Two new booklists - in memoriam

Two new booklists have been posted to the BookGuide pages, paying tribute to two authors whom we've lost in recent weeks. Both lists are printable in PDF format, and offer complete lists of the individual authors' works, all of which are still available through the collections of the Lincoln City Libraries, as well as some biographical background on each of their writing careers.

Remembering Stephen J. Cannell, 1941-2010

Remembering Belva Plain, 1915-2010

You can find (and print) both of these, plus dozens of other fascinating booklists on BookGuide's Booklists page. Or search the booklists archive by genre category.

R.I.P. Stephen J. Cannell, 1941-2010

R.I.P. Stephen J. Cannell, 1941-2010
Originally uploaded by BookGuide at LCL

Legendary television producer Stephen J. Cannell -- creator of The Rockford Files, The Greatest American Hero, Wiseguy, The A-Team, Silk Stalkings, Profit, 21 Jump Street and Baa Baa Black Sheep, and the novelist behind the popular Shane Scully thriller series, died September 30th, 2010 at his home in California, of complications from melanoma. He was 69 years old.

Cannell was one of television's most successful independent producers of action-adventure dramas throughout the 1980s and early 1990s; at one point in the late 80s, he had 5 of his series on the air simultaneously. Cannell originally had tremendous difficulty in school, as he suffered from the reading disability dyslexia. He persevered until college, when a creative writing teacher encouraged him to continue writing despite his difficulties.

In the 1970s, he became a story editor on ADAM 12, for producer Jack Webb, and continued to write and produce series such as THE ROCKFORD FILES and BARETTA for Universal, with Roy Huggins serving as a working mentor to him. In 1979, he launched his own independent tv production company, so as to have greater creative and financial control over the series he created, and went on to tremendous success. Having been mentored successfully, he served as the mentor to many others in the industry and was always willing to share writing tips with up-and-coming writers.

Throughout the years, his personal goal was to become a best-selling novelist, and after his company got out of television production in the late 1990s, he finally got the chance to live out his dream. He is the author of over 15 bestsellers, including 9 in the Shane Scully series; a tenth is due later in October.

More information about Cannell is available at:

His official web site

and dozens of other web sites across the internet.

Robert B. Parker, 1932-2010

Best-selling and incredibly popular American mystery author Robert B. Parker -- creator of iconic Boston P.I. Spenser and more recent series featuring Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone (among others), died January 18, 2010, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Parker's death comes as a shock -- he was in relatively good health, and was found at his desk by his wife following her morning jog.

Parker was extremely prolific, producing over 50 novels, 37 of which featured the singularly-named Spenser, which also served as the inspiration for 1980s TV series Spenser For Hire (starring the late Robert Urich). Parker's first novel -- also his first Spenser -- was The Godwulf Manuscript, in 1973.

Parker had also developed three other regular series: Jesse Stone -- 9 books featuring a disgraced California cop who sets up shop as a small-town Police captain on the East Coast (starting in 1997) -- turned into a series of TV-movies starring Tom Selleck in the title role; Sunny Randall, 6 books featuring a female Boston P.I. (starting in 1999); and a western series featuring Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, which had reached 3 volumes from 2005 to 2009. Parker was also a huge fan of Raymond Chandler, and wrote two follow-up volumes to Chandler's works, one (Poodle Springs) completing an unfinished Chandler manuscript, and the 2nd (Perchance to Dream) completely original.

Parker is considered groundbreaking for developing the "thinking man's private eye", and opened doors for many of today's popular hard-boiled authors.

Boston Herald obit for Robert B. Parker

Washington Post obit for Robert B. Parker

Wikipedia page for Robert Parker (with complete list of credits)

FantasticFiction page for Robert Parker (with complete list of credits)

Internet Movie Database page for Robert B. Parker (with list of screen credits)

R.I.P. - Ira Levin

Ira Levin, American novelist and playwright, died on November 12, 2007 in New York City, at the age of 78.

Born and raised in New York City, Levin attended the prestigious Horace Mann high school, then both Drake University and New York University. He had known he wanted to be a writer since he was 15, and as a senior in college he submitted a script to a screenwriting contest that was ultimately produced as an episode of NBC's Lights Out. Levin spent his Army years writing training films for the armed services, then sequed into scripts for 1950s television.

Levin's first novel was 1953's A Kiss Before Dying, a mystery which ultimately won him the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best "first novel". Levin then focused on stage plays for a dozen years, authoring No Time for Sergeants, which helped launch the career of comic actor Andy Griffith. In 1967, he returned to the novel form, producing the darkly atmospheric horror novel Rosemary's Baby. Horror also dominated his next two novels, This Perfect Day (1970) and The Stepford Wives (1972). 1976 brought international thriller The Boys From Brazil, and Levin continued to write for the stage as well, producing Veronica's Room (1973) and perhaps his best-known play, Deathtrap (1978), a comic mystery, among others.

Though his output was less prodigious in more recent years, he managed the thriller Sliver in 1993 and Son of Rosemary: The Sequel to Rosemary's Baby in 1997. Levin may not have produced a huge number of novels, but his style influenced many other genre writers, including Peter Straub, Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk, and his works continue to entertain and thrill to this day.

Here are some links to additional Ira Levin information:

Ira Levin's works in the Lincoln City Libraries catalog

Ira Levin's entry in the Internet Movie Database
New York Times article on his death
Obituary in The Guardian

R.I.P. - Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer, one of the leading figures of what came to be known as The New Journalism in the 1960s through the 1980s, died November 10, 2007 at the age of 84.

Mailer was born Norman Kingsley, into a traditional Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. Following a family move, Mailer had a typical upbringing in Brooklyn, NY, and eventually attended Harvard, starting in 1939. Graduating with an aeronautical engineering degree in 1943, Mailer was drafted into the U.S. Army, and served in the Philippines during WWII. Having become fascinated with writing while at Harvard, Mailer turned his experiences during the war into his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. This novel received critical and popular acclaim and has gone on to be listed as one of the Top 100 English Language Novels by the Modern Library.

Other prominent Mailer novels included Barbary Shore (1951), The Deer Park (1955), Ancient Evenings (1983), Harlot's Ghost (1991) and his most recent best-seller, The Castle in the Forest (2007).

Although the novel form was Mailer's favorite writing format, it is perhaps for his non-fiction books and essays that he will remain best known. His non-fiction often took an experimental "fiction-like" form, and his topics and views could be incendiary. Some of the non-fiction works for which he is reknowned would include: "The White Negro" (1957 essay), Advertisements for Myself (1959), The Armies of the Night (1968), The Fight (1975) and Why Are We At War? (2003). Mailer also wrote several noteworthy biographies of prominent individuals, including Marilyn: A Biography [Marily Monroe] (1973) and Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995). He also dabbled in plays, screenplays, and film directing.

In his public life, Mailer became something of a political and social activist, running for Mayor of New York City on a radical platform, participating in anti-war activities opposing the Vietnam War, and lobbying on behalf of prison inmates. His personal life could be problematic -- he had 8 children from 6 marriages, and fought both drug and alcohol abuse at various times during his career.

In the end, whether readers agreed with his politics or not, he is considered an American original -- one of the more innovative and thought-provoking authors in the latter half of the 20th century, and a voice whose absence will be noted.

Here are some links to additional Norman Mailer information:

The Norman Mailer Society
Mailer's named essay, The White Negro
New York Times' obituary for Mailer