It was reported on June 28, 2016 that Cormac McCarthy had died of a stroke. The story was a deliberate hoax, a lie that spread halfway around the world before it was quashed like the bug it was.

I received the news of McCarthy’s actual death on June 13, 2023, in a terse email delivered late in the afternoon on the day he passed. The report came from a lifelong friend who I had blessed and cursed decades ago by suggesting that he read McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN, one of those rare books that takes up permanent residency in the reader’s mind.

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Tom Clancy’s success was the type for which every potential author dreams. Write a novel (THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER) that is accepted by the first publisher to which it is submitted. It becomes a bestseller, helped to some measure by the recommendation of the sitting President of the United States, and is adapted for film.

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Elmore Leonard didn’t write crime fiction, westerns, historical thrillers or mysteries. He wrote Elmore Leonard books. No, that’s not quite right. He wrote Elmore Leonard books. You can bring an Elmore Leonard book to someone totally unfamiliar with genre fiction, say “try this” and make a believer out of them within the first few pages. When they run through everything from THE BOUNTY HUNTERS to MR. MAJESTYK (“hey...didn’t they make a movie of this?”) to FIFTY-TWO PICKUP to, yes, RAYLAN, they come back to you and ask, “Can you recommend anything else like this?” And you can, with the admonition that it will be almost, but not quite, as good as the real thing.

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As I grow older, I have more frequent cause to think of a quote from the Oscar-winning movie Harry and Tonto. It’s from Harry Coombes, who was played by the truly immortal Art Carney: “You never really feel somebody’s suffering; you only feel their death.”

Right now I’m feeling the death of Vince Flynn, one of our era’s top thriller authors and a terrific guy who passed away in the first hours of June 19, 2013. I first met Vince at ThrillerFest in New York several years ago, where he very graciously signed and personalized several of his books for my son Michael, who is a major fan of his. Vince was an easy guy to talk to, a skill he undoubtedly acquired in his prior vocational lives as a bartender and a commercial real estate agent. I never bought a drink or leased an office from him, but I did read every one of his books. From first to last, beginning to end, they were...well, I could run out of adjectives. Let’s start with riveting and thrilling, and go on to addicting, to name but three.

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