{"id":18666,"date":"2021-01-06T17:59:01","date_gmt":"2021-01-06T17:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoklahomaeagle.net\/?p=18666"},"modified":"2021-01-06T17:59:01","modified_gmt":"2021-01-06T17:59:01","slug":"bestselling-novelist-eric-jerome-dickey-dead-at-59","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/2021\/01\/06\/bestselling-novelist-eric-jerome-dickey-dead-at-59\/","title":{"rendered":"Bestselling Novelist Eric Jerome Dickey Dead At 59"},"content":{"rendered":"

www.newser.com<\/a>
\nBy Newser Editors and Wire Services
\n <\/p>\n

Eric Jerome Dickey, the bestselling novelist who blended crime, romance, and eroticism in\u00a0Sister, Sister<\/em>;\u00a0Waking With Enemies<\/em>; and dozens of other stories about contemporary Black life, has died at age 59. Dickey’s publicist at Penguin Random House told the\u00a0AP<\/a>\u00a0that the author died of cancer Sunday in Los Angeles; she listed four daughters among his survivors.<\/p>\n

Dickey was an aspiring actor and stand-up comic who began writing fiction in his mid-30s and shaped a witty, conversational, and sometimes graphic prose style. It brought him a wide readership through such novels as\u00a0Naughty or Nice<\/em>\u00a0and through his\u00a0Gideon<\/em> crime fiction series. Dickey was a native of Memphis, Tenn., and a computer technology major at the University of Memphis. He moved to Los Angeles after college and eventually set much of his work there.<\/p>\n

Dickey worked as a software engineer in the aerospace industry but found himself becoming more interested in the arts. He developed his narrative skills through creative writing classes at UCLA and through reading; favorite authors included Judy Blume. “When I’m writing, I’m always trying to write these twists and turns … these oh-no-he-didn’t or no-she-didn’t or no-that-didn’t-happen moment where, you know, you want to call your friend and say, ‘Are you on Page 40? Get to Page 40,'” he told\u00a0NPR<\/a>\u00a0in 2007. He wrote 29 novels in all; his final book,\u00a0The Son of Mr. Suleman<\/em>, comes out in April.
\n“I am truly saddened to hear about the passing of Eric Jerome Dickey,” author Roxane Gay\u00a0tweeted<\/a>\u00a0Tuesday. “His were some of the first novels I ever read about black people that weren’t about slavery or civil rights. He was a great storyteller.” In a follow-up\u00a0tweet<\/a>, she recommended these three books of his:\u00a0Milk in My Coffee<\/em>,\u00a0Friends and Lovers<\/em>, and\u00a0Sister, Sister<\/em>.
\n(Read more\u00a0obituary<\/a>\u00a0stories.)
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

www.newser.com By Newser Editors and Wire Services   Eric Jerome Dickey, the bestselling novelist who blended crime, romance, and eroticism in\u00a0Sister, Sister;\u00a0Waking With Enemies; and dozens of other stories about contemporary Black life, has died at age 59. Dickey’s publicist at Penguin Random House told the\u00a0AP\u00a0that the author died of cancer Sunday in Los Angeles;…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":18667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,105,109],"tags":[],"thb-sponsors":[],"class_list":["post-18666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-national","category-obituary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18666"},{"taxonomy":"thb-sponsors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thb-sponsors?post=18666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}