Their Lives All Mattered

In the past, I have found time at each year’s end to write about the people from the broader crime-fiction community who died during the previous 12 months. No such flexibility presents itself this week. Therefore, I am glad that Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph put together this record of contributors to the genre who passed away in 2023. It includes authors as diverse as Carol Higgins Clark, Tim Dorsey, Patricia Holt, Tom Savage, and Anne Perry. Mentioned, as well, is Jim Napier, a longtime Rap Sheet contributor from Canada, who apparently died on December 23 at age 81—though this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Born in 1942 and reared in California, James E. Napier later moved to Ontario to study philosophy at the University of Waterloo. He went on to pursue a teaching career, but retired in 2004 to take up crime-fiction reviewing and writing. “Author of the Colin McDermott series in Legacy (2017) and Ridley’s War (2020), Jim was writing his third novel and looking forward to publishing it in 2024,” according to this obituary. In addition to critiquing books for the Montreal Review of Books, the Ottawa Review of Books, and January Magazine, and maintaining an award-winning crime-fiction site called Deadly Diversions, Jim composed occasional reviews for The Rap Sheet. Since 2014, he had also participated in this blog’s annual “favorite crime fiction of the year” features. However, he never responded to my requests this last fall that he submit a favorites list for 2023; I might have recognized that as being significant, but did not.

I knew Jim had suffered vision problems in his right eye for a long while, which limited his print-reading opportunities to a mere 20-30 minutes at a stretch. I didn’t think, though, that he was on the verge of leaving us. I’m only glad to read in his obituary that he “died peacefully surrounded by loved ones.” I offer my condolences to Jim’s family. Thank you for sharing him with the rest of us.

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In addition to the late authors Mystery Fanfare recognizes, let us remember several people who, before they breathed their last in 2023, lent their abundant talents to crime and mystery films or television shows: Peter S. Fischer, who, among other things, co-created the CBS-TV series Murder, She Wrote; Richard Roundtree, who played super-cool, super-tough New York City private eye John Shaft on both the large and small screens; Man From U.N.C.L.E. co-star David McCallum; actress Sharon Farrell, who appeared with James Garner in Marlowe (1969) and later featured in series such as The Name of the Game and Harry O; Canadian-born Sharon Acker, who was seen regularly on Hec Ramsey and The New Perry Mason; Barry Newman, who led the 1974-1976 NBC-TV legal drama Petrocelli; Rupert Heath, the founder and publisher of Dean Street Press; Robert Blake, who went from headlining ABC-TV’s Baretta to defending himself from charges that he murdered his wife in 2001; Barbara Bosson, a frequent fixture in her husband, Steven Bochco’s shows, from Hill Street Blues to Hooperman; and two familiar faces from Homicide: Life on the Street—Andre Braugher and Richard Belzer.

READ MORE: “Notable Deaths of 2023” (The Washington Post).