Levinson Leaves Us

I haven’t yet seen any official obituary, but multiple Web sources are reporting that New York-born Los Angeles author Robert S. Levinson died yesterday, March 13, “after a hard-fought battle with pneumonia.” Levinson, a newspaper reporter turned advertising and public-relations director, and a former president of the Mystery Writers of America’s Southern California chapter, was the author of the Neil Gulliver and Stevie Marriner series (The Elvis and Marilyn Affair, Hot Paint—which I reviewed in this early newsletter version of The Rap Sheet—and The Stardom Affair), as well as standalone novels such as Ask a Dead Man (2004) and The Evil Deeds We Do (2015).

According to his Web site, the 76-year-old Levinson

won the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Best Short Story Derringer Award for “The Quick Brown Fox,” a short that originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. The short is also featured in the anthology Between the Dark and the Daylight and 28 More of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories [2009]. An original short, “Down in Capistrano,” appears in Orange County Noir, and another, “The Night of the Murder,” in the anthology Crime Square. Another original, “The Dead Detective,” appears in The Sound and the Furry: Stories to Benefit the International Fund for Animal Welfare, as well as [in] the Coast to Coast short-story collection.

Levinson, a Shamus Award nominee, was an Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Award winner three consecutive years. To date, his short stories have been selected for inclusion in “year’s best” anthologies eight consecutive years, including the cover title piece (from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) in A Prisoner of Memory and 24 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories [2008].

A list of this author’s novels, plus more biographical information, can be found at the Book Series in Order site.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

READ MORE: “Lights! Camera! Levinson!” by Bob Levinson (Meanderings and Muses); “On the Bubble with Bob Levinson,” by Elaine Flinn (Murderati).