A Sad Vineyard Day

Philip R. Craig fans received a hard blow yesterday, with news that the novelist has died at age 73, “after a short illness,” according to his friend and occasional co-author, William G. Tapply.

Craig was born in Santa Monica, California, and reared in Colorado, but eventually came to live in Edgartown, Massachusetts, after attending Boston University “with the intention of becoming a minister.” He was best known for having written 17 books featuring J.W. “Jeff” Jackson, a former Boston cop who, in his mid-30s, retired to what he thought would be a more sedate life on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts, only to become involved there with one crime after the next. The first installment of that soft-boiled series was A Beautiful Place to Die (1989), while the most recent was Death in Vineyard Sand (2006). In addition, Craig and Tapply conspired (the two penning alternating chapters) on a trio of mysteries that brought Jackson together with Tapply’s protagonist, Beantown lawyer Brady Coyne. The first of these works was First Light (2001), while the last, Third Strike, is still to come from Scribner in November of this year.

Tapply offers a fine remembrance of his friend and co-writer here, while Mystery*File presents a rundown of Craig’s work and brief excerpts from three of his Vineyard books here.

UPDATE: The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura notes that Craig left behind two as-yet-unseen novels when he died on Tuesday. “The 18th and probably last novel in the Martha’s Vineyard series,” Kimura says, “will be Vineyard Stalker, to be published in this coming June--the 19th one, The Adventurer, is unfinished.” Are we the only ones thinking that Tapply might be the perfect candidate to complete The Adventurer, which sounds like a standalone?

READ MORE: “The Phil ’n’ Bill Show,” by William G. Tapply and Philip R. Craig (William G. Tapply Online).