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.

Passages: George Carlin at 71

“I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”

No one lives forever, but it’s difficult to think of a world without George Carlin in it, observing, calculating, pulling us up when we veered into silliness. Taking us to silliness. And sometimes both at once.

Carlin died of heart failure today in Los Angeles. From Reuters:

Known for his edgy, provocative material, Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The comedian’s death comes just days after the Kennedy Center announced that Carlin would receive the 2008 Mark Twain prize in November.

“Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.”

Carlin was the author of three bestselling books: When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, Brain Droppings and Napalm and Silly Putty.

MAD Artist Willie Elder Passes at 86

So sad to read about this morning’s passing of 86-year-old Willie Elder, the cartoonist and illustrator whose work was most strongly identified with MAD Magazine. Elder was born Wolf William Eisenberg in the Bronx, September 22, 1921, but changed his name on his return from WWII.

Elder was one of of Harvey Kurtzman’s first hires at MAD in 1952. MAD editor John Ficarra has fond memories. “Willie Elder was one of the funniest artists to ever work for MAD,” Ficarra said today in a press release. “He created visual feasts with dozens of background gags layered into every MAD story he illustrated. He called these gags ‘chicken fat.’ Willie’s ‘anything goes’ art style set the tone for the entire magazine and created a look that endures to this day.”

MAD art director Sam Viviano added that everyone “who has attempted to draw a funny picture over the course of the last fifty or sixty years owes an enormous debt to Willie, who taught us all how to do it -- and no one has ever done it better than he did.”

Jane Smiley on Eight Belles

Like a lot of people, I was heartbroken to see the tragic end the lovely filly Eight Belles came to in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. I won’t go into it in any detail here, it’s not the place -- though I sobbed a bit about it on my personal blog a few hours after the race -- but I did want to point you at Pulitzer Prize-winning (for 1992’s A Thousand Acres) novelist Jane Smiley’s take on the matter in The New York Times:

This is what we saw in Eight Belles: she was more resolute and competitive than was good for her, and she literally ran herself to death. When the race was finished, every part of her was exhausted, including, I am sure, the support apparatus of ligaments and tendons that were keeping her bones together. She probably stumbled and broke one ankle, then stepped hard on the other and broke that one. Then she fell.

But Big Brown was the other half of the equation. Big Brown looks to be a truly exceptional horse -- exceptionally strong and exceptionally competitive, possibly the Secretariat of our day. When Eight Belles decided she wasn’t going to give up, she risked herself more than she would have with a lesser horse -- and in general, male horses are stronger than female horses, which is why so few fillies run in the Derby.

Smiley goes on to offer a brief, expert and eloquent assessment of American-style horse racing. If the tragedy that grew from the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby was something that moved you, don’t miss Smiley’s piece.

Want more horse sense from Smiley? Try her 2004 memoir, A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck (Knopf) or her wonderful 2000 novel, Horse Heaven (Knopf).

Minghella Passes

A day meant for sadness: Anthony Minghella died earlier today. Minghella was, arguably, best known for his brilliant adaptations of several books that, on the surface of things, you might not have thought would make terrific films. (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain.) According to AP:

Minghella’s publicist, Jonathan Rutter, said the Oscar-winning filmmaker died at London’s Charing Cross Hospital. He said Minghella was operated on last week for a growth in his neck, “and the operation seemed to have gone well. At 5 a.m. today he had a fatal hemorrhage.”

The BBC looks back at Minghella’s life:

Born on the Isle of Wight to Italian parents in 1954, Anthony Minghella went on to become one of Britain's most celebrated film-makers and screenwriters.

His crowning achievement came in 1997, when The English Patient won him the Academy Award for best director -- more than 20 years after he began directing on the stage.

At the time of his death, Minghella was working on a television adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency for the BBC.

Arthur C. Clarke Dies Tomorrow

Sir Arthur C. Clarke died today in hospital in Sri Lanka where he had lived since the 1950s--and where it is already tomorrow. He was 90. Somehow one can’t help but think that the timing of the thing would have pleased him: that for so many of us that would report on his passing, from the perspective of date, we’d be reporting on something still to occur. Says MSNBC:

Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 a.m. local time after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.

Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956, lured by his interest in marine diving -- which he said was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space. “I’m perfectly operational underwater,” he once said.

Sir Arthur was born in Somerset, England in 1917 and is perhaps best known for his authorship of 2001: A Space Odyssey but his body of work and contributions to the fields of both science and fiction are almost too vast to relay in their entirety. For starters, though, Clarke wrote 32 novels, 29 book length works of non-fiction and saw the publication of 13 collections of his short stories. And his publication history only touches the surface. The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation offers a full biography here. Bloomberg hits some of the highlights here.

READ MORE: “Arthur C. Clarke’s Down-to-Earth Legacy,” by Ed Park (Los Angeles Times); “For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically,” by Edward Rothstein (The New York Times); “R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke,” by Edward Champion (Edward Champion’s Filthy Habits); “Sir Arthur C. Clarke: 90th Birthday Reflections” (YouTube).

Buckley Dead at 82

In this instance, the New York Times says it best:

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.

The New York Times obituary is here. The Rap Sheet takes a look from a more personal perspective here.

Phyllis A. Whitney Dead at 104

Phyllis Ayame Whitney, who The New York Times once called the Queen of the American Gothics, died yesterday, “peacefully, after a brief illness.” She was 104.

Born to American parents in Yokohama, Japan, on September 9, 1903, she spent her youth in the Orient.

Whitney’s first book, a young adult novel called A Place for Ann, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941. Once she’d achieved novel-length publication, there was no stopping Whitney and, by 1960, she was the author of 25 books. In fact, between 1941 and 1994, Whitney wrote and published a book each year, often doubling that pace in the early years. Her most recent novel, Amethyst Dreams, was published in 1997 when Whitney was 94.

In 1961, Whitney’s 26th novel, a young adult book called Mystery of the Haunted Pool, won the Edgar Award for best children’s mystery. Three years later, another young adult book, Mystery of the Hidden Hand, also won an Edgar. In 1988, the Mystery Writers of America accorded Whitney their highest honor: the Grand Master Award, which celebrates a lifetime of achievement.

The author was published in over 30 countries and more than 50 million copies of her books are currently in print.

The New York Times obituary is quite lovely, and it’s here.

Theodora Keogh Dies

Like a lot of people I guess, I had never heard of Theodora Roosevelt Rauchfuss Keogh until The Telegraph ran her obituary today. An obituary, as a matter of fact, Keogh had requested not run at all, according to The Charlotte Observer who said that one time novelist, socialite and ballet dancer had requested there be “no funeral or obituary and leaves no children of her own, according to family and friends.”

Keogh died January 5th at age 88 and was, according to The Telegraph, the granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt and “the author of nine novels, all of them dark in tone and many of them peopled with sinister figures.”

The remarkable early novels treated young girls facing sexual conflict in New York and Paris, and critics could not decide whether Theodora Keogh possessed extraordinary understanding of these matters or was merely aiming to shock.

Though Keogh’s work gained some critical respect, in the United States her novels were produced as pulps and are all out of print, though in the last few years, reports The Telegraph, “she was tracked down by a disparate group of new readers from various lands, some bearing offers of republication.”

Theodora Keogh published her first novel, Meg, in 1950. Partly autobiographical (the heroine came from an Upper East Side family), it tackled dark areas - the heroine was raped, and passed her history exam by threatening to expose her teacher as a lesbian.

John Betjeman described it as a “brutally frightening picture of what may happen to a little girl in New York”, and Nigel Nicolson wrote: “A great many people will be outraged by this book, but I place it first on my list because of its remarkable originality, good sense and utter lack of sentimentality.”

In the Saturday Review, Patricia Highsmith gave an unknown woman a rare favourable review: “She writes with a skill and command of her material that should set her promptly into the ranks of the finer young writers of today.”

Though from the little I’ve been able to learn about Keogh, I think she would have hated all this fuss about her, The Telegraph obituary paints an amazing portrait of a life well lived. The author herself might have paused before making some of this stuff up. The Charlotte Observer adds a bit here and here.

Ironically, we bring you the news about Keogh’s death on the very day former first daughter and mystery author Margaret Truman Daniel passes away at age 83. The Rap Sheet has that story here.

Ed Hoch Passes

The crime fiction blogosphere let our a collective cry of sadness yesterday when word began to spread that novelist and prolific short story writer Edward Dentinger Hoch had passed away at the age of 77.

The Rap Sheet leads us through some of this outpouring here.

Flashman Creator Passes

Author George MacDonald Fraser passed away earlier today, following a battle with cancer.

Born April 2, 1925, the author was best known for his Flashman series of historical novels featuring the dashing and daring Sir Harry Flashman. His most recent novel, The Reavers, was published in the United Kingdom by HarperCollins UK last autumn and will be published in the US by Knopf this coming April. From the synopsis on the UK edition:

Elizabethan England, and a dastardly Spanish plot to take over the throne is uncovered. It's up to Agent Archie Noble to save Queen and country in this saucy and swashbuckling romp from the bestselling author of “The Flashman Papers” and “The Pyrates”.

Born in England and educated in Scotland, the author served in the Gordon Highlanders in India, Africa, and the Middle East. He incorporated many personal anecdotes from this time of his life in his McAuslan series including Quartered Safe Out Here, The General Danced at Dawn, McAuslan in the Rough and The Sheikh and the Dustbin.

Fraser also worked extensively in film, writing or co-writing such well known movies as The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers, Royal Flash, Octopussy, Red Sonja and others. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1999.

We Bow Our Heads

The past 12 months represent a cruelly expensive year in the literary world. We lost some of the greats in 2007 and, sadly, sometimes it seemed we spent as much time at January last year saying good-bye to authors as we did in celebrating their lives.

As Sarah Weinman commented in The Guardian in November, “No doubt people say this every year, but I can’t remember a 12-month period in which America has lost so many of its best-known writers.” I agree.

At January Magazine alone we commented on the deaths of Jane Rule, Ira Levin and Norman Mailer, all in November. Earlier in the year, there was Madeleine L’Engle (September), Margaret Clark (May), David Halberstam, June Callwood, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Dibdin (all April) and Richard S. Prather back in February.

Our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, commented on some of the same passages, as well as Marc Behm (September), Joe L. Hensley, Magdalen Nabb, John Gardner and Rodney D. Wingfield (all in August), Philip R. Craig (May), Donald Hamilton (April) and Barbara Seranella and Sidney Sheldon (January).

You can see all of our tributes labeled as Passages and collected here.

Jane Rule Gone at 76

Celebrated adopted Canadian writer Jane Rule died last night of complications due to liver cancer. She was 76.

Born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1931, Rule had lived in British Columbia since the 1950s. Rule was inducted into the Order of Canada last summer, Canada’s highest civilian honor. According to Arsenal Pulp Press, the current publisher of Rule’s 1977 novel, The Young in One Another’s Arms, in January of 2007, Rule was awarded the Alice B. Toklas Medal “for her long and storied career as a lesbian novelist.”

Writing in The Globe and Mail today, Sandra Martin described Rule as, “Writer, teacher, cultural nationalist and lesbian role model,” in a lengthy and affectionate obituary:

The author of a dozen books, including the novels Desert of the Heart, This is not for You and Memory Board, and the non-fiction essays Lesbian Images, Ms. Rule brought the idea of women loving women into the quotidian world both in her personal life, which was lived openly for nearly 50 years with her partner Helen Sonthoff, and in her writing.

She explored the conflict between desire and convention and the constriction that fear can extol on intimacy, joyfulness and freedom. Her fiction falls into the category of social realism, but it was always driven by character rather than polemics. Typically an ensemble of homosexual and heterosexual characters interact, often communally, to represent the position of the artist in society or to confront bureaucratic oppression of difference.

The Globe piece is here. CBC Arts doesn’t add much here. Smith College professor Marilyn Schuster says a beautiful good-bye in XTra here.

A Dangerous Year for Authors

On The Guardian’s books blog, the incomparable Sarah Weinman looks back at what was a dangerous year for authors. More to the point, she wonders how long we’ll care:

No doubt people say this every year, but I can’t remember a 12-month period in which America has lost so many of its best-known writers. Potboiler king Sidney Sheldon crossed over to the other side of midnight on January 30. The world mourned the loss of Kurt Vonnegut and his unique brand of satire on April 11. Lloyd Alexander, author of the marvellous Chronicles of Prydain books, passed away on May 17, while New Jersey native Marc Behm died in his adopted home of France on July 12. September 16 saw the passing of Robert Jordan, the bestselling author of fantasy epic Wheel of Time, which will remain in suspended animation at volume 11 unless someone else decides to finish it up. And earlier this month, Norman Mailer and Ira Levin died within two days of each other.

The full piece is well thought out, deeply entertaining and just a touch sad. And it’s here.

Levin Passes

Novelist and playwright Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, The Boys from Brazil, Stepford Wives) passed away at his home in Manhattan on Monday. He was 78.

The New York Times reports that no cause of death has been named, “but Mr. Levin appeared to have died of natural causes, his son Nicholas said yesterday.”

Mr. Levin’s output was modest -- just seven novels in four decades -- but his work was firmly ensconced in the popular imagination. Together, his novels sold tens of millions of copies, his literary agent, Phyllis Westberg, said yesterday. Nearly all of his books were made into Hollywood movies, some more than once. Mr. Levin also wrote the long-running Broadway play “Deathtrap,” a comic thriller.

Levin is sent off here, here, here and here.

Tough Guys Don’t Live Forever

Controversial American author Norman Mailer died this morning at age 84. He rose to international fame in 1948 with the publication of The Naked and the Dead, a novel based on his experiences during World War II. He went on to co-create a genre of writing known as “creative non-fiction” and help found The Village Voice; win the Pulitzer Price twice (for Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song) and the National Book Award once (also for Armies); protest the Vietnam War, oppose women’s liberation, and run for the New York City mayor’s office; marry six times and have nine children; and become famous for his feuds with fellow wordsmiths Gore Vidal, William Styron, and Truman Capote. However, Mailer never lost sight of the fact that he was, first and foremost and always, a writer. And like all determined writers, he was a willing slave to his work, unable to imagine himself doing anything else except continuing to turn out words on the page that either sang or sank, but that he thought worth writing, and that he would write--no matter the skepticism voiced by critics.

“I am the only major writer in America who has had more bad reviews than good reviews in the course of his writing life,” Mailer once told an interviewer. “So that gives me a certain pride, you know. I feel they keep taking their best shot, and they’re ... not going to stop me, ya know.”

There are many fine remembrances being either published or broadcast today of Norman Mailer, the runty New Jersey kid who grew up to be a giant of his craft, and there will no doubt be considerably more to come in the next week. (One of the best so far is Lynn Neary’s segment this morning on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday.) Yet the greatest tribute to Mailer is the endurance of his literary efforts. His writing will outlive him by a longshot, which is just what every author wants for his or her own work.

READ MORE: “Norman Mailer: Death of an Icon” (Guardian Unlimited); “Remembering Norman Mailer Through His Books,” by A.O. Scott (Salon); “Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Is Dead,” by Charles McGrath (The New York Times); “Mailer Made America His Subject,” by Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times); “Remembrances: Norman Mailer 1923-2007,” compiled by Dana Cook (Salon); “Stormin’ Norman,” by Gregory Kirschling (Entertainment Weekly).

L'Engle Dead at 88

One of the best loved children’s writers of all time died at home in Connecticut yesterday. Madeleine L’Engle wrote more than 60 books, but was best known for the children’s fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time, first published in 1963.

The New York Times takes an affectionate look at L’Engle’s life today:

The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: “Wrinkle” is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity.

The Times reported that L’Engle died of natural causes. She was 88.

Good-bye to an Editor from My Childhood

Before the irritating Harry Potter became ubiquitous in youth literature, there was an influential British editor called Margaret Clark who shaped some of my juvenile reading. I’m sad to report Margaret Clark passed away last month. According to The Guardian:

Margaret Clark, who has died following a brain tumour aged 80, was one of a distinguished band of children’s book editors who were responsible for changing the profile of children’s book publishing during the 1970s and 80s. They were passionate about the quality of the books themselves and about reaching more readers by publishing a wider range of fiction and picture books which reflected the changing experiences and expectations of contemporary children.

The Guardian’s obituary is here.

Some of us still remember the publishing houses that became imprints when larger conglomerates gobbled them up. One of these was Bodley Head where Clark found herself as a senior editor. I recall reading her “new adults” series which included work by Aidan Chambers -- who I remember reading avidly along with Paul Zindel’s The Pigman.

The Times reports:

Like all the Bodley Head books of these years before the firm’s absorption into the Random House conglomerate, Clark’s were helped towards distinction by the genius of the production director, John Ryder, and it is matter for regret that many of the books whose publication she oversaw have not survived the current fashions.

Lucy Boston, whose later work she edited, paid tribute to her skills in her memoir Memory in a House (1973) and these are seen most notably in her cultivated regard for poetry, conspicuous in her editing of David Mackay’s A Flock of Words (1969) and of the Bodley Head Poets series (1964-72) – great poetry selected by eminent and sympathetic modern writers.

Clark was also foremost among British editors in seeking to cater for a teenage readership through the Bodley Head’s “New Adults” series of fiction, following and sometimes, as with Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, adopting texts from the already busy exploitation of the genre in the US. (An influential British “first” came with Breaktime (1978) by Aidan Chambers.)

In 1980, Clark became the chief of the Bodley Head’s children’s division, and even after her retirement in 1988 she continued with what was more or less a lifetime’s preoccupation with children’s literature.

The Times piece is here.

Margaret Clark was born September 19, 1926 and died April 25, 2007. I celebrate her contribution to my early reading habits. Her efforts still linger in my memory.

David Halberstam Dead at 73

Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam died this morning in a San Francisco-area car crash, just two weeks after his 73rd birthday.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, “Halberstam, author of 15 bestsellers, died at the scene after the car in which he was a front-seat passenger was broadsided by another vehicle. The coroner’s office said he died of massive internal injuries.”

The resident of New York had given a speech at UC-Berkeley on Saturday night on “Turning Journalism into History.” The Mercury News reports that, at the time of his death, Halberstam was on his way “to an interview for his next book, about the Korean War.”

Perhaps best known for his work covering the Vietnam war for the New York Times in the 1960s -- the work that led to his Pulitzer at age 30 -- in later years, Halberstam turned his keen eye and passionate voice on a wide variety of topics of sharp interest to Americans.

Between 1961 and 2005, Halberstam wrote 21 books -- 15 of them bestsellers -- including The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era (1965), The Best and the Brightest (1972) about the Vietnam war and War in a Time of Peace (2002) which was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

In a 1993 interview with the Mercury News, Halberstam spoke eloquently about his life and career.

“It’s been a wonderful life,” he said. “Actually, when I think about my career I am sometimes stunned. I’m stunned by the richness of it. It gave me all the things I ever wanted. I loved being a reporter.”

The Mercury News piece is lovely and it’s here. AP adds its voice here. This is what Reuters had to say.

Callwood Passes

Canadian journalist, author and activist June Callwood passed away April 14th after a lengthy battle with cancer.

In her final interview, early in April, with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s George Stroumboulopoulos, she addressed this moment. “I’m okay. I’m 82 years old, for heaven’s sake. Dust to dust is the way it ought to be. The death of the young is inexcusable.”

Still. We bow our heads. Another vibrant voice lost. The Toronto Star published an affectionate look at the late writer here. The CBC has a wonderful selection of interviews with Callwood over the years archived here. The Toronto Star covered a candlelight walk in memory of Callwood on Tuesday night here.

The Night I Shared a Beer with Vonnegut

There’s a bar in Bloomington, Indiana, about three blocks west of the Indiana University campus. It’s called Nick’s English Hut, but all the students know it simply as Nick’s.

When you walk into Nick’s you see a wide aisle with booths along either side. Back when I attended IU, the booths were wooden and hard. There’s a small gold plaque screwed into one booth on the left side of the aisle. It commemorates a night in 1983 when the writer Kurt Vonnegut walked in with three IU students, sat down, and had a couple of beers.

The plaque is actually in the wrong booth; the correct booth is one over.

I should know. I was one of the three IU students who accompanied Vonnegut to Nick’s.

Vonnegut was the first subversive writer I ever read (unless you count Maurice Sendak). I discovered him on my parents’ bookshelf, a paperback copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. I was 15 years old. I was transfixed from the opening line: “All this happened, more or less.” I had never read anything like this novel, the story of Billy Pilgrim, his “bad chemicals” and the firebombing of Dresden. It was sparse, it was cynical, it was compact, yet it yearned for hope.

I dove into Vonnegut’s work with the zeal of a convert, which I largely was. From there I went to Breakfast of Champions, followed by God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, to Slapstick, which was a Christmas gift from my mother. Vonnegut was the first writer I ever consumed so passionately that was still alive and working. The news of a new book being published was cause for great celebration and anticipation.

Fast forward to 1983. I was a junior at IU, and I worked on the student programming committee that brought lectures, films, and concerts to the campus. I was on the lecture subcommittee and after years of attempts, we finally got Vonnegut to come to IU for a lecture. Even though I was 21 and saw myself as way too cool for words, I couldn’t wait to shake the hand of my literary idol.

The lecture Vonnegut gave that night to a sold out crowd was How to Get a Job Like Mine, a stump speech he had been delivering on college campuses for years. He carried the text of the speech with him to the podium, even though he probably had it memorized. He diagrammed Shakespeare with the aid of an overhead projector. He told the audience that every story needed a character like Iago. He railed against what was then called a “word processor” proclaiming that inventions that put people (like his typist) out of a job were unworthy (his idea of a perfect invention was the paper clip). He held the audience in the palm of his hand and the applause was nothing short of rapturous.

Back at an informal reception at the student union, Vonnegut fielded questions. Yes, he said, Kilgore Trout would reappear someday. Yes, he liked the film adaptation of Slaughterhouse—Five. No, he had nothing to do with the film.

During the reception, I was standing next to the chairman of the lecture subcommittee, a frat rat whose name I don’t recall, but whom I’ll call Doug. Vonnegut leaned into Doug as he was signing autographs and asked if there was somewhere nearby where he could get a beer. We piled into a university vehicle (how we had one at our disposal escapes my memory) and drove off to Nick’s.

I was sitting on the outside of one side of the booth at Nick’s. Doug was to my left and Vonnegut was directly across from me. Baskets of popcorn appeared and Vonnegut reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, which he lit one after another (this was 1983, remember).

I was utterly stupefied, unable to fully comprehend the fact I was seated at a booth in a bar, sharing popcorn, beer and second hand smoke with Kurt Vonnegut. My self-consciousness shifted into overdrive. I could barely stammer anything remotely intelligent or articulate. I remember asking him what he read for pleasure. He sighed and confessed that he read a lot but rarely for pleasure. He felt obliged to read new books so he could stay on top of what was discussed at the cocktail parties and dinners he attended. He felt burdened to read the books of his many friends, just so he could remain social and polite.

I’ve thought a lot about my brief encounter with Vonnegut since I heard of his death. I wasn’t terribly surprised at his passing. There had been rumors of declining health and of injuries sustained in a house fire. Truthfully, even 24 years ago he looked like he already had one foot in the grave. His face was haggard and drawn, he appeared too thin, and he smoked like a blast furnace.

And yet, even though it’s been at least 15 years since I read any of his work, I always thought of him as being there. To me, he was the Old Faithful of literature, occasionally blasting a hot plume of words, then settling down beneath the surface until another eruption seemed appropriate.

I get nervous about returning to the work of my idols after too many years have gone by. I have a suspicion that Vonnegut, like Ayn Rand and J.D. Salinger, is a writer best experienced in the bloom of one’s youth. I am middle-aged now, about to turn 45, and I’d hate to revisit his books and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Yet, two of my favorite Vonneguts are staring at me from the bookshelf: Jailbird, his fictional explanation of the Nixon White House, and Palm Sunday, a marvelous anthology of non-fiction pieces. Plus, there is that copy of Deadeye Dick that he signed for me after our beers at Nick’s.

But maybe all you need is to be young at heart, and Vonnegut will speak to you again. I hope so. God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.

Vonnegut Passes

Kurt Vonnegut, considered by many to be one of America's finest authors, died in New York City on April 11, of complications after a fall. He was 84 years old.

Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions and about 17 others, was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922. The Los Angeles Times’ Elaine Woo has put together an affectionate and in-depth look at the literary giant:

An obscure science fiction writer for two decades before earning mainstream acclaim in 1969 with Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut was an American original, often compared to Mark Twain for a vision that combined social criticism, wildly black humor and a call to basic human decency. He was, novelist Jay MacInerny [sic] once said, “a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion.”

Although he was disdained by some critics who thought his work was too popular and accessible, his fiction inspired volumes of scholarly comment as well as websites maintained by young fans who have helped keep all 14 of his novels in print over a 50-year career. Five of his novels have made the leap into films.

His last novel was 1997’s Timequake, a book that critics said was murky and odd and confusing, but mostly loved anyway. Valerie Sayers called it both of those things in The New York Times, then gave it some serious love:

Nearly 30 years later, Vonnegut is still making the pompous look silly and the decent and lovely look decent and lovely. His new so-called novel, “Timequake,” is, as Vonnegut describes it, a “stew.” He has taken the best pickings from a novel that wasn’t working and interspersed them with a running commentary on his own life and the state of the universe. The mix is thick and rich: a political novel that's not a novel, a memoir that is not inclined to reveal the most private details of the writer’s life.

The NYT review of Timequake is here. Elaine Woo’s LAT remembrance is here.

Dibdin’s Short Finish

The sad news coming out of Seattle, Washington, today is that Michael Dibdin, the 60-year-old author of an award-winning series starring Venetian detective Aurelio Zen (Back to Bologna) died there last Friday, March 30, after what Britain’s Telegraph says was “a short illness.”

Of both generous size and tone, the Telegraph’s obituary of Dibdin, who was born in Wolverhampton, England, in March 1947, but has lived in the United States since the early ’90s, is the best one I’ve seen yet. As it explains:

Dibdin combined a flair for complex plotting and biting characterisation with a mastery of satire and the surreal.

In all he produced 16 novels, 11 of them featuring Zen, and his work was translated into 18 languages. With popular success came critical acclaim: “During the Nineties,” noted the legal commentator Marcel Berlins, “no writer of crime fiction attracted as much praise, and gave as much enjoyment, as Michael Dibdin.”

His trademark was the multi-layered literary whodunnit, couched in prose that his contemporary Val McDermid described as “limpid and extraordinary”; another admirer concluded that Dibdin remained “one of an elite cadre of crime fiction writers for whom literary critics break out all of their favourite adjectives”.

Dibdin deliberately tapped into British middle-class fantasies in the Aurelio Zen series. The appeal of the books lay partly in his decision to set each one in a different part of Italy (starting in the beautiful medieval city of Perugia), but also in the character of Zen himself: Dibdin invented him as an outsider, coming to Perugia as a stranger, much as Didbin himself had done when he arrived to teach English at the university there in the late 1970s.

Aurelio Zen’s initials offered a clue to his creator’s methods and motives; in the course of the series, Dibdin pieced together an A to Z of contemporary Italy, a composite of finely-drawn observations about the country and its people. The picture he painted, however, was no rose-tinted idyll: his tenth Zen mystery, Back to Bologna (2005), opened with a football club tycoon slumped dead over the wheel of his Audi, a bullet in his brain and a Parmesan cheese knife rammed through his chest.

Dibdin was an outsized figure with outsized traits and appetites; he had a fondness for fine food and drink, and liked to sport a Panama hat (“he embraces excess”, one observer wrote). Although in person he was private and shy, his books were larded with sex and violence--“two of the things we can do,” Dibdin noted, “which were not possible for earlier generations [of writers], so there’s an understandable tendency to want to take it to the max”.

Although his plots were convoluted (“as tangled as a dish of spag bol,” as one reviewer put it), Dibdin was a thoughtful exponent of crime fiction with a literary cast, specialising in unsympathetic heroes (someone noted that Aurelio Zen is not a man with whom one would want to be marooned in a gondola), and he took an academic interest in the history of the genre.

As for politics, Dibdin was careful not to taint his narratives with an identifiable ideology, but he believed that a wider political lens was not only essential to telling criminal tales but also unavoidable. He admired Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, both of whom were Left-leaning and disturbed by the corruption and abuses they saw in the society they wrote about. Like them, Dibdin shunned an overt political agenda in his books. “They exposed problems,” Dibdin said of them, “they didn’t propose solutions.”

The Telegraph piece goes on to quote Dibdin on the reason he devoted his novel-writing career to crime fiction: “The mainstream has lost its way. Crime fiction is an objective, realistic genre because it’s about the real world, real bodies really being killed by somebody. And this involves the investigator in trying to understand the society that the person lived in.”

Dibdin’s first published novel, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, was The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978). It was followed 10 years later by Ratking, the first of his Commissario Zen crime novels, which won the Macallan Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award. “Other books in this series,” The Telegraph notes, “include two of his best titles, Cabal (1992), which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier, and Dead Lagoon (1994). Cosi Fan Tutti (1996), a brutal exposé of Italian organised crime and a brilliantly funny pastiche of Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera buffa, was followed by A Long Finish (1998) and Blood Rain (1999), in which Zen faced death at the hands of the Sicilian Mafia.” In addition to his Italian series, Dibdin wrote standalones such as Dark Spectre (1995), which was set in an American town traumatized by an apparently random set of killings, and Thanksgiving (2000), about a journalist fixated on the recent death of his wife.

Back to Bologna was Dibdin’s most recent title, but he has an 11th (and probably last) Zen novel, End Games, due out in the UK in July and in the States in November.

I had the opportunity to talk with Michael Dibdin only once, shortly after the publication in 1997 of The Vintage Book of Classic Crime, a rather curious literary sampler he’d edited. He was by then living in rainy Seattle, after meeting (at a 1993 writers’ conference in Spain) and then marrying local mystery author Kathrine Beck (aka K.K. Beck). I found Dibdin to be a bit gruff at first, delivering clipped responses that he evidently believed would be quite sufficient for an interviewer with no more than passing interest in crime fiction. After we’d spent a good while talking about his work and the genre at a coffee shop in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square district, though, he realized that I was no general assignment reporter, but instead had a longtime interest in the very variety of story to which he had devoted himself. We then carried on for another hour or so, exchanging the names of favorite recent books and talking about some of the acknowledged giants and lesser-known stars of this genre, many of whose work figured into his Vintage collection. We promised to get together again someday, but never did.

My January Magazine colleague Linda L. Richards had a similar experience when she sat down to interview him in 1999. In the resulting article, she wrote:

In person Michael Dibdin’s warmth is not immediately apparent. There is, at first, almost a shyness to our exchange: perhaps a caution. This is the slightly self-protective, intensely private Dibdin who--when he married Seattle writer and single mom Kathrine Beck ...--acquired the house next door to hers in order to have a peaceful nest where he could spin his yarns.Dibdin does warm, though. He has the sort of passion for his work and his genre that doesn’t allow distance in discussion that he finds interesting. Before long, his self-protection is abandoned and his eyes sparkle with interest and intelligence as he discusses his work and his passions.

Regrettably, such encounters are now no longer possible.

Blogger-mystery maven Sarah Weinman remarks that Dibdin’s demise is a “huge blow to the crime fiction world and to literature at large.” I’m sure that much more will be expressed about Dibdin’s loss in days to come. He demonstrated crime fiction’s potential for making sense of the world, at the same as it entertains. Can literature expect to do any more than that?

Prather Passes

It was sad to read of the passing of 85-year-old Richard S. Prather, best known as the creator of Hollywood gumshoe Shell Scott. According to the Rap Sheet:

Although Prather hadn’t seen a new book of his published since Shellshock (1987), Hard Case Crime last year reissued his 1952 standalone, The Peddler (which originally appeared under his pseudonym “Douglas Ring”), and interviewer Linda Pendleton, the widow of pulp novelist Don Pendleton, noted in her recent interview with Prather that the author was sitting on an as-yet-unpublished, 1,000-page Shell Scott manuscript, The Death Gods.

Though Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce doesn’t “feel qualified to eulogize over this author,” he’s included many links to more information about the well-loved Prather, as well as links to sites on the Web that are mourning him today.