Marks Made His Mark

Although I’m late in mentioning this, I must note the death of Paul D. Marks, the award-winning Los Angeles short-story writer and novelist. According to a note from his wife, Amy, posted on Facebook,

Paul passed away on Sunday, February 28th. He died peacefully listening to Beatles and cowboy music. He loved sharing his film noir alerts, his dog walking pictures, his love of writing and his thoughts on life with you. He used to boast that he could go anywhere in the country and would have a Facebook friend he could have lunch with.

Marks penned the Shamus Award-winning novel White Heat and its sequel, Broken Windows, both published in 2018. His 2016 tale “Ghosts of Bunker Hill” won first place honors in that same year’s Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Award competition for short stories. His yarn “Howling at the Moon” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November 2014) was short-listed for both the 2015 Anthony and Macavity awards for Best Short Story, while another brief tale, “Windward,” was included in the Best American Mystery Stories of 2018, and won the 2018 Macavity Award for Best Short Story. The Blues Don't Care (2020) is Marks’ most recent novel, but he also co-edited (with Andrew McAleer) three short-story anthologies, among them last year’s Coast to Coast: Noir from Sea to Shining Sea. He contributed to the blogs SleuthSayers and Criminal Minds.

A native of L.A., Marks’ Web site says that much of his writing was “inspired by the city’s history and culture. Los Angeles and Southern California is often as much a ‘character’ in his work as the human characters. … His stories often deal with the changing nature of the city and the displacement it causes people. His characters are frequently people who time has passed by or who no longer fit in today’s society.” Marks had at various times served on the boards of both the L.A. chapter of Sisters in Crime and the SoCal chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

In a Criminal Minds post that went up in mid-January, Marks told readers that he’d “been on forced hiatus for a couple of months now,” after being diagnosed with cancer.

I was in the hospital off and on for several weeks. It was torture in more ways than one. My body reacted strongly to the first dose of chemo. That is, the chemo worked—maybe too well. And threw off all of my other labs and numbers. It was and—to some extent—still is a mess. But I’m home—mostly—these days. With some return hospital visits scheduled. And following up with chemo and other treatments.

There’s a lot to deal with and I’m shorthanding this greatly. It’s going to be a long, tough road, but at least it finally looks like a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Janet Rudolph writes in Mystery Fanfare: “I knew Paul had cancer, but we all thought he'd beat it and continue his long walks with the dogs, writing great stories and novels, illuminating the history and culture of Los Angeles, writing witty comments, and sharing his life with Amy and the dogs and cats.” Apparently that was not to be.

READ MORE: “Remembering Paul D. Marks” (Criminal Minds); “Fare Thee Well, Paul D. Marks,” by Robert Lopresti (SleuthSayers).