I just heard that Dennis Lynds has passed away.
Man, I loved that guy. I was just going to drop him a line to
check out what I did to his little state-of-the-union address
he so kindly offered to my site, and to thank him for
inviting me to write the intro tfor an upcoming collection of
his.
The only consolation is that, somewhere in hard-boiled
heaven, the Big Man is being grilled, and he won't be let off
easy. That's the thing about Dennis -- some people may have
not liked his politics, but he never -- ever -- offered easy,
pat solutions; he just knew which questions to ask. They were
frequently hard, unpleasant questions, and could make people
on all sides of the divide squirm, but they were questions
that needed asking, and were only rarely asked anywhere, much
less in crime fiction. Dennis never offered up answers, but
his writing sure demanded them.
Yeah, Dennis could -- and did -- tell a good story, be it the
Three Investigators or Dan Fortune, but it was his burning
hunger for justice in his best work, and his ability to flesh
out ideas and the most extreme and often objectionable
positions and humanize them, give them real weight, and force
us to question not just them but ourselves that kept me
reading.
The thing was, Dennis actually cared about people.
And he wasn't afraid to let it show. Talk about a man out of
time.
I'll miss him.
And in a world where our rights are, one by one, being
sacrificed in the name of God and Profit, we've all lost
something by Dennis' passing. He was one of the greats.
Shit... I'll miss him.
Kevin
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