2010 has started out with a bang, and it’s not a good one:  quite a few well-known writers have died since this year began!

Here are some of the authors we’ve lost:

William Tuohy, 83
He was a former Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who covered the Vietnam War and who wrote three well-known books: DANGEROUS COMPANY (1987), detailing his time as a war correspondent; THE BRAVEST MAN: The Story of Richard O’Kane and U.S. Submariners in the Pacific War (2001); and “AMERICA’S FIGHTING ADMIRALS: Winning the War at Sea in World War II” (2007). Tuohy died Dec. 31 after open-heart surgery at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif.

Dick Zunt, 78
Cleveland’s Plain Dealer sports writer who covered the city’s high school teams for more than 50 years, died on Jan 2nd.

Margery Beddow, 72
Broadway dancer, choreographer, director and author of BOB FOSSE’S BROADWAY, also passed away Jan 2nd.

Stephen Huneck, 60
A Vermont man whose love of dogs inspired his art and books (SALLY GOES TO THE BEACH, MY DOG”S BRAIN) and the building of a unique dog chapel,  died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Jan 7th. He had been suffering from depression for quite some time before taking his own life.

William J. Lederer, 97
Co-author of THE UGLY AMERICAN, the fiction book that brought to light some of the US foreign service’s unsavory practices and associations in Southeast Asia and which was to serve as a warning about the coming loss of US influence in the area, passed away on Dec 5th, but it wasn’t made public until a month later while funeral arrangements were being made.  A former Naval line officer in World War II, he’s to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery on Feb 16th.

George B. Leonard, 86
An editor and writer for Look magazine and an advocate for counterculture and the “human potential movement”, over the years he wrote a dozen books, including “The Transformation: A Guide to the Inevitable Changes in Humankind” (1972), “The Silent Pulse: A Search for the Perfect Rhythm That Exists in Each of Us” (1978), “The End of Sex: Erotic Love After the Sexual Revolution” (1983), “Walking on the Edge of the World” (1988) and “The Ultimate Athlete” (2001).  He passed away on Jan 6th.

Georges Anglade, 65
Canadian geographer and author, he and his wife Mireille, also 65, were killed in the Port-Au-Prince earthquake on Jan. 12.  Born in Haiti, Anglade had moved to France during the reign of dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, getting a degree in geography.  He then moved to Canada in the late ’60s, teaching geography at l’Université du Québec à Montréal, a school he helped found. During the 1990s, he turned to writing French-language books:  ”Les Blancs de Mémoire” (Memory Blanks), “Leurs jupons dépassent” (Their Slips are Showing), “Ce pays qui m’habite” (This Country that Lives Inside Me) and “Et si Haïti déclarait la guerre aux USA?” (And What if Haiti Declared War on the USA)

Erich Segal, 72
Best known for the tearjerker LOVE STORY, Segal died of a heart attack on Jan 17th.  He had suffered with Parkinson’s disease for more than 2 decades.  Unlike most bestselling books, LOVE STORY was actually a novelization of an uproduced screenplay by Segal rather than starting life as an original manuscript. The book was critically panned when it came out, and even the National Book Award jury threatened to walk out if the book wasn’t taken out of contention for that year’s award. (It was removed to their delight, but the publisher had the last laugh as the book spent a year on the hardcover bestseller lists…)  The screenplay was finally produced about then, and the movie became a blockbuster.

Robert B. Parker, 77
A writer who “died in the saddle” (he had a heart attack at his writing desk on Jan. 18), Parker was the profilic author of the Spenser murder mystery series, writing 37 books in that set alone. Spenser (no first name), a wise-cracking, street-smart and surprisingly literate Boston P.I. became extremely popular, propelling Parker onto the bestselling lists over and over, and spawning a TV series based on him. Another of his series characters, Jesse Stone, also became the basis for another TV series.

Paul Quarrington, 56
Award-winning author of WHALE MUSIC, a book loosely based on Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson’s life which was made into a movie, Quarrington passed away from lung cancer on Jan 21.  His memoir, Cigar Box Banjo, is due out in May.  He was also a screenwriter, helping to pen the TV series DUE SOUTH.

Dave Berry, 66
He wrote the reference work WALES AND CINEMA – The First Hundred Years and was a former critic and correspondent with the South Wales Echo. Mr. Berry had been ill for some time before he passed away on Jan 23rd.

Howard Zinn, 87
Author of the book “A People’s History of the United States”, which started out with a small printing (5000)  back in 1980 and almost no interest and then grew into a million-copy selling monster, died from a heart attack in Santa Monica, California, on Jan 27th. His book took a very “left-wing” approach to history, taking “established” views of the past and turning them on their heads.  (Rather than treat historical figures such as Columbus and others as heroic explorers, he instead charged them with genocide.)  While many complained his books weren’t accurate or very thorough, he himself said his book wasn’t intended as the be-all and end-all of history books, but rather a starting place to discuss what really happened, a book to get people talking and creating change.

Louis Auchincloss, 92
A Manhattan lawyer, novelist, essayist, biographer and editor who wrote about the decline of the old WASP world of power and privilege (a world he was intimately familiar with), died Jan. 26 at Lenox Hill Hospital from complications from a stroke.  He was best known for books like THE RECTOR OF JUSTIN and THE EMBEZZLER, both written in the 1960s.  He also wrote POWER OF ATTORNEYS, a collection of short stories, all of which take place in a Manhattan law firm.

J. D. Salinger, 91
If you aren’t familiar with CATCHER IN THE RYE, you may be one of the only people in the world who’s never heard of it. Salinger’s book to date has sold over 60 million copies, and even though it was written in the early ’50s, it still resonates with readers today.  A reclusive writer, Salinger originally started out writing short fiction for magazines, especially the New Yorker.  However, after CATCHER became a mega-hit, Salinger developed an intense dislike for the publishing industry and stopped giving interviews or promoting his books.  That didn’t stop his later works from becoming bestsellers in their own rights, including FRANNY AND ZOOEY.  However, none ever reached the level of popularity of CATCHER. (And now that Salinger has passed away and can no longer object/sue as he was wont to due, word has it that it may finally be made into a movie.)

Ralph McInerny, 80
A professor at the University of Notre Dame, McInerny wrote more than 80 books, the most well-known and popular being his Father Dowling books about a priest who solved murder mysteries. They also became the basis for a well-liked TV series that aired from 1989-1991. He died Jan. 29 of esophageal cancer.

Tomas Eloy Martinez, 75
Martinez’s SANTA EVITA, THE FLIGHT OF THE QUEEN and THE PERON NOVEL mixed fiction and reality about Argentina during and after the rule of Juan and Eva Peron, the fascinating and fearsome couple who dominated the nation’s politics in the 1950s. His books struck such a nerve with the public that Isabel Peron, 2nd wife and widow of Juan, had Martinez exiled from Argentina during the ’70s. He later returned to Argentina and was living in Buenos Aires when he passed away from cancer on Jan 31.

(R.I.P. to them all and any I missed mentioning…)

According to the Associated Press, bestselling author Tony Hillerman died Sunday, age 83, of pulmonary failure.  According to his daughter, Anne Hillerman, Hillerman’s health had declined over the last few years, including his having suffered 2 heart attacks along with surgeries for prostate and bladder cancers.

However, an avid storyteller, Tony Hillerman was still punching out his beloved and bestselling books of acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police Officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, two of the unlikeliest of literary heroes, even though his vision had dimmed, his hearing was going and his hands turned into virtual claws from rheumatoid arthritis.

“I’m getting old,” he declared in 2002, “but I still like to write.”

Introduced in THE BLESSING WAY in 1970, Lt. Joe Leaphorn was an experienced police officer who understood, but did not share, his people’s traditional belief in a rich spirit world.  First appearing in PEOPLE OF DARKNESS in 1978, Lt. Joe Leaphorn was a younger officer studying to become a “hathaali” — Navajo for “shaman.”  The two characters wouldn’t appear together, thoughth, until SKINWALKERS, published in 1987.  It wasn’t until A THIEF OF TIME, however, before they hit the big-time:  the New York Times Bestseller List, selling almost 1/2 million copies.  In all, 18 books make up the Navajo series, with the latest being THE SHAPE SHIFTER.

Although probably best-known for the Navajo series, Hillerman also wrote a novel for young people; his memoir, SELDOM DISAPPOINTED; and books on the history and natural beauty of the Southwest, one of his favorite places on Earth, including the gorgeous and haunting photo book HILLERMAN COUNTRY (with photographs by his brother, Barney).

“Those places that stir me are empty and lonely,” he wrote in “The Spell of New Mexico,” a collection of his essays. “They invoke a sense of both space and strangeness, and all have about them a sort of fierce inhospitality.”

Hillerman also edited or contributed to other books, including crime and history anthologies and books on the craft of writing.

Born May 27, 1925, in the tiny rural town of Sacred Heart, OK (population 50), Tony Hillerman was the son of August and Lucy Grove Hillerman. They were farmers who also ran a small store. While growing up there, an impressionable Tony listened spellbound to the locals tell their stories.

Because the teacher at the local schoolhouse was rumored to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan,  Tony and his brother were sent to St. Mary’s Academy, a school for Potawatomie Indian girls near Asher, OK. It was at St. Mary’s that he developed a lifelong respect for Indian culture—and an appreciation of what it means to be an outsider in your own land.

In 1943, he joined the Army. He, along with a mortar he had to lug around, participated in D-Day with the 103rd Infantry Division, with Hillerman being severely wounded in battle at Alsace, France. He returned from Europe with a Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, temporary blindness and two shattered legs that never stopped giving him pain.

He returned to the university after coming home and finished his degree, and, in 1948, married Marie Unzer. Together, they raised six children, five of them adopted, all of whom, along with his wife, survive him.

As a young man, he was a farmer, a truck drive, an oil field roughneck and a reporter and editor for the Borger News-Herald in Borger, Texas; the Morning Press-Constitution in Lawton, Okla.; United Press International in Oklahoma City; and the Santa Fe New Mexican, where he became executive editor. In 1962, he left the Santa Fe New Mexican to earn his master’s degree from the University of New Mexico, where he later taught journalism and eventually became chairman of the journalism department. In 1993, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

While Hillerman wrote his first novel, BLESSING WAY, he was still teaching. A anecdote that always made him chuckle: His first agent advised him that if he wanted to make it into print, he would have to “get rid of that Indian stuff.”  (Just goes to show, eh?)

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