Dennis Lynds, 81; Author Used Detective Novels to Explore Social Conditions
LA Times
Dennis Lynds, a prolific mystery novelist best known for injecting compassion into the hard-boiled private eye with his series featuring one-armed detective Dan Fortune, which he wrote under the pseudonym Michael Collins, has died. He was 81.
Lynds, who lived in Santa Barbara, died Friday at UC San Francisco Medical Center, where he had collapsed Thursday on his way to visit a hospitalized daughter, said Kathleen Sharp, a longtime friend and fellow writer. She said he had recently undergone several operations for gastrointestinal problems and died of complications from an undiscovered bowel infection.
Sharp said that although Lynds had been ill about a year, he was still writing and had recently completed two short stories scheduled for publication in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Lynds, a former chemist and technical magazine editor, wrote more than 80 densely plotted novels and more than 200 short stories.
A master of the detective genre, he earned a lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1988 and the Marlowe Award for body of work from the Southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America in 2003.
Particularly in his Dan Fortune series, Lynds is credited with sensitizing his main character and with turning crime-solving exploits into vehicles for sociological observation.
“He didn’t have much patience with style without substance,” Sharp said. “He thought the mystery novel should be written to say something beyond just being a good yarn.”
The Fortune mysteries became one of the longest-running private eye series, encompassing 20 books, from the initial “Act of Fear” in 1967, which won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, to the collection of Dan Fortune short stories, “Fortune’s World,” in 2000.
Lynds has often been compared to mystery writer Ross Macdonald who, as Kenneth Millar in real life, befriended Lynds when he moved to Santa Barbara and encouraged his work on the manuscript that became “Act of Fear.”
Tom Nolan, author of “Ross Macdonald: A Biography” and a frequent book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, said Monday that Lynds was “in the school — or the graduate school — of Macdonald…. I think he took heart from the idea that you could use the detective novel to explore serious social and cultural themes as entertainment.”
Nolan said Lynds once explained the concept by saying, “Suspense novels are no less novels than sonnets are poems.”
Act of Fear (1980 Playboy Press)
