When I first posted the news about Dennis's passing, I was
too shocked, having heard the news only minutes earlier, to
more than say he was a fine writer and a fine man.
I was going to post something else when I got my thoughts
together, but I spoke at his memorial at Bouchercon, and
posting something else here seemed superfluous after
that.
An off-list correspondent asked me about that memorial
service and requested that I post the comments I made that
night here.
I spoke extemporaneously, so what follows is more an
approximate memory of what I said that night, than a
word-for-word transcipt:
I first met Dennis at the very first Bouchercon I ever
attended. You've all heard tonight how accessible Dennis was
to his fellow writers, but when I first met him, I wasn't a
pro in any sense. I'm not that much of a pro now. At best,
I'm a semi-pro. But that day I was just an overeager
"fanboy," who was flattered to be treated kindly and
graciously by a wrier whose work I'd so admired.
I'm here to tell you that, as accessible as he was to his
fellow writers, he was just as accessible to his fans.
You've also heard how versatile he was as an author. Anyone
who can write so well about characters as varied as Nick
Carter, The Shadow, and The Three Investigators would
certainly qualify as versatile, but to get a real sense of
just how versatile he could be, you should check out two of
his earliest series characters, both characters firmly rooted
in the traditions of the hard-boiled private eye, Dan Fortune
and Kane Jackson.
Fortune and Jackson both came along in the late '60's, when
the private eye form was very tightly constrained. Yet,
within in a year, he'd produced books about two characters
who were so different, yet who both fit firmly and
comfortably within those constraints.
You've heard tonight that Dennis, despite the passion of his
political beliefs, never made people who disagreed with him
feel that he held them in contempt.
His Kane Jackson novels are proof of that. Jackson was
not a guy Dennis would have agreed with politically, yet he
was able to get inside this guy's head and make him the hero.
Jackson was a competely different character from Fortune, who
handled completely different kinds of cases, whose stories
were told in a completely different style and voice. If you
didn't know that Michael Collins and William Arden were both
the same guy, you'd have know idea that they were same guy.
THAT'S versatility!
I'll also confirm Dennis's warm-hearted good nature. He and I
weren't on the same page politically. We weren't even in the
same book. I'm not even sure we were on the same shelf. But
he never made me feel, as others have, that my political
views made me somehow contemptible.
I lost my own Dad a little more than a year ago. When he
passed, a friend told me later, "He was the epitome of a
gentleman."
Dennis was part of the same generation as Dad, a generation
we've come to recognize as the "Greatest Generation." He was
a very different kind of guy than Dad was, but, in his very
different way, he, like Dad, was "the epitome of a
gentleman."
The person who asked me to post that had been a friend of
Dennis's for a long time. I hope he feels I did Dennis
justice.
JIM DOHERTY
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 09 Oct 2005 EDT