A Portrayer of Small-Town Darkness

John F. “Jack” O’Connell, who gained public attention as the author of crime novels set in the worn-out, fictional New England city of Quinsigamond, died on January 1, just as 2024 was stretching its wings. According to an obituary in Worcester, Massachusetts’ Telegram & Gazette, he perished “after a brief illness” (the details of which aren’t supplied). O’Connell was 64 years old.

Born in Worcester in December 1959, O’Connell attended St. John’s High School in the nearby town of Shrewsbury, and graduated from Worcester’s College of the Holy Cross in 1981. “Jack’s vocation was writing,” says his obit. “He found great success as a noir-suspense novelist, publishing five books, beginning with Box Nine for which Mysterious Press awarded him winner of The Mysterious Press Discovery Contest for best first novel in 1992.” His later novels included Wireless (1993) and the one I remember best, 1996’s The Skin Palace. O’Connell was a finalist for a Shirley Jackson Award in 2008, for his final book, The Resurrectionist. That same work won him France’s Prix Mystère de la critique in 2010.

In addition to his fiction, O’Connell served for more than a decade (1997-2008) as editor of the Holy Cross Magazine, “a quarterly publication for the College of the Holy Cross Community.”

When he was interviewed by that very periodical back in 2009, O’Connell said he’d been “contracted for a novel about a cult of South American ‘train surfers’—street kids who ‘surf’ atop high-speed train cars. I’ve had this story waiting on deck for over 10 years.” My understanding is that tale never saw print.

(Hat tip to reader Mark R. Harris.)