Dan Simmons passed away last Saturday. My source for this is a tweet Lawrence forwarded me from David Morrell: Lawrence has also posted his own obit, which is much better than anything I could post.
He was a pretty swell writer. I haven’t read everything he wrote, but I’ve read quite a bit. I liked Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion quite a bit. He also did some pretty good suspense books: I’m very fond of Darwin’s Blade and the first two Joe Kurtz books (I haven’t read the third). He also wrote The Terror, which was turned into a TV series.
FotB RoadRich sent over two obits: Dan McGrath, writer for “The Simpsons”. (He co-wrote the “Time and Punishment” segment of “Treehouse of Horror V”, the one where Homer turns his toaster into a time machine.)
Also by way of RoadRich, Elizabeth Snead, former THR writer. I missed this, but she sounds fun:
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Snead often brought her poodle Mina on assignment. She found the abandoned dog, dingy gray and with chipped nail polish, on a street near Dupont Circle in Washington. Once she bathed the pooch, she discovered Mina had snow-white fur.
She retired from journalism in the mid-2010s and returned to Florida, where she turned her attention to animal activities, such as showing her pack of Maltese dogs competitively and breeding Napoleon cats.
Bobby J. Brown, actor. He played “Officer Bobby Brown” on “The Wire”, a character based on a real police officer named “Bob Brown”. I think RoadRich rolled his eyes a little when he told me this.
Other credits include “Law & Order: SVU”, “We Own This City”, and “From Within”.