much for the novels we never saw as much as anything else: it's not as though we, as a culture, knew him as well as we would have liked.

Time magazine writes about Salinger here. The CBC is here. The National Post is here. The Guardian here. Expect many, many more still to come.

Louis Auchincloss Dies at 92

Louis Auchincloss (The House of Five Talents, Last of the Old Guard), the Wall Street lawyer and prolific author best known for his books about the waspier bits of America, died last night of complications due to stroke, according to his son, Andrew.

Born in Lawrence, New York, in 1917, Auchincloss was both well regarded and widely celebrated. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1965, received the National Medal of Arts in 2005 and held honorary degrees from New York University, Pace University and The University of the South.

From The New York Times:

“Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “Yet such is the vastness of our society and the remoteness of academics and book chatters from actual power that those who should be most in this writer’s debt have no idea what a useful service he renders us by revealing and, in some ways, by betraying his class.”

More from the Times here.

Paul Quarrington Passes Away at 56

Award-winning Canadian author (Whale Music, The Spirit Cabinet) and musician died on Thursday of lung cancer. He was 56.

From his Web site:

In May 2009, Paul was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. From May 2009 to January 2010 he channeled his prodigious creative energy into the completion of many artistic endeavours, included his first solo CD release, the third PorkBellys Futures CD release, his memoir for Greystone Books, “Cigar Box Banjo,” the documentary film inspired by the book, “Life in Music”, and much more.

His brave battle ended on January 21, 2010. He passed peacefully at home in Toronto in the early hours surrounded by friends and family. It is comforting to know that he didn’t suffer; he was calm and quiet holding hands with those who were closest to him.

Contributions to the Quarrington Arts Society are being accepted in his honor.

Love Story Author, Erich Segal, Dead at 72

The creator of the iconic 1970s book and film has died almost exactly 40 years Love Story’s debut. According to The New York Times, Erich Segal, who had suffered with Parkinson’s disease for 25 years, died of a heart attack at home in London on the 17th of January.

At his funeral, his daughter, the writer Francesca Segal, delivered a eulogy in which she said her father had “fought to breathe, fought to live, every second of the last 30 years of illness with such mind-blowing obduracy, is a testament to the core of who he was -- a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity. He was the most dogged man any of us will ever know.”

From The Guardian:

Segal wrote the bestselling book about love and bereavement, which became a chart-topping film, in 1969 when he was 32 and a classics professor at Harvard. As its most famous line, "love means never having to say you're sorry", entered popular culture, Segal became a celebrity and regular on TV shows, as well as a commentator on the Olympic games for the ABC network.

The Passing of Parker

Robert B. Parker, the Boston novelist who was highly influential in popularizing the detective fiction genre over the last four decades, died yesterday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 77 years old. The cause of his passing is being attributed to a heart attack, which took him in the midst of working at his desk.

Parker introduced his most famous series protagonist, Beantown private eye Spenser, in The Godwulf Manuscript (1973). He went on to pen more than 60 books, in at least two genres and with several lead players.

The Rap Sheet has the full story here. And there are links to many other Parker tributes at Sarah Weinman’s blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

Poet P.K. Page Dies at 93

The Canadian literary community is saddened today by news that one of the country’s best-loved poets has died. From CBC News:

Canadian literary grand dame P.K. Page, long renowned for her poetry and other writing, has died at the age of 93.

Page died early Thursday morning at her home in Victoria, CBC News has confirmed.

A companion of the Order of Canada, the British-born, Canadian-reared Patricia Kathleen Page was considered among Canada's most esteemed writers.

January Magazine most recently discussed Page’s work last year when contributing editor Monica Stark reviewed Page’s children’s chapbook, The Old Woman and the Hen (Porcupine’s Quill). “It’s a tiny, special, lovely little book,” Stark wrote, “clearly intended to be cherished.”

Page’s official Web site is here. Wikipedia includes extensive information on her here. The portrait of Page at left was done in 1947 by the painter, graphic artist and film producer Alma Duncan (1917–2004). It is held by Library and Archives Canada and can be seen online here.

Fantasy Author Robert Holdstock Dead at 61

Well known and loved fantasy author, Robert Holdstock died today. His Web site reports that he had been in intensive care since November 18th, when he collapsed due to an E. coli infection. From the Web site:

Rob was one of the best fantasy writers of his generation, and a man with a huge appetite for life. There was nothing he liked better than the company of good friends, a cracking meal, drink and laughter. His departure at only 61 years old is a tremendous loss.

Holdstock was first published when he was just 20. The short story, “Pauper’s Plot,” was published by New Worlds magazine. His first novel, Eye Among the Blind, was published in 1976. Though he created a large and critically acclaimed body of work throughout his career, he is best known for the Mythago Wood cycle of novels. The first book in the series, Mythago Wood, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1985. The most recent book in the Mythago Wood Cycle, Avilion, was published in July of this year.

Comedian Soupy Sales Dead at 83

The Rap Sheet reports that pie-throwing comedian Soupy Sales passed away yesterday:

Another character from my boyhood has passed on to that great entertainment venue in the sky: Milton Supman, better known as the “rubber-faced” comedian and TV personality Soupy Sales, has died at age 83 in New York City.

Sales was also the author of several books, including My Life & Zany Times and Stop Me If You Heard It, both from M. Evans & Company.

J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet reports on Sales’ passing here.

Stuart M. Kaminsky Dies at 75

We were saddened to read of the passing of noted mystery author Stuart M. Kaminsky last Friday. On The Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce who interviewed Kaminsky for January Magazine back in 2002, had this to say:

“A very warm, witty, wonderful guy, and a terrific writer” is how fellow author Max Allan Collins remembers Kaminsky. I shan’t disagree. Although I never actually met Kaminsky, I had many opportunities to communicate with him via letters and e-mail, not only in association with that long-ago January Magazine exchange, but also having to do with an earlier profile I did of Toby Peters for Stephen Smoke’s now-forgotten Mystery Magazine and requests for comments on a number of subjects (including “overlooked ... or underappreciated” crime novels). He was never less than generous with his time and expertise in this field.

I think I’ve read all but a small handful of Kaminsky’s novels. He was a confident, comfortable stylist with a taste for quirky and humorous, but never less than believable characters, people revealed by their responses to challenging circumstances. I looked forward to reading each new book born of Kaminsky’s imagination. I can now look forward only to re-reading them in his profound absence.

Pierce’s lengthy tribute -- with many appropriate links -- is here. January’s interview with Kaminsky is here.

Author Lyn Hamilton Dies at 65

Canadian mystery novelist Lyn Hamilton died on September 10 after a battle with cancer. The Rap Sheet remembered Lyn yesterday:

After many years of working in the communications field, Hamilton began writing fiction at age 50. She eventually penned 11 books featuring Toronto antiques dealer Lara McClintoch, “who travels the world in search of the rare and beautiful for her shop, finding more than a little murder and mayhem along the way. Each book in the series is set in a different and exotic location and calls upon the past in an unusual way.” Those novels blended Hamilton’s fondness for thriller stories with her interest in archeology. Her most recent McClintoch novel was The Chinese Alchemist (2007).

Read more about Hamilton here.

Western Writer Elmer Kelton Dead at 83

Born at Horse Camp on the Five Wells Ranch in 1926, American journalist and novelist Elmer Kelton walked the walk when he described the American west he wrote about in over 40 novels and 60 books over a full half century.

Kelton’s wife of 62 years, Ann, told The New York Times that her husband died August 22nd of “various causes.” The author’s health had been deteriorating throughout the year, even preventing him from completing the novel he had in progress.

From The New York Times’ obituary:

For example, in “The Good Old Boys” (1978), a novel set in 1906 that was later made into a television movie directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Hewey Calloway, an aging cowboy with a self-destructive streak, grapples with the onset of modern times, as automobiles and 20th-century thinking encroach on the Texas frontier.

“I have often been asked how my characters differ from the traditional, larger-than-life heroes of the mythical West,” Mr. Kelton said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News in 2007. “ ‘Those,’ I reply, ‘are seven feet tall and invincible. My characters are 5-8 and nervous.’ ”

You can read that obituary here. The “Kelton Story” is here. A family written obituary appeared in Kelton’s local newspaper, The San Angelo Standard-Times, is here.

Dear Diarist: Dominick Dunne Dead at 83

Vanity Fair special correspondent, victims rights activist and bestselling author: just three of the titles that could easily be hung on Dominick Dunne. Dunne died at home in Manhattan today. From the Vanity Fair Web site:

The cause of death was bladder cancer, said his son Griffin Dunne.

Dunne -- who joined Vanity Fair in 1984 as a contributing editor and was named special correspondent in 1993 -- famously covered the trials of O. J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Michael Skakel, William Kennedy Smith, and Phil Spector, as well as the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He wrote memorable profiles on numerous personalities, among them Imelda Marcos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elizabeth Taylor, Claus von Bülow, Adnan Khashoggi, and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. His monthly column provided a glimpse inside high society, and captivated readers.

His first article for the magazine appeared in March 1984 -- an account of the trial of the man who murdered his daughter Dominique. Throughout his life, Dunne was a vocal advocate for victims’ rights.

The Vanity Fair piece is here. January Magazine’s 2001 interview with Dunne is here.

“A Leader, a Statesman, and a Hero”

It was sad to wake up this morning to news that Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) has died at age 77. His demise comes as no great surprise; he was diagnosed last spring with brain cancer, and has not been able to cast a vote in the Senate for months. Still, the loss of this great “liberal lion” of Congress -- the brother of an assassinated president, the brother of a slain presidential candidate, and once a presidential contender himself, in 1980 -- is profound. “An important chapter in our history has come to an end,” President Barack Obama said in a statement this morning. “Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States Senator of our time.”

I won’t try and outdo others in heaping praise upon Kennedy. He was a man who had his faults, like all humans (except, I guess, those Republican’ts who insist that their political ascendancy was ordained by God), but he spent five decades strongly backing civil-rights legislation, worker-pay improvements, and efforts to make health care affordable and available to all Americans. Let me just direct you to some news items I think are valuable in understanding Ted Kennedy’s remarkable legacy:

• From Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly: “Kennedy’s Unfinished Work,” “‘One of the Most Accomplished Americans Ever to Serve Our Democracy,’” and “Quote of the Day.”

• From The New York Times: “Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies,” by John M. Broder; “Q&A About Senator Kennedy,”
by Adam Clymer

• From The Washington Post: “End of an American Epoch,” by Joe Holley; “Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-2009.”

• From Salon: “Remembering Teddy,” by Vincent Rossmeier; “ Ted Kennedy, Champion of Social Justice,” by Robert Reich; “The Senator’s Last Battle,” by Joan Walsh; “A Man of History,” by Vincent Rossmeier; “Emotional Biden Remembers Kennedy.”

• And from Slate: “Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009): The Kennedy Who Most Changed America,” by Timothy Noah.

Budd Schulberg Dead at 95

Veteran screenwriter and bestselling author Budd Schulberg died Wednesday afternoon. His wife, Betsy, has said he died of natural causes at a hospital near his Long Island home.

The son of studio head B.P. Schulberg, Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel, See Sammy Run, created a stir in film industry circles when it was first published. Schulberg was best known for the screenplay for the 1954 film, On the Waterfront. The movie starred Marlon Brando who won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance. On the Waterfront received seven other Oscars and is widely considered to be one of the most important films ever made. From The Los Angeles Times:

Budd Schulberg, who exposed the dark side of American ambition in his acclaimed Hollywood novel “What Makes Sammy Run?"” and won an Academy Award for his screenplay depicting the mob-controlled longshoremen’s union in the film classic “On the Waterfront," has died. He was 95.

Schulberg, a one-time Communist Party member who was ostracized in Hollywood after naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s, died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., his wife, Betsy, told the Associated Press.

The Los Angeles Times piece is here. The New York Times Arts Blog chimes in here, but promises that an obit will follow shortly.

Angela’s Ashes Author Dead at 78

Frank McCourt died in a Manhattan hospice on Sunday after a battle with meningitis and skin cancer. The outpouring of love for the Irish-American author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Angela’s Ashes in 1997 has been intense. Time’s Lev Grossman takes a long and luscious look at the author’s life here:

McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 -- he would later, much later, memorably describe the scene of his conception in his memoir -- but he grew up in Ireland. His parents were both Irish immigrants, and they moved back there, to Limerick, in an effort to stay ahead of McCourt's father's drinking problem. They didn't succeed. Malachy, Frank's father, worked intermittently as a laborer, but he drank constantly.

The Boston Globe’s Kevin Cullen recalled an early interview with the author:

A few hours after Frank McCourt learned he had won the Pulitzer Prize for “Angela's Ashes,” I went to see him at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, where he was staying.

In what turned out to be one of his last moments of anonymity, he was sitting in a corner booth in one of the hotel lounges with his wife Ellen, who used to work at WGBH, less than a mile away.

"Well," he said laconically, "I suppose I'm the Mick of the moment." Material success always puzzled Frank McCourt. He did not go through life courting it. Hell, if he did, he wouldn't have been a teacher. Because while everybody today mourns Frank McCourt the writer, he always thought of himself as Frank McCourt the teacher.

The Guardian -- generally a sure bet in the obit department -- comes in on a silly note:

Frank McCourt, whose evocative tales of a poverty-stricken Irish childhood enthralled readers around the world and sparked the genre of “misery lit”, has died of cancer in a Manhattan hospice aged 78.

Though there’s much McCourt can be credited with, “misery lit” is not one of those things: if there is such a thing, it’s as old as literature itself. Still, the balance of The Guardian’s coverage does a good job with all the bases and even includes a short excerpt of Angela’s Ashes.

The New York Times, meanwhile, not only offers up a very detailed obituary today, but it also asks readers to contribute their memories of the well-loved author. “Were you a student of Mr. McCourt’s?” the Times asks. “Or a fan of his work? Share your memories of the teacher-turned-Pulitzer Prize-winning author.” At time of this writing, nearly 300 readers had done so. That piece is here.

And That’s the Way It Is

Iconic newsman Walter Cronkite died today. He was 92 years old. From The New York Times:

“My father Walter Cronkite died,” his son Chip said just before 8 p.m. Eastern. CBS interrupted prime time programming to show an obituary for the man who defined the network’s news division.

Mr. Cronkite anchored the “CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981, at a time when television became the dominant medium of the United States. He figuratively held the hand of the American public during the civil rights movement, the space race, the Vietnam war, and the impeachment of Richard Nixon. During his tenure, network newscasts were expanded to 30 minutes from 15.

We bow our heads. And an era passes.

“The Day the 70s Died”

Will June 25th be remembered as the day the 70s died? That’s what some social-media mavens were asking yesterday when two 1970s pop-culture icons passed away within hours of each other.

Former Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett, 62, died of complications resulting from the cancer she had been publicly battling for some time, while 1970s child star -- and publicly off-kilter adult -- Michael Jackson, 50, died of cardiac arrest, the direct result of an intentionally lethal drug overdose.

You don’t need to go far to find news stories on either icon. Or both. Of all the ones we saw, though, the most relevant to January’s readership (aside, of course, from J. Kingston Pierce’s delicate send-off of Fawcett, “An Angel Gets Her Wings”) was Amy Wallace’s piece on Fawcett for The Daily Beast. Wallace’s piece illustrates Fawcett’s little known “brainy side” as well as the star’s friendship with the writer Ayn Rand.

A recent e-mail exchange with the late Farrah Fawcett reveals the unlikely friendship between the Charlie's Angels star and the novelist Ayn Rand, who helped the actress understand her place in culture -- and longed to cast her in a TV version of Atlas Shrugged.

Wallace tells us several things “almost no one knew about Fawcett”:

1) Fawcett and the writer Ayn Rand shared a birthday, February 2.

2) Rand, the inventor of the philosophical system called Objectivism, never missed an episode of Charlie’s Angels. She was such a Fawcett fan, in fact, that she sought to cast the actress as the lead in a planned TV miniseries version of her best-known work, the gargantuan novel Atlas Shrugged. (NBC later scrapped the project).

3) Rand, perhaps better than anyone else, helped Fawcett understand her place in American culture.

Marilyn French Dead at 79

American author and feminist Marilyn French (The Women’s Room, A Season in Hell) died on Saturday. She was 79. From French’s New York Times obituary:

With steely views about the treatment of woman and a gift for expressing them on the printed page, Ms. French transformed herself from an academic who quietly bristled at the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era to a leading, if controversial, opinionmaker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. “My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world,” she once declared.

Her first and best-known novel, “The Women’s Room,” released in 1977, traces a submissive housewife’s journey of self-discovery following her divorce in the 1950s, describing the lives of Mira Ward and her friends in graduate school at Harvard as they grow into independent women. The book was partly informed by her own experience of leaving an unhappy marriage and helping her daughter deal with the aftermath of being raped. Women all over the world seized on the book, which sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages.

The Women’s Room was the bestselling feminist novel of all time.

The New York Times piece is here. The Telegraph obituary is here.

JG Ballard Dead at 78

JG Ballard, author of over a dozen novels including Crash, Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes died Sunday morning after a long illness, according to BBC News:

His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill “for several years” and had died on Sunday morning.

Despite being referred to as a science fiction writer, Ballard said his books were instead “picturing the psychology of the future.”

His most acclaimed novel was Empire of the Sun, based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China.

The author of 15 novels and scores of short stories, Ballard grew up amongst the ex-patriot community in Shanghai.

During World War II, at the age of 12, he was interned for three years in a camp run by the Japanese.

He later moved to Britain and in the early 1960s became a full-time writer.

According to Wikipedia, it was while the young Ballard was stationed in Canada for RAF flight training that he discovered the genre in which much of his work would be enfolded:

In 1953 Ballard joined the RAF and was sent to the RCAF flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. There he discovered science fiction in American magazines. While in the RAF, he also wrote his first science fiction story, “Passport to Eternity,” as a pastiche and summary of the American science fiction he had read.

Wikipedia also reports that Ballard’s work had a “notable influence on popular music”:

...where his work has been used as a basis for lyrical imagery, particularly amongst British post-punk groups. Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx, various songs by Joy Division (most famously “The Atrocity Exhibition” from Closer), the song “Down in the Park” by Gary Numan and “Warm Leatherette” by The Normal. Songwriters Trevor Horn and Bruce Woolley credit Ballard’s story, “The Sound-Sweep,” with inspiring The Buggles' hit, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and Buggles’ second album included a song entitled “Vermillion Sands.” The 1978 post-punk band Comsat Angels took their name from one of Ballard’s short stories.

Q&Q Editor Derek Weiler Dies

The Canadian literary community was saddened today at news of the loss of Derek Weiler, editor of Quill & Quire and just 40 years old. Though the Canadian press was aflutter with the news, the most touching tribute I’ve come across thus far came from Globe & Mail’s Martin Levin, who offered a heartfelt essay on the Globe’s blog:

I’m in shock. This morning, a colleague came to my desk, teary-eyed, and told me that Derek Weiler died yesterday. Many of you reading this will have known Derek very well. He was, after all, the much-respected editor of Quill & Quire, which functions as Canada's books-industry bible, the equivalent of Publisher’s Weekly in the United States, though doing much more with many fewer resources.

The balance of Levin’s essay is on the Globe blog here. An obituary as well as a summary of the sad news is on the Quill & Quire blog here.

Weiler’s trenchant voice and passion for his subject and will be sadly missed.

John Hope Franklin Dies at 94

Pioneering historian John Hope Franklin died yesterday. He was 94.

Among his many accomplishments, Franklin was Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995. He is best known as the author of From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. The book was first published by Knopf in 1947 and has never been out of print. It is currently in its eighth edition and has sold over three million copies.

Duke University has prepared an online memorial to Dr. Franklin:

“John Hope Franklin lived for nearly a century and helped define that century,” said Duke President Richard H. Brodhead. “A towering historian, he led the recognition that African-American history and American history are one. With his grasp of the past, he spent a lifetime building a future of inclusiveness, fairness and equality. Duke has lost a great citizen and a great friend.”

The same Web page says that there will be “a celebration of his life and of his late wife Aurelia Franklin at 11 a.m. June 11 in Duke Chapel in honor of their 69th wedding anniversary.”

That memorial is here.

Passages: James Purdy

James Purdy (Malcolm, The Nephew) died a few weeks ago. He was 94. His age only came to light after his death on March 13th. Purdy was born in 1914 but, according to The Telegraph, he “habitually cited 1923.” From The New York Times:

James Purdy, whose dark, often savagely comic fiction evoked a psychic American landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation, died Friday in Englewood, N.J. He was 94 and lived in Brooklyn Heights.

His death was confirmed by John Uecker, a friend and assistant. Wayward and unclassifiable, Mr. Purdy, the author of the novels “Malcolm” and “The Nephew,” labored at the margins of the literary mainstream, inspiring veneration or disdain. His nearly 20 novels and numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with ornate, florid locutions, and the hallucinatory quality of his often degraded scenes.

Tip of the hat to The Book Depository, who brought Purdy’s passing to our attention.

Jane Mayhall Dead at 90

The wonderful American poet Jane Mayhall passed away yesterday.

Mayhall was born on May 10, 1918, in Louisville, Kentucky. Over the years, her work had appeared in The Yale Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and other publications. Her most recent collection, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2004.

Knopf’s Nicholas Latimer sent along the news of Mayhill’s passing as well as the poem “Never Apologize, Never Explain,” which appears in her last collection. Here’s a stanza from that poem:

On the contrary, always apologize and explain,
in the terror-white veracity, down to the essence bone,
tenaciously follow the long road. Be
capable and Voltairean, discreet of form and substance, tell it
like it is, don't gloss over
in silent splendor.

Oscar and Pulitzer-Winning Writer Dies at 92

Horton Foote, the celebrated writer for stage and screen, died Wednesday afternoon at his daughter’s home in Hartford, Connecticut. Though Foote maintained homes in California and Texas, he had been living with his daughter while adapting his nine-play Orphans’ Home Cycle into a three-part production to be staged next fall.

According to The New York Times’ Art Beat blog, Broadway will honor Foote this evening:

The marquees of Broadway theaters will be dimmed on Thursday for one minute at 8:00pm in tribute to Horton Foote, who died on Wednesday. Mr. Foote’s most recent Broadway play was “Dividing the Estate,” the dysfunctional family portrait that ran at the Booth Theater from Nov. 20 through Jan 4.

The Theater section of the Times offered up an affectionate appraisal of Foote’s life by Ben Brantley, the paper’s chief theater critic:

Throughout his seven decades as a writer -- during which he received two Academy Awards for screenplays (for “Tender Mercies” and his adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”) and a Pulitzer Prize (for his 1995 drama “The Young Man From Atlanta”) -- Mr. Foote was treated with condescension by some critics, who saw him as a sweet little miniaturist, a comforting chronicler of small lives. Such assessments are absurdly off base, but they are indicative of the paradoxical (and, I would argue, singular) nature of Mr. Foote’s work.

In Foote’s Times obituary, Wilborn Hampton pulled a great quote from Foote:

“I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing,” he said in a 1999 interview. “I write almost every day. I’d write plays even if they were never done again. You’re at the mercy of whatever talent you have.”

Minnesotan Bill Holm Passes Away at 65

Minnesota poet and author Bill Holm, the “Polar Bear of American Literature,” and the author of The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere On Earth, died Wednesday. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

He was larger than life, a man of letters, a man of the prairie, a man of the world. Poet and essayist Bill Holm collapsed Tuesday after getting off a plane in Sioux Falls, S.D., and died Wednesday night of complications from pneumonia. He was 65.

Six-and-a-half-feet tall and bearded, with a passion for justice, and a booming, generous personality, Holm was the author of "Coming Home Crazy," "Boxelder Bug Variations," and, perhaps his most beloved book, "The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere On Earth," his homage to his hometown of Minneota, in western Minnesota near Marshall.

The full story is here. Holm’s Web site is here.

Philip Jose Farmer Dies at 91

Science fiction great Philip Jose Farmer died yesterday morning “peacefully in his sleep,” according to his official Web site, just weeks after his 91st birthday. From CNN:

Farmer was known for his science-fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. He was 91.

The Peoria, Indiana, native’s most popular work was his "Riverworld" series, written in the 1970s.

Joe Lansdale, a critic, writer and friend of Farmer’s, credited Farmer with changing the face of science fiction.

“I just can’t begin to tell you how important he is to the field as well as other fields,” Lansdale said.

Critics said Farmer was the first author to address adult sexual themes in science-fiction novels.

Jonathan Strahan, an editor and critic for Locus magazine, said Farmer treated sex seriously, not in a juvenile manner or for cheap thrills.

“It wasn’t pornography and it wasn’t just about the sex of it,” Strahan said. “It was about the sexuality of people in an interesting and intelligent way.”

Graham Sleight, who wrote eloquently about Farmer’s work for his “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” column early in 2008, had this to say on the Locus blog:

All the weird stuff he loved to pack into his stories -- Tarzan, Richard Burton, sex, Joyce, loopy epistemology, historical trivia, flat earths -- made it a brew like nothing else.

From Farmer’s Web site:

He will be missed greatly by his wife Bette, his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends and countless fans around the world.

January 26, 1918 - February 25, 2009. R.I.P.

Canadian Poet Nellie McClung Dead at 80

Nellie McClung, a talented and eccentric Canadian poet, died recently in Vancouver. She would have been 80 on March 21st.

McClung was the granddaughter of the Canadian feminist of the same name who played such an important role in fighting for women’s right to vote and who was also the first woman to serve on the Canadian legislature.

McClung’s best known work is probably My Sex is Ice Cream (Ekstasis Editions), a 1996 book of poems based on the life of McClung’s hero, Marilyn Monroe. Her most recent book was I Hate Wives! a “short collection of terse verse and aphorisms on sexual politics” published by Ekstasis Editions in 2003.

McClung died of conditions resulting from lung cancer at Mount St. Joseph’s Hospital in Vancouver on February 13th.

Updike at Rest

Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist John Updike, who became famous not only as a result of his remarkable writing but because he exposed “suburban adultery” in his fiction, has died of lung cancer. He was 76 years old.

As the Associated Press reports today:

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir “Self-Consciousness” and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, releasing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest,” and two National Book Awards. ...

His settings ranged from the court of “Hamlet” to postcolonial Africa, but his literary home was the American suburb. Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by “penny-pinching parents,” united by “the patriotic cohesion of World War II” and blessed by a “disproportionate share of the world’s resources,” the postwar, suburban boom of “idealistic careers and early marriages.”

He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation’s confusion over the civil rights and women’s movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War.

Updike was the author most recently of The Widows of Eastwick, which reached U.S. bookstores in October of last year and was a sequel to his much-talked-about 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick. His other works include Couples (1968, which inspired Time’s April 26, 1968, cover story on “The Adulterous Society”), Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), The Early Stories: 1953-1975 (2003) and the more controversial Terrorist (1976).

READ MORE: “John Updike Dies Aged 76,” by Jason Szep (Reuters); “One Reader Who Won’t Be Reading My Blog Today,” by David Terrenoire (A Dark Planet); “John Updike Dies,” by Patti Abbott (Pattinase); “John Updike’s Life and Work,” by David Lipsky (Salon); “John Updike, 1932-2009,” by David Hudson (The Daily, IFC).

Westlake Dead at 75

It’s too early in the year for me to be writing something like this. Yet here we are.

Bestsellling mystery author Donald Westlake collapsed on his way out to New Year’s dinner, according to The New York Times:

Donald Edwin Westlake was born to Lillian and Albert Westlake on July 12, 1933, in Brooklyn, but raised in Yonkers and Albany. He attended a number of colleges in New York State, but did not graduate from any of them. He married his current wife, Abigail, in 1979, and the couple made their home in Gallatin, N.Y. He was previously married to Nedra Henderson and Sandra Kalb. He is survived by his wife; his four sons by his previous marriage, Sean Westlake, Steven Westlake, Paul Westlake, Tod Westlake; two step-daughters, Adrienne Adams and Katherine Adams; a step-son, Patrick Adams; his sister, Virginia; and four grandchildren.

The Rap Sheet remembers Westlake:

Known best for comic mysteries written under his own name and the harder-boiled Parker novels under the pseudonym “Richard Stark,” Westlake had published over 100 novels during a career that spanned half a century. Westlake was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1993.

At her Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog, Sarah Weinman is collecting Westlake tributes until week’s end:

Suffice to say this is NOT the way to ring in 2009. So through the end of the week, the tributes will be collected and the floor’s yours to pay tribute to someone truly beyond measure in the mystery genre.

Those We Lost in 2008

For many in the community of letters, the loss of David Foster Wallace on September 12th was the hardest blow. Something about a candle that burns too brightly, I think. More personal: something about the books we’ll never get the chance to read.

January Magazine didn’t comment on Foster Wallace’s death at the time. January’s contributors at that moment spread to the four winds. I myself was at the foot of a glacier, contemplating immortality of a very different sort. And, still, something pierced me when I heard the news.

January did, however, comment on the loss of several writers in the 12 months just passed. Too many, really. Though I don’t imagine there’s ever a year that holds the correct amount.

In January we lost “Flashman” creator George MacDonald Fraser; mystery writer Ed Hoch; as well as novelist and socialite Theodora Roosevelt Rauchfuss Keogh.

February brought the death of 104-year-old “Queen of the American Gothics” Phyllis Ayame Whitney and famed thinker and conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr.

In March, we brought the news of the death of Arthur C. Clarke (who we thought would never die!) and Anthony Minghella (who died much, much too young).

Later in the year, we shared the passing of MAD artist Willie Elder, comedian and author George Carlin, science fiction authors Thomas M. Disch and Algis Budrys; mystery author James Crumley, actor and author Paul Newman; jazz music expert and author Peter J. Levinson; author Tony Hillerman; Pulitzer Prize-winning author, activist and radio host Louis “Studs” Terkel; thriller author Michael Crichton and, finally, Nobel laureate British playwright Harold Pinter, who died just a few days ago.

All of our tributes are labeled as Passages and collected here.

Nobel Laureate Dead at 78

British playwright Harold Pinter died on Thursday. The Los Angeles Times offers a splendid piece:

Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning British playwright who addressed the isolation, fear and brutality of life in an original style that changed the face of 20th century theater, has died. He was 78.

Pinter, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005, died Wednesday, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, told the Associated Press in London. He had been in failing health in recent years, battling cancer of the esophagus as well as pemphigus, a rare autoimmune disease.

The LA Times piece is here. The Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones waxes appropriately poetic here. The Times Online gets personal here and offer up a mess of great quotes here. My favorite Pinterism from this batch:

“I can sum up none of my plays ... but my writing life has been, quite simply, one of relish, challenge and excitement.”

Michael Crichton Passes

Well, this teaches me to never step away from my computer for even a nanosecond. I took myself out to breakfast this morning, in celebration of Barack Obama’s historic election yesterday as the 44th president of the United States, and when I returned, I found a note from Rap Sheet correspondent Ali Karim, telling me that author Michael Crichton has died. From The Hollywood Reporter:

Michael Crichton -- whose books were made into films including “Jurassic Park” and “The Andromeda Strain” -- died Tuesday. He was 66.

The author died “after a courageous and private battle against cancer,” according to his Web site. A statement on MichaelCrichton.net said Crichton died “unexpectedly” in Los Angeles.

Crichton was a brand-name author, known for his stories of disaster and systematic breakdown, such as the rampant microbe of “Andromeda” or dinosaurs running amok in “Jurassic Park,” one of his many books that spawned major Hollywood movies.

Crichton also was a screenwriter and filmmaker, earning producing and writing credits for the film versions of many of his titles. He also created the NBC hospital drama “ER” in 1994.

In addition to his best-known novels, Crichton penned several works of crime fiction under the pseudonym “John Lange.” Two of those books have been republished within the last couple of years by Hard Case Crime -- Zero Cool (1969) and Grave Descend (1970) -- but his first Lange novel was in fact Odds On (1966).

Still, I remember Crichton best for his historical thriller, The Great Train Robbery (1975), which fictionalized -- with style, wit, and humor -- England’s notorious Great Gold Robbery of 1855. I read that book when it came out in paperback, and was entirely consumed by its story and characters. I’ve re-read it once since, and still find it a marvel of plot development, tension, and historical re-creation. A film was made from the book in 1979, starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland, but the novel far outshines its cinematic adaptation. Go find a copy. Right now.

READ MORE: “Michael Crichton Dies at 66,” by Hillel Italie (AP); “The Admirable Mr. Crichton,” by Ali Karim (The Rap Sheet).

“Take It Easy, But Take It”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, activist and radio host Louis “Studs” Terkel died at his Chicago home Friday. He was 96. From CNN:

Terkel had grown frail since the publication last year of his memoir, "Touch and Go," said Gordon Mayer, vice president of the Community Media Workshop, which Terkel had supported.

"I'm still in touch, but I'm ready to go," he said last year at his last public appearance with the workshop, a nonprofit that recognizes Chicago reporters who take risks in covering the city.

Terkel received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1934, though he opted not to pursue the practice of law. He was perhaps best known for his radio show, The Studs Terkel Program, that was heard in the Chicago area from 1952 until 1997 for one hour every week day.

His first book, The Giants of Jazz, was published in 1956. He received the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for The Good War.

“Studs Terkel knew the real America,” Dennis Kucinich wrote Friday in an essay for The Nation. “The America of grit and gumption, heart and soul, passion and nerve. He chronicled five generations of American history with a compassionate and deep understanding of the American character.”

In an affectionate good-bye in The Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote:

Was he the greatest Chicagoan? I cannot think of another. For me, he represented the joyous, scrappy, liberal, generous, wise-cracking heart of this city. If you met him, he was your friend. That happened to the hundreds and hundreds of people he interviewed for his radio show and 20 best-selling books. He wrote down the oral histories of those of his time who did not have a voice. In conversation he could draw up every single one of their names.

And Ebert ends on a quote so completely Terkel, I must end on it, as well:

There will be no tombstone, although being Studs, he has written his epitaph: “Curiosity didn’t kill this cat.”

Author Hillerman Passes

Celebrated New Mexico-based author Tony Hillerman passed away on Sunday afternoon:

Tony Hillerman, author of the acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels and creator of two of the unlikeliest of literary heroes -- Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee -- died Sunday of pulmonary failure. He was 83.

Hillerman's daughter, Anne Hillerman, said her father's health had been declining in the last couple years and that he was at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque when he died at about 3 p.m.

AP offers up details here, as well as a glimpse into Hillerman’s life.

The writer’s death comes less than two weeks before The Hillerman Conference, sheduleded this year to take place at the Hyatt Regency in Albuquerque, New Mexico, November 5-9.

Peter J. Levinson Passes

January contributing editor Tom Nolan brings us the sad news that, after a life spent in music, author Peter J. Levinson passed away earlier this week. From Variety:

Veteran music PR exec and jazz music expert Peter J. Levinson died Oct. 21 of head injuries due to a fall at his Malibu home. He was 74.

For nearly two years, he had suffered from ALS, (Lou Gehrig's disease) and was unable to speak. However, with the aid of his talking computer, he was able to carry on business as usual until the day he died.

In addition to repping musicians and actors from Count Basie to Mel Torme to Joel Grey, Levinson was also a noted biographer. His books included "Trumpet Blues -- The Life of Harry James," "September in the Rain: The Life of Nelson Riddle" and the Tommy Dorsey biography, "Livin' in a Great Big Way." He had recently completed his fifth book, a study of the life and work of Fred Astaire, "Puttin' On the Ritz," which will be published in March.

In the opening paragraph of an affectionate 2001 interview for January Magazine, Nolan remarked:

As America ages, it more and more disproves F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that American lives have no second acts. Case in point: Peter J. Levinson, who in the last few years has transformed himself from one of America's premier jazz publicists into one of America's most enterprising vintage-popular music biographers.

Nolan lets us know that, in the time since “we ran that Q&A, Peter wrote a well-received biography of Tommy Dorsey, and he’d finished one on Fred Astaire which will be published next spring.”

Tom Nolan’s January Magazine interview with Levinson is here.

Newman Passes

We have lost one of the greatest actors of our time. Paul Newman “died Friday after a long battle with cancer at his farmhouse near Westport,” according to the Associated Press. He was 83 years old.

Newman’s presence on the screen was magnetic, whether he was performing in Exodus (1960), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), The Verdict (1982), Road to Perdition (2002), or ... well, the list could go on and on. As Britain’s The Guardian notes, “He appeared in about 60 films over a period of 50 years.” In two of those, Newman played Ross Macdonald’s fictional private eye, Lew Archer (renamed Lew Harper for Hollywood): Harper (1966, adapted from 1949’s The Moving Target) and The Drowning Pool (1975). And in a third film, the 1998 noir thriller Twilight, he played another ex-cop turned private detective, Harry Ross, who could have been Archer/Harper at an older age. (That film, by the way, also featured James Garner, whose creds in the fictional P.I. field are equally strong.)

In addition to his screen work, the handsome, blue-eyed Newman was famous for his charitable contributions and his political activism. A strong and determined liberal, he wound up on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” supported Ned Lamont’s candidacy in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary race against turncoat Senator Joe Lieberman, contributed infrequently to The Nation, and would no doubt have loved to be around to see an end to George W. Bush’s presidency and the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. (Fingers crossed.)

READ MORE: “Paul Newman, 83, Magnetic Hollywood Titan, Dies,” by Aljean Harmetz (The New York Times); “More Than Just a Pretty Face,” by Stephanie Zacharek (Salon); “Paul Newman, 1925-2008,” compiled by Dana Cook (Salon); “Remembering Paul Newman, the Philanthropist,” by Dahlia Lithwick (Slate); “Saturday Night at the Movies,” by Taylor Marsh; “Actor Paul Newman Dies at 83,” by Lynn Smith (Los Angeles Times); “The Bluest Eyes: The Pleasures of Watching Paul Newman,” by Dana Stevens (Slate).

James Crumley Passes

Montana crime novelist James Crumley has died. According to The Missoulian, he passed away at age 68 after “many years of health complications.

When he died, Crumley was surrounded by family and friends, including his wife, Martha Elizabeth, and Missoula author and county emergency services director Bob Reid.“We were friends in the fullest sense,” Reid said. “I admired him for many things. He always kind of had this off-kilter way of looking at things--different than what you would imagine. He had a real hard-nosed exterior, yet at the same time he was patient and understanding of many different things and many different people.”

Missoula author Neil McMahon said of Crumley: “A huge man in terms of his heart and soul. He influenced me greatly and many others. He has a tremendous fan base and admirers all over the world.”Crumley has published 11 novels, taught at universities across the country and worked in Hollywood for several years. Famous for his hard-boiled mysteries, his works include “One Count to Cadence,” “The Last Good Kiss,” “The Wrong Case,” “The Mexican Tree Duck,” “Bordersnakes,” “The Final Country,” and most recently, “The Right Madness.”

One of the earliest detective novels I remember reading--more than once--was Crumley’s The Wrong Case (1975), which introduced alcoholic, sometime private eye Milo Milodragovitch. Had Crumley never written another detective novel in his life, I’d still remember him for that Chandleresque one. But then a few years later, I picked up The Last Good Kiss (1978) and was hooked again by the first short paragraph, a paragraph that has become an inspirational touchstone for later crime novelists:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

That latter book introduced a second Montana gumshoe, C.W. Sughrue, who was really the flip side of the same coin. (If memory serves, The Last Good Kiss was originally supposed to feature Milo, but some arcane publishing deal compelled Crumley to rename--if not modify significantly--his protagonist.) Over time, however, the two men showed some of their dissimilarities: Milo was a Korean War vet, Sughrue did his service during the Vietnam War and was court-martialed for killing an entire Vietnamese family (the crime was unintentional, of course); Milo was the kinder and smarter of the two, Sughrue the more violent and mean. Crumley once said that “Milo is my good side, Sughrue’s the bad.” But the characters got along well enough that in 1996’s Bordersnakes, they teamed up to go gallivanting around the West and into Mexico in search of an embezzling banker and a hit man. There was always lots of road travel in Crumley’s books, leading critics to conclude (not too brilliantly) that he’d been influenced by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

As Crumley got older, I thought his skills dropped off a bit and his stories became confusing at times. I was saddened by the mess of 2005’s The Right Madness, a Sughrue novel, but in reviewing that book for Amazon.com, I wrote: “Crumley’s detective stories have always been stronger on character development, high-caliber action, literary wit, and lyrical exposition than on meticulous plot construction.” He could put more punch into his storytelling than five other guys, and he had a poetic edge to his prose that wasn’t lost at all on careful readers.

There are plenty of tributes to Crumley appearing in the blogosphere today, including a fine and personal one from Duane Swierczynski. Laura Lippman has posted the transcript of an interview she conducted with Crumley for Crimespree Magazine. Two older pieces to look for are John Williams’ interview from his 1991 book Into the Badlands and an interview journalist-author Craig McDonald conducted with Crumley for Hardluck Stories. (McDonald follows that up today with a newspaper obituary that incorporates much of that same exchange.)

I wasn’t fortunate enough to meet James Crumley, except through the pages of his books, which I think is always the best way to get to know an author, anyway.

Wherever you are now, Mr. Crumley, I hope the camaraderie is generous and the beer is cold.

(Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)

Goodbye Mr. Disch and Mr. Budrys

Two recent losses have saddened fans of science fiction and beyond. Both Thomas M. Disch and Algis Budrys were major fixtures in the genre. Their influence has been lasting.

Cult science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch passed away on July 4th. I read most of Disch’s output, but perhaps my fondest memory is reading his novella The Brave Little Toaster to my eldest daughter when she was an infant. I will miss the work of this strange writer/poet who pushed the genre into the literary with masterworks such as 334 and Camp Concentration. Although an American, Disch was associated with the British new-wave of SF/F in the 1970s when he resided in the UK. The Telegraph reports on his passing away in a lengthy obituary:

Though an American, Disch was often associated with the New Wave of science fiction in Britain -- where he lived during the late 1970s – which was centred on writers such as Michael Moorcock and M John Harrison, rather than with figures such as Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin in the United States, who were also engaged in broadening the field from its pulp origins.

Disch's work was self-consciously literary and ambitious -- and became more so as time went on -- and was notable from the first for its sardonic wit, chilly anger, cynicism and reliance on irony and allegory. In his later novels and poems, it often seemed that satire had given way to bitterness.

The critic John Clute judged him “perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers.” He was well-regarded for his poetry (which he wrote as Tom Disch) by many who had no idea that he wrote genre fiction.

The Telegraph’s obituary is here.

Disch’s last interview was with Bat Segundo and is available as a podcast downloadable here. In a surreal twist, Disch is asked about Algis Budrys who passed away in June. Disch appeared to predict Budrys’ passing:

Correspondent: I wanted to also ask you about A.J. Budrys, who I know you -- I saw your LiveJournal where there were many caustic remarks directed his way. But I should point out that when I received this galley well before June 9th, when he died, you referred to him as “the late Algis Budrys.”

Disch: (laughs) Yes!

Correspondent: I’m wondering if you had some inside dope or if this is another example of your divine powers.

Disch: I guess so. I mean, I never know what my divine powers are going to do often, until they’ve done it. And this is certainly a case where I had picked the right horse without even knowing.

Influential and award winning writer Algis Budrys passed away on June 9th. The Chicago Tribune took a fond look back:

Known to friends as “A.J.,” Mr. Budrys' books, particularly 1960’s Rogue Moon and 1977's Michaelmas are highly regarded by critics and students of the genre. His work explored “the way a person feels or develops, more than with wild space adventures,” said his wife, Edna.“A lot of his books are about identity, who we are and why do we do what we do,” said Charles Brown, editor of the science fiction magazine Locus. The plot of Michaelmas touched on computer hacking and domination of human behavior by machines, “which pretty much predicted a lot of what’s going on today,” Brown said. “He was well ahead of his time.”

The full piece is here.

In a recent interview, Budrys’ was asked what the future held for him and replied somewhat poignantly considering his passing

I'll probably be found draped over my computer keyboard at some point. I’m 70 years old. I don’t know how much longer I can go, but I plan to keep going until I stop. I don’t have anything else I’d rather do, and since there’s no retirement income here (although I've been drawing Social Security for some time), I’ll just keep going.

The Times reported:

Algis Budrys was one of the writers who made his name alongside such luminaries as Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick in the early-1950s boom in science-fiction magazines.

Budrys’s first two published stories, in 1952, were The High Purpose (in Astounding Science Fiction) and Walk to the World (Space Science Fiction). He went on to write more than 100 stories in the next decade. In Silent Brother (Astounding, February 1956), the hero finds an alien intelligence living in his mind, with mutually beneficial results for both of them and the entire human race.

Other exceptional stories from this period are The End of Summer (1954), Nobody Bothers Gus (1955), The Man Who Tasted Ashes (1959), The Distant Sound of Engines (1959) and Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night (1961). The Edge of the Sea (1958), a seminal first-contact story, narrowly missed out on winning a Hugo award.

The Independent reported that Budrys’ later career was not without controversy –

In the early 1980s, a new professional role began to occupy Budrys's time, and changed his life. His involvement in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future brought him far too close, in the eyes of many, to Scientology, both as a controversial religion and as the corporate backer of the series of anthologies Budrys edited – 18 of them in all between 1985 and 2007. This programme was of immense use to many young writers, which goes some way to justifying Budrys's sometimes strenuous defence of his advocacy, in word and deed, of Hubbard himself.

It was also in the 1980s that Budrys decided to come to England for the first time, to attend the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention being held that year in Brighton. To do so he had to modify his technical statelessness, and gained an American Green Card to make the trip (in the 1990s he took out American citizenship). Unfortunately the Brighton experience was shadowed by a perception on the part of British science-fiction professionals that the Church of Scientology, which maintained a highly visible sponsoring presence at the convention, was attempting to take over the event.

Meanwhile, Locus Magazine published this excellent essay on Budrys’ work shortly after his passing.