He wrote best-sellers like “The Day of the Jackal” and “The Dogs of War,” often using material from his earlier life as a reporter and spy. Read more
Category: Obituaries
Peter Lovesey, a Master of British Whodunits, Is Dead at 88
He wrote a series of witty police procedurals set in Victorian England and then turned to the present, introducing a cantankerous and technology-averse detective. Read more
Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel-Winning Peruvian Novelist, Dies at 89
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world, died on Sunday in Lima. Read more
Irish Crime Writer Ken Bruen Dies Aged 74
The author published more than 50 works including the acclaimed Jack Taylor crime novels. Read more
Joseph Wambaugh, Author With a Cop’s-Eye View, Is Dead at 88
Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died on Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Read more
Tom Robbins, Whose Comic Novels Drew a Cult Following, Dies at 92
Tom Robbins, whose cosmically comic novels about gargantuan-thumbed hitchhikers, stoned secret agents and mystic stockbrokers caught hold of millions of readers in the 1970s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in La Conner, Wash. Read more
Jules Feiffer, Acerbic Cartoonist, Writer and Much Else, Dies at 95
In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature. Read more
David Lodge, British Novelist Who Satirized Academic Life, Dies at 89
The author of 15 novels and more than a dozen nonfiction books as well as plays and screenplays, Mr. Lodge was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his work has been translated into dozens of languages. His best-known work, “Campus Trilogy,” dramatized the brief heyday of English literature as a discipline and the jet-setting lifestyle of its professoriate. Read more
Jimmy Carter: Poet, Novelist, Memoirist, Philosopher
He wasn’t just prolific, publishing 32 books. His output also showed an unusual range that included memoirs and forays into historical fiction and even poetry. Read more
Barry N. Malzberg Dies at 85
The key fact about Malzberg was not just that he was fast—but that he was good. Perfectly readable was his baseline minimum, and when he was at his peak, he overshot that to achieve genuine brilliance. It’s easy enough to tote up evidence of Malzberg’s prolificity: In his peak decade, from 1967 to 1976, Malzberg wrote at least 68 novels and seven story collections along with scores of still uncollected stories published in many magazines and anthologies. He worked in a variety of genres, including mystery, thrillers, erotica, and adventure fiction, but his core work was in science fiction. Malzberg’s best science fiction novels—titles such as Beyond Apollo (1972), Herovit’s World (1973), Guernica Night (1975), and Galaxies (1975)—were astonishingly incisive critiques of modern technology and mass society. Intimately familiar with the genre, Malzberg used all the familiar SF tropes (space exploration, time travel, alternative histories) but amped them up with a bracing dose of pessimism and the stylistic bravura of literary modernism. Read more
