Friday, July 1, 2011

All My Favorite Authors are Dead

In the past years, my favorite mystery writers have all died. All were prolific and all had long, distinguished careers. All left long backlists, totaling hundreds of books. The problem is, I’ve read most of them. However, if you’re not familiar with them, you have a treat in store.

It started with Ed McBain, author of the 87th Precinct mystery series. With titles such Let’s Hear it for the Deaf Man and Cop Hater, McBain transformed the police procedural into something more than the standard mystery, with complex characters and unusual storylines. Under his real name of Evan Hunter, McBain wrote many other books, including The Blackboard Jungle.

Then there’s Tony Hillerman. In his books featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police he brought to life a segment of American society unknown to many people. Set in the southwest, such books as Dance Hall of the Dead and The Shape Shifters revolve around life on the Navajo reservation, and are influenced by Navajo mythology and traditions. These are good, absorbing reading. I miss Hillerman.

Donald Westlake was best known for his Dortmunder series, a career criminal who dreams up grandiose plots for capers that always go just a little bit wrong. From The Hot Rock, the first book in the series, to Get Real, the final one, Dortmunder and pals blunder through one comic misadventure after another. Westlake also wrote many stand-alone titles, as well as other mysteries and Westerns under various pseudonyms. I’m really going to miss Westlake.

Stuart Kaminsky authored several series, each one featuring offbeat characters. Toby Peters is a detective in 1930’s and 1940’s Hollywood, who works with such people as Groucho Marx (You Bet Your Life) and Cary Grant (To Catch a Spy). His other series feature Abe Lieberman, an aging and much put-upon Chicago detective; Lew Fonesca, a process server who lives in a decrepit office building behind a Dairy Queen in Sarasota; and Inspector Rostnikov, who battles crime and corruption in post-Communist Russia. Kaminsky was also a film historian and screenwriter; he wrote the screenplay for Once Upon a Time in America.

Within the last few years, we lost a trio of great Massachusetts authors. First was Philip R. Craig, whose books featuring J. W. Jackson are set on Martha’s Vineyard. A former Boston detective, Jackson now does odd jobs around the island when he’s not fishing for stripers and bluefish. He should be enjoying the good life, but in books such as A Shoot on Martha's Vineyard and A Beautiful Place to Die, he keeps encountering murder. Who knew the Vineyard was such a hotbed of crime? Craig also authored a cookbook, Delish!: The J. W. Jackson Recipes, which is well worth a look.

Like Jackson, Brady Coyne, the lawyer hero of the books by Boston author William G. Tapply, is an avid fisherman. Tapply and Craig, good friends, collaborated on several novels featuring both characters, beginning with First Light. Conscientious and dedicated to his clients, Coyne finds himself in suspenseful and dangerous situations, while dealing with a difficult personal life. Some of the titles in this series are Past Tense and Nervous Water.

Last, but never least, is Robert B. Parker. From the first book in the Spenser series, The Godwulf Manuscript, to the last, Sixkill, Parker wrote consistently entertaining stories about a man in a violent profession, who is not himself violent, and has a strict code of honor. In doing so, Parker transformed the private eye genre from the stereotypical hard-drinking macho detective, to a multi-faceted character. Parker also wrote two other series, and some stand-alone titles. The Spenser series and the Jesse Stone series will be continued by other authors, but somehow I don’t think it will be the same. I miss Parker a lot.

All of these authors left terrific legacies, in their books. But if you’ve read them all, as I have, the question is: what do I read now?