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Joe Gores, a crime writer whose spare, chiseled sentences and deadpan dialogue put him squarely in the Dashiell Hammett tradition and persuaded Hammett's daughter to let him write a follow-up to "The Maltese Falcon," died on Monday in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 79 and lived in San Anselmo.
The cause was complications of bleeding ulcers, his stepdaughter, Gillian Monserrat, said.
Mr. Gores, well known to crime-fiction fans as a short-story writer, scored a critical success in 1969 with his first novel, "A Time of Predators," the story of an ordinary man who wrestles with his conscience as he tries to avenge the murder of his wife by a teenage gang. It was named the best debut mystery novel by the Mystery Writers of America, which gave it its Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1970.
He also won an Edgar that year for his short story "Good-bye, Pops," which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Mr. Gores followed up with "Dead Skip" (1972), the first in a series of taut, ingeniously plotted stories about Daniel Kearney Associates, a detective agency whose main business is repossessing cars, a job Mr. Gores once held. In describing the agency's workings, he created what the crime writer Lawrence Block pronounced a new genre, the "detective-agency procedural."
In "Hammett" (1975) Mr. Gores skillfully blended fact and fiction, inventing a murder case for his protagonist to solve at the time the actual Hammett was finishing "Red Harvest." Critics praised Mr. Gores's evocation of Hammett's literary style and character, as well as his fictional world.Joe Gores, a crime writer whose spare, chiseled sentences and deadpan dialogue put him squarely in the Dashiell Hammett tradition and persuaded Hammett's daughter to let him write a follow-up to "The Maltese Falcon," died on Monday in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 79 and lived in San Anselmo.
The cause was complications of bleeding ulcers, his stepdaughter, Gillian Monserrat, said.
Mr. Gores, well known to crime-fiction fans as a short-story writer, scored a critical success in 1969 with his first novel, "A Time of Predators," the story of an ordinary man who wrestles with his conscience as he tries to avenge the murder of his wife by a teenage gang. It was named the best debut mystery novel by the Mystery Writers of America, which gave it its Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1970.
He also won an Edgar that year for his short story "Good-bye, Pops," which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Mr. Gores followed up with "Dead Skip" (1972), the first in a series of taut, ingeniously plotted stories about Daniel Kearney Associates, a detective agency whose main business is repossessing cars, a job Mr. Gores once held. In describing the agency's workings, he created what the crime writer Lawrence Block pronounced a new genre, the "detective-agency procedural."
In "Hammett" (1975) Mr. Gores skillfully blended fact and fiction, inventing a murder case for his protagonist to solve at the time the actual Hammett was finishing "Red Harvest." Critics praised Mr. Gores's evocation of Hammett's literary style and character, as well as his fictional world.Joe Gores, a crime writer whose spare, chiseled sentences and deadpan dialogue put him squarely in the Dashiell Hammett tradition and persuaded Hammett's daughter to let him write a follow-up to "The Maltese Falcon," died on Monday in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 79 and lived in San Anselmo.
The cause was complications of bleeding ulcers, his stepdaughter, Gillian Monserrat, said.
Mr. Gores, well known to crime-fiction fans as a short-story writer, scored a critical success in 1969 with his first novel, "A Time of Predators," the story of an ordinary man who wrestles with his conscience as he tries to avenge the murder of his wife by a teenage gang. It was named the best debut mystery novel by the Mystery Writers of America, which gave it its Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1970.
He also won an Edgar that year for his short story "Good-bye, Pops," which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Mr. Gores followed up with "Dead Skip" (1972), the first in a series of taut, ingeniously plotted stories about Daniel Kearney Associates, a detective agency whose main business is repossessing cars, a job Mr. Gores once held. In describing the agency's workings, he created what the crime writer Lawrence Block pronounced a new genre, the "detective-agency procedural."
In "Hammett" (1975) Mr. Gores skillfully blended fact and fiction, inventing a murder case for his protagonist to solve at the time the actual Hammett was finishing "Red Harvest." Critics praised Mr. Gores's evocation of Hammett's literary style and character, as well as his fictional world.Joe Gores, a crime writer whose spare, chiseled sentences and deadpan dialogue put him squarely in the Dashiell Hammett tradition and persuaded Hammett's daughter to let him write a follow-up to "The Maltese Falcon," died on Monday in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 79 and lived in San Anselmo.
The cause was complications of bleeding ulcers, his stepdaughter, Gillian Monserrat, said.
Mr. Gores, well known to crime-fiction fans as a short-story writer, scored a critical success in 1969 with his first novel, "A Time of Predators," the story of an ordinary man who wrestles with his conscience as he tries to avenge the murder of his wife by a teenage gang. It was named the best debut mystery novel by the Mystery Writers of America, which gave it its Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1970.
He also won an Edgar that year for his short story "Good-bye, Pops," which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Mr. Gores followed up with "Dead Skip" (1972), the first in a series of taut, ingeniously plotted stories about Daniel Kearney Associates, a detective agency whose main business is repossessing cars, a job Mr. Gores once held. In describing the agency's workings, he created what the crime writer Lawrence Block pronounced a new genre, the "detective-agency procedural."
In "Hammett" (1975) Mr. Gores skillfully blended fact and fiction, inventing a murder case for his protagonist to solve at the time the actual Hammett was finishing "Red Harvest." Critics praised Mr. Gores's evocation of Hammett's literary style and character, as well as his fictional world.
