Eric Jerome Dickey, 59, bestselling novelist, dies

Eric Jerome Dickey, who mixed saucy, sexy and savvy into a formula that regularly landed his novels on bestseller lists and made him one of the most successful Black authors of the past quarter century, died Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 59.

His publisher, Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, said the cause was cancer. Dickey lived in Los Angeles.

A f ter experimenting with careers as a software developer and a stand-up comic, Dickey drew considerable attention in 1996 with his first novel, “Sister, Sister,” the intertwined stories of three Black women told from each character’s point of view.

“Fresh, in-your-face and always outrageous,” Jane Henderson wrote in The St. Louis Post Dispatch, “‘Sister, Sister’ depicts a hardedged reality in which women sometimes have their dreams shattered, yet never stop embracing tomorrow.”

T he voices were so strong that many readers were surprised to find a man’s name on the cover.

“Everyone’s come out to the book signings; I think they just come to see if it’s really a guy that wrote the book,” Dickey told CNN in 1997.

Vivid female characters became a hallmark of his career, which will encompass 29 novels when “The Son of Mr. Suleman” is published in April.

“I actually get inside their heads and develop them from the inside out,” he said. “I read a lot of female magazines, anything from Cosmo to Essence. I watch my friends, female friends. I watch my girlfriends, the little bitty things they do. I listen to things they say, and a lot of times I read between the lines.”

The characters he created, especially the women, tended to have inner strength and a deadpan sense of humor.

“I thought I’d found my knight in shining armor,” a woman named Frankie says in “Naughtier Than Nice” (2015), describing a failed relationship, “but he was just another liar wrapped in aluminum foil.”

There was no lack of sex in Dickey’s stories. That same character, recalling a better time in the love affair gone wrong, mentions sneaking away from walking tours of Italy and the Vatican for quickies.

“Having an orgasm, then looking up and seeing incredible frescoes by Michelangelo, was like being in God’s living room,” she says.

Dickey’s novels had a particularly strong follow in g a mon g you n g and middle- aged Black women, although his appeal extended to many demographics.