Whipped Cream Difficulties

I missed this, and it hasn’t been reported in the usual places I check. I only know about it thanks to a story in the Rap Sheet.

Ken Bruen, the great Irish mystery writer, passed away on March 29th.

My late lamented friend Willie Siros (of the late lamented Adventures in Crime and Space) gave me an advance reading copy of The Guards because he thought I might like it. I loved it. It was something new and stunning and frankly brutal, especially the ending. I haven’t gone back to the Jack Taylor books since, though, and I don’t know why, other than not having enough time to read everything. But with a hard stop in place, now I can catch up.

I’ve read A Fifth of Bruen (and I have the promotional Zippo that was issued with it). You can see the Jack Taylor in these early stories, but you can also see more depth to Bruen. For example, one of the stories is a very gentle mainstream story about a couple dealing with the birth of a child with Down syndrome.

Bruen was, to my mind, a good and underappreciated writer, whose death leaves a hole.

Also by way of the Rap Sheet, also among the dead, and also no obit in the usual places: Robert McGinnis, artist. Quoting from his obit:

Bob was one of the most prolific illustrators of the 20th century. It’s likely you have seen one or more of his artwork images somewhere. They appeared in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest and Guideposts; on very many book covers (especially paperback books, spanning many genres, from Detective to Mystery to Gothic to Historical Fiction to Romance to Fantasy); in the form of personal-project paintings that included many Old West scenes; and also on movie posters for culturally significant movies (and also on soundtrack album covers). In our biased opinion, Bob was the very best of the James Bond/007 artists, having created exciting images for the posters for movies such as Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale (parody movie), and Live and Let Die.

Not exactly an obit, but this is a swell…tribute? to John Taffin from the Revolver Guy blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2025 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Books, Guns, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.