Ed Gorman, A Writer of Our World

I found out yesterday Ed Gorman died late Friday night, October 14, 2016, after a years long struggle with multiple myeloma. A disease he had for as long as I knew him, and a disease I thought would never really kill him. I have corresponded with him, mostly through email, for somewhere close to ten years. I always looked forward to his emails because they made me laugh – he promised more than one Maserati – and he had such keen insights about writers, books, writing, and politics that he also made me think. He supported me, and this blog, more than you (or I) can imagine.

Ed asked me to write an introduction for Stark House’s reprint of his fine novels The Autumn Dead and The Night Remembers in 2014. He put me in touch with a couple editors at Mystery Scene Magazine a year later who gave me a shot at writing book reviews. It went well, I think, since they keep sending me books to review.

But the best thing Ed gave me, and at heart I’m really a fanboy so this is something special, was his friendship. It wasn’t anything grand. We didn’t speak on the telephone for hours, meet for drinks, or anything else most friends do, but we did get to know each other in that fuzzy, Twilight Zone, way the internet allows. He sent me books. His and other writers he thought I would enjoy. He always inscribed his own titles with a funny little note and signed it simply, “Ed”. One of my favorite inscriptions arrived on the title page of his novel, The Midnight Room, in 2009—

“That million+ I owe you is on the way as soon as Bernie Madoff pays me back!”

He often asked about my daughter, and he always, and I mean always, thanked me for everything I did for him. Just so you know, I didn’t do nearly as much for Ed as he did for me. When his illness really started to wear on him a few years ago he asked me if I would review a few books other writers had sent him, hoping for a review on his blog. I readily agreed and after I sent him the second review he insisted that I be paid. I demurred since I know how much revenue literary blogs generate – none at all – but he remained insistent and from then on every so often he would send me a small payment in my Paypal account.

Ed Gorman was a great writer. It is true he was a great mystery writer. A great western writer. A great suspense, both dark and straight, writer. He was all that, but he was, simply, a great writer. He could write anything and he frequently escaped the genre where he wrote and created something very much like literature. His stories always said something about the human condition, the world we live in. His characters, always vivid, were three dimensional. He never wrote a wholly good hero, or a completely stained villain. He wrote about us – our experience in the world – in stories that were larger than life with players so real we can very nearly see them in our bathroom mirrors.

Ed Gorman was a great writer, but he was an even better friend. And I think it is going to be a very long time before I open my email without a glimmer of hope that there will be an email from Ed. I miss you already, my friend, and my thoughts are with your family.