We’re Poorer Without Their Presence

Mike Ripley’s mid-April “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots is chockfull of newsy morsels and sharp-witted remarks destined to entertain mystery-fiction fans. Subjects range from the mysterious author “Frank Ross” and Pierre Boulle’s short fiction to forthcoming novels built around fantasy vacations and other releases by the likes of Alan Parks, Christobel Kent, Don Winslow, and Ragnar Jónasson.

Included, too, is a mention of Thalia Proctor’s recent demise.

“Thalia was well-known in the [British] crime-writing community as a knowledgeable and well-read fan, a bookseller and an editor with Little, Brown,” Ripley explains. She had worked previously at London’s Murder One bookshop and at Goldsboro Books in Cecil Court. It was during her years in the later position that I met Thalia at a 2004 book-launch party for Michael Marshall (Smith)’s The Lonely Dead. My wife and I were vacationing in the UK capital, and joined Rap Sheet correspondent Ali Karim, Shots editor Mike Stotter, and novelist Simon Kernick at a public house in (if memory serves) the city’s theater district, where much praise was heaped upon Marshall and much beer was imbibed by all. After the festivities had run their course, we joined Ali, Mike, and Thalia in a weaving excursion to some Chinese restaurant not far distant and there continued our conversation about crime fiction, while also trying to fill our stomachs with more than just booze. My recollections of Thalia match the description of her that New York Times columnist Sarah Weinman proffers in the most recent edition of her newsletter, The Crime Lady: “Thalia … had the biggest heart, most gorgeous laugh, and a great sense of fun.” I have thought often since about that long-ago drunken evening in London—always with a smile—and regret that I shall never be able to re-create it. Thalia passed away on April 2, at age 51, from “complications relating to breast cancer,” according to Weinman.

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Also notable is the death, on April 9, of thriller writer Jack Higgins. Born Henry Patterson in England in 1929, the teacher turned writer—best known for his 1975 novel, The Eagle Has Landed—was 92 years old when he expired on Jersey, in the Channel Islands.

Less than a week later, Neil Nyren, Patterson’s former editor at G.P. Putnam’s Sons (and now editor-at-large for CrimeReads) contributed a touching remembrance of the author to Publishers Weekly. You really should read it in its entirety, but here’s Nyren’s conclusion:

[Patterson] loved what he did, and he was proud to be a member of the thriller community.

In 2009, I was in London to help him celebrate his 80th birthday. A roomful of his friends, family, and colleagues were there, and I’ll share what I told them then: Some people are good writers, I said, and some writers are good people. But when you have both in the same person, that’s a treasure you hold onto.

Harry Patterson was a treasure. I will always hold onto him.

Click here to learn more.

READ MORE: “A Little About Jack Higgins: A Life in Writing,” by Ben Boulden (Dark City Underground).