JOHN LUTZ: R.I.P.

More sad news.  John Lutz: 1939-2021.

I was lucky to know John Lutz over the years. John wrote over 50 novels of political suspense, private eye novels, urban suspense, humor, occult, caper, police procedural, espionage, historical, futuristic, amateur sleuth, thriller -- just about every mystery sub-genre. He also wrote over 200 short stories and articles. John was a past president of both Mystery Writers of America and Private Eye Writers of America. Among his awards were the MWA Edgar, the PWA Shamus, The Trophee 813 Award for best mystery short story collection translated into the French language, the PWA Life Achievement Award, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society's Golden Derringer Lifetime Achievement Award. And, he was a kind, supportive, and generous man. He'll be missed.

My sincere sympathy goes out to his family and friends.

MARY HIGGINS CLARK: R.I.P.

Very sad news, indeed. Mary Higgins Clark, the Queen of Suspense, has died, at the age of 92. I remember the first time I met her. We were at the High Tea at the first Malice Domestic. Most of the other authors were huddled together, not necessarily mixing with the fans, but Mary Higgins Clark circulated. When she came to our table, she held out her hand and introduced herself. "I am Mary Higgins Clark, so nice to meet you." She engaged with everyone at our table before going on to others. She was so gracious. I met her several more times over the years, and each time I was touched by how kind, supportive, and truly lovely she was. She will be missed.

From: WCVB:
Mary Higgins Clark, the tireless and long-reigning "Queen of Suspense" whose tales of women beating the odds made her one of the world's most popular writers, died Friday at age 92.
Her publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced that she died in Naples, Florida, of natural causes.

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"Nobody ever bonded more completely with her readers than Mary did," her longtime editor Michael Korda said in statement. "She understood them as if they were members of her own family. She was always absolutely sure of what they wanted to read — and, perhaps more important, what they didn’t want to read — and yet she managed to surprise them with every book."

A widow with five children in her late 30s, she became a perennial best-seller over the second half of her life, writing or co-writing "A Stranger Is Watching," "Daddy's Little Girl" and more than 50 other favorites. Sales topped 100 million copies and honors came from all over, whether a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France or a "Grand Master" statuette back home from the Mystery Writers of America. Many of her books, including "A Stranger is Watching" and "Lucky Day," were adapted for movies and television. She also collaborated on several novels with her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark.

Mary Higgins Clark specialized in women triumphing over danger, such as the besieged young prosecutor in "Just Take My Heart" or the mother of two and art gallery worker whose second husband is a madman in "A Cry in the Night." Mary Clark's goal as an author was simple, if rarely easy: keep the readers reading.

"You want to turn the page," she told The Associated Press in 2013. "There are wonderful sagas you can thoroughly enjoy a section and put it down. But if you're reading my book, I want you stuck with reading the next paragraph. The greatest compliment I can receive is, 'I read your darned book 'til 4 in the morning, and now I'm tired.' I say, 'Then you get your money's worth.'"

Her own life taught her lessons of resilience, strengthened by her Catholic faith, that she shared with her fictional heroines. She was born Mary Higgins in New York City in 1927, the second of three children. She would later take on the last name Clark after marriage. Mary Clark's father ran a popular pub that did well enough for the family to afford a maid and for her mother to prepare meals for strangers in need. But business slowed during the Great Depression and her father, forced to work ever longer hours as he laid off employees, died in his sleep in 1939. One of her brothers died of meningitis a few years later. Surviving family members took on odd jobs and had to rent out rooms in the house.

Mary had always loved to write. At age 6, she completed her first poem, which her mother proudly requested she recite in front of the family. A story she wrote in grade school impressed her teacher enough that Mary Clark read it to the rest of the class. By high school, she was trying to sell stories to True Confessions magazine.

After working as a hotel switchboard operator (Tennessee Williams was among the guests she eavesdropped on) and a flight attendant for Pan American, she married Warren Clark, the regional manager of Capital Airways, in 1949. Throughout the 1950s and into the '60s, she raised the children, studied writing at New York University and began getting stories published. Some drew upon her experiences at Pan American. One story which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, "Beauty Contest at Buckingham Palace," imagined a pageant featuring Queen Elizabeth II, Jackie Kennedy and Princess Grace of Monaco. But by the mid-60s, the magazine market for fiction was rapidly shrinking and her husband's health was failing; Warren Clark died of a heart attack in 1964.
Mary Clark quickly found work as a script writer for "Portrait of a President," a radio series on American presidents. Her research inspired her first book, a historical novel about George and Martha Washington. She was so determined that she began getting up at 5 a.m., working until nearly 7, then feeding her children and leaving for work.

"Aspire to the Heavens" was published in 1969. It was "a triumph," she recalled in her memoir "Kitchen Privileges," but also a folly. The publisher was sold near the book's release and received little attention. She regretted the title and learned that some stores placed the book in religious sections. Her compensation was $1,500, minus commission. (The novel was reissued decades later, far more successfully, as "Mount Vernon: A Love Story").

For her next book, she wanted to make some money. Following a guideline she would often suggest to other writers, she looked at her bookshelves, which featured novels by Agatha Christie, Rex Stout and other mystery writers, and decided she should write the kind of book she liked to read. A recent tabloid trial, about a young woman accused of murdering her children, gave her an idea.
"It seemed inconceivable to most of us that any woman could do that to her children," Mary Clark wrote in her memoir. "And then I thought: Suppose an innocent young mother is convicted of the deliberate murder of her two children; suppose she gets out of prison on a technicality; and then suppose seven years to the day, on her 32nd birthday, the children of her second marriage disappear."

In September 1974, she sent her agent a manuscript for "Die a Little Death," acquired months later by Simon & Schuster for $3,000. Renamed "Where are the Children?" and released in 1975, it became her first-best seller and began her long, but not entirely surprising run of success. She would allege that a psychic had told her she would become rich and famous.

Mary Higgins Clark, who wrote well into her 90s, more than compensated for her early struggles. She acquired several homes and for a time owned part of the New Jersey Nets. She was among a circle of authors, including Lee Child and Nelson DeMille, who met regularly for dinner in Manhattan. She also had friends in Washington and was a White House guest during the administrations of the Clintons and of both President George H.W. Bush, whose wife Barbara became a close friend, and President George W. Bush.

Married since 1996 to former Merrill Lynch Futures CEO John J. Conheeney, she remembered well the day she said goodbye to hard times. It was in April of 1977, and her agent had told her that Simon & Schuster was offering $500,000 for the hardcover to her third novel, "A Stranger is Watching," and that the publisher Dell was paying $1 million for the paperback. She had been running her own script production company during the day and studying for a philosophy degree at Fordham University at night, returning home to New Jersey in an old car with more than 100,000 miles on it.

"As I drove onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, the tailpipe and muffler came loose and began dragging on the ground. For the next 21 miles, I kur-plunked, kur-plunked, all the way home," she wrote in her memoir. "People in other cars kept honking and beeping, obviously sure that I was either too stupid or too deaf to hear the racket.

“The next day I bought a Cadillac!”

Read more here. 

Patrick Williams: R.I.P.

From FilmMusicReporter and Variety:

Patrick Williams (1939-2018)

Patrick Williams, who was best-known for his Emmy-winning television music but who was also a renowned and Grammy-winning big-band jazz leader and arranger, died Wednesday morning of complications from cancer at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 79.

The composer scored numerous features, TV shows, and television movies over a five decade-spanning career. Among his feature film credits are John Water’s 1990 comedy Cry-Baby, the 1992 drama The Cutting Edge, Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars, Richard Donner’s 1982 film The Toy,  and Richard Lester’s Cuba. He received an Academy Award nomination for his music adaptation for Peter Yates’ 1979 movie Breaking Away. His TV scoring credits include The Streets of San Francisco, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show and Columbo. Williams received 4 Emmy Awards (for Lou Grant, The Princess and the Cabbie, 1992’s Jewels and a song for 2000’s Yesterday’s Children) and 22 Emmy nominations. He also was honored with two Grammy Awards (and 19 Grammy nomination) and BMI’s Richard Kirk Award.

HT: J. Kingston Pierce

Kate Wilhelm: R.I.P.

I just learned that Kate Wilhelm passed away on March 8. Kate Wilhelm was what I consider a Renaissance writer. She wrote award winning science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, magical realism, and mystery. She wrote stand-alones and series, poetry and non-fiction, short stories, and edited many collections. She was extremely prolific, and she was extremely good.

Kate Wilhelm wrote 14 novels in the Barbara Holloway legal mystery series and six novels in the Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn p.i./psychologist series, as well as several Collections, Short Stories in EQMM, and standalone mystery/suspense novels. Her works have been adapted for television and movies in the United States, England, and Germany. Wilhelm’s novels and stories have been translated to more than a dozen languages. She has contributed to Quark, Orbit, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Locus, Amazing Stories, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Fantastic, Omni, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan.

Kate Wilhelm won three Nebulas, two Hugos, and two Locus awards, and was an inductee to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Bill Moody: R.I.P.

More sad news. Bill Moody, 76, musician and mystery author, passed away on January 14. I haven't seen a formal obituary yet, but saw this on his Facebook page, a post by Piro Patten:

We lost Bill Yesterday. He was late for a gig and the musicians went looking for him. Great way to go. I hope musicians are looking for me when my time comes. WE love you Bill and that wonderful lilting swing that propelled the music so well.

I knew Bill for many years, both as a musician and mystery author. We worked together on several events (the drummer side of his life), and I hosted him at Literary Salons and saw him at several mystery events, most recently at Noir at the Bar. Bill and his group played at Bcon Monterey several years ago. He lived in Sonoma in a converted train car. How cool is that! But that was Bill. I will miss him.


Bill Moody was a mystery author and professional jazz drummer. He was the author of the Evan Horne Mystery series: The Man In Red Square, Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz, Fade to Blue, Shades of Blue, Looking for Chet Baker, Bird Lives! and other novels, as well as a short story collection, Mood Swings.

From his website:
Bill Moody was born in Webb City, Missouri and grew up in Santa Monica, California. A professional jazz drummer, Bill played and/or recorded with Jr. Mance, Maynard Ferguson, Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, and Lou Rawls. He lived in Las Vegas for many years as a musician on the Las Vegas Strip, hosted a weekly radio show at KUNV-FM, and taught in the UNLV English Department. He lived in northern California, where he taught creative writing at Sonoma State University, and was active in the Bay Area jazz scene with the Terry Henry Trio and Dick Conte's trio and quartet.

"The connection between playing jazz and writing crime fiction is a strong one for me. A jazz musician begins with the framework or the song — the chords, the structure, the form — but during a solo, he doesn't know what he's going to play or how until he reaches that part of the song. Writing crime fiction for me is a similar process. Working from the basic structure of the crime novel, I then improvise on a premise or motif, if you will, and I'm a fervent advocate of the 'what if' game during the writing process."
-Bill Moody

Ursula K. Le Guin: R.I.P.

Very sad news. I was privileged to meet Ursula K.  Le Guin several times and was even on a panel with her. Sharing the stage with her was awe inspiring and scary. I'm sure I was incoherent. Ursula K. Le Guin was one of my heroes. She accomplished so much.

From the NYT:

Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like “The Left Hand of Darkness” and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88.

Ms. Le Guin embraced the standard themes of her chosen genres: sorcery and dragons, spaceships and planetary conflict. But even when her protagonists are male, they avoid the macho posturing of so many science fiction and fantasy heroes. The conflicts they face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles.

Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Several, including “The Left Hand of Darkness” — set on a planet where the customary gender distinctions do not apply — have been in print for almost 50 years. The critic Harold Bloom lauded Ms. Le Guin as “a superbly imaginative creator and major stylist” who “has raised fantasy into high literature for our time.”

In addition to more than 20 novels, she was the author of a dozen books of poetry, more than 100 short stories (collected in multiple volumes), seven collections of essays, 13 books for children and five volumes of translation, including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral. She also wrote a guide for writers.

  
Read More Here

From Locus Magazine:

Le Guin was a towering figure in the field, famed for her fiction and non-fiction alike, with a career in SF that spanned more than 50 years. She was a Hugo Award nominee 23 times and won five, and won six Nebula Awards, with 18 nominations. Other major awards included the World Fantasy Award for life achievement, the Eaton Award for life achievement, and the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and fantasy scholarship. Several of her works have been collected in editions from the prestigious Library of America.

Le Guin began publishing SF in 1962, and wrote numerous major novels of adult and YA SF and fantasy, including The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed (1974), A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Orsinian Tales (1976), Always Coming Home (1985), Gifts (2004), and Lavinia (2008). Le Guin was equally adept as a short fiction writer, with countless influential and iconic stories, among them “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” (1971), “The Word for World is Forest” (1972), “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1974), “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (1987), “The Matter of Seggri” (1994), and “A Woman’s Liberation” (1995). 

Her fiction collections were numerous and celebrated, among them The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987), A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994), Unlocking the Air (1996), The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002), Changing Planes (2003), two volumes of The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, and The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). She also wrote for children, including the Catwings series, and numerous other pictures books, along with poetry, and plays.

Le Guin was unparralled as a critic, SF scholar, thinker, and social commentator. Important works of non-fiction include From Elfland to Poughkeepsie (1973), The Language of the Night (1979), Always Coming Home (1987), Dancing at the End of the World (1989), Steering the Craft (1998), The Wave in the Mind (2004), Words are My Matter (2016), and No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017). She also edited anthologies.

Read More Here

Fred Bass, Strand Bookstore: R.I.P.

Fred Bass, who transformed his father’s small used-book store, the Strand, into a mammoth Manhattan emporium with the slogan “18 Miles of Books,” died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89. The cause was congestive heart failure.

From the NYT:

Mr. Bass was 13 when he began working at the Strand, founded by his father, Benjamin. At the time, it was one of nearly 50 such stores concentrated along Fourth Avenue. Except for two years in the Army, he never left, until retiring in November 2017.

A year after taking over as manager of the store in 1956, he moved it from Fourth Avenue to its present location, on Broadway at 12th Street, where it occupied half the ground floor of what had been a clothing business. He set the Strand on a path of unstoppable expansion, taking over the entire first floor, then, in the 1970s, the top three floors, adding an antiquarian department along the way.

Following his father’s playbook, he pursued a policy of aggressive acquisition.

“At first I used to think he was crazy,” Mr. Bass told the cable news channel NY1 in 2015. “Why are we buying extra books? We haven’t sold all these. But we just kept buying and buying. It was a fact — you can’t sell a book you don’t have.”

The 70,000 books in the Fourth Avenue store swelled, at the Broadway site, to half a million by the mid-1960s and 2.5 million by the 1990s, requiring the purchase of a storage warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. By the time Mr. Bass bought the building for $8.2 million in 1997, the Strand had become the largest used-book store in the world.

Into his late 80s, Mr. Bass stood behind a counter, appraising books and authorizing payment on the spot to book-laden sellers cleaning out their apartments, critics offloading surplus review copies and the down-at-heel looking to collect a few dollars.

Continue Reading HERE.

Sue Grafton: R.I.P.

This is such sad news -- a terrible way to end the year. Sue Grafton passed away last night from cancer at the age of 77. She was such a gracious and talented woman.

Sue Grafton has been published in 28 countries and 26 languages — including Estonian, Bulgarian, and Indonesian. Books in her Kinsey Milhone Alphabet series, beginning with A is for Alibi in 1982 and ending this year with Y is for Yesterday, are international bestsellers with readership in the millions.

Named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, Sue also received many other honors and awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, the Ross Macdonald Literary Award, the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award from Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Malice Domestic, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Left Coast Crime, the Anthony Award given by Bouchercon, the Macavity, the Barry, and three Shamus Awards.

Her experience as a screenwriter taught her the basics of structuring a story, writing dialogue, and creating action sequences. Grafton then felt ready to return to writing fiction. While going through a "bitter divorce and custody battle that lasted six long years," Grafton imagined ways to kill or maim her ex-husband. Her fantasies were so vivid that she decided to write them down. We all remember 'The Jerk" and the stories she told about him.

She had long been fascinated by mysteries that had related titles, including those by John D. MacDonald, whose titles referenced colors, and Harry Kemelman, who used days of the week. While reading Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabetical picture book of children who die by various means, she had the idea to write a series of novels based on the alphabet. She immediately sat down and made a list of all of the crime-related words that she knew.

This exercise led to her best-known works, a chronological series of mystery novels. Known as "the alphabet novels," the stories are set in and around the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California. It is based on Santa Barbara, outside of which Grafton maintained a home in the suburb of Montecito. (Grafton chose to use the name Santa Teresa as a tribute to the author Ross Macdonald, who had used it as a fictional name for Santa Barbara in his own novels.)

Sue was one of my heroes... one of those people you admire, respect, and emulate. I've read all of her books--from A is for Alibi to Y is for Yesterday. In 1986 when she published C is for Corpse, I invited her to speak at our fledgling Mystery Readers Literary Salon. Not surprisingly, she was a big hit. At the 1990 Bouchercon in London, she replaced the 'little black dress' with a black beaded jacket and pants, just as versatile. I don't remember Kinsey wearing that, but it was perfect! I emulated her fashion prowess!

I got to spend time with Sue in 2011 at Malice Domestic where we shared top billing...well, as if.. I received the Poirot Award, and she, the Lifetime Achievement Award, so we were thrown together at various functions and talks. I mention this because we both received Malice teapots which we shipped back to our respective homes. Several weeks later, I noticed my teapot read "Sue Grafton: Lifetime Achievement"... After a short time considering the ethical thing to do, I emailed Sue and let her know. Yes, our teapots had been switched by the shippers. For a brief moment I had a very special souvenir.  In 2014, I asked Sue to be the Lifetime Achievement Guest at Left Coast Crime in Monterey. There I got to spend more time with her and her husband Steve discussing travel and gardening and the Kentucky Derby. She was so gracious and the perfect guest. Sue was also very supportive of new and veteran writers. I ran into her at several conventions, and I was always amazed to see her sitting alone in panel sessions, taking notes. She was a good friend to everyone in the mystery community. She will be missed.

Sorry, I'm still reeling from this news.

Her daughter posted this today on Sue's Facebook Page:

Hello Dear Readers. This is Sue's daughter, Jamie. I am sorry to tell you all that Sue passed away last night after a two year battle with cancer. She was surrounded by family, including her devoted and adoring husband Steve. Although we knew this was coming, it was unexpected and fast. She had been fine up until just a few days ago, and then things moved quickly. 

Sue always said that she would continue writing as long as she had the juice. Many of you also know that she was adamant that her books would never be turned into movies or TV shows, and in that same vein, she would never allow a ghost writer to write in her name. Because of all of those things, and out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.

Sue leaves behind her legacy of wonderful books, her husband, three children, and several grandchildren. She was a remarkable woman, and the world won't be the same without her. R.I.P., Sue.

For a fun article about Sue Grafton that you may have missed, check out Garden and Gun, February/March 2014 "Sue Grafton's Kentucky Garden"

And, an excellent interview from The Armchair Detective, Volume 22, Issue 1, Winter 1989, G is for (Sue) Grafton,  reprinted on Murder and Mayhem

Steve Landesberg: R.I.P.

Steve Landesberg who played Det. Sgt. Dietrich on the TV Show Barney Miller from 1975-1982, as well as other roles, most recently in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, died of cancer this morning. He was 65. More news soon.