Eric Jerome Dickey, bestselling novelist, dead
NEW YORK (AP) — Eric Jerome Dickey, the bestselling novelist who blended crime, romance and eroticism in “Sister, Sister,” “Waking With Enemies” and dozens of other stories about contemporary Black life, has died at age 59.
Dickey’s publicist at Penguin Random House, Emily Canders, told The Associated Press that the author died of cancer Sunday in Los Angeles. She did not immediately provide other details beyond listing four daughters among his survivors.
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 “Sister, Sister” and “Naughty or Nice” and through his “Gideon” crime fiction series, which included “Sleeping With Strangers” and “Resurrecting Midnight.”
He also worked on the screenplay for the 1998 movie “Cappuccino,” wrote a comic book miniseries for Marvel, and contributed to such anthologies as “Mothers and Sons” and “Black Silk: A Collection of African American Erotica.”
“In comedy you learn to write with flow — segue, setup, and punch line — but in a way that people won’t see or notice. And in theater you learn about character,” he told Bookpage in 2000. “You’ve got to bring something to it, and what you bring is the understanding of the character you get from doing your homework, from understanding the little stuff like speech patterns and the way the character walks, and from understanding the big stuff — your character’s motivation.”