Marshall Green; Ambassador to Indonesia During 1960s

Marshall Green, 82, ambassador to Indonesia in the 1960s when President Suharto came to power. Green was considered the State Department’s leading Southeast Asia expert during those years and helped guide U.S. foreign policy as this country extended its presence in the region. He was involved at the beginning of the complex and deadly Asian conflicts, having served as private secretary to the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo in 1939. He left the embassy shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Green became senior American diplomat in South Korea before moving to Indonesia, and in 1969 became a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris talks aimed at ending the Vietnam War. He later served as an aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on the historic 1972 trip to China. In Washington on Saturday of an apparent heart attack.

Thomas Narcejac; Best-Selling French Detective Writer

Thomas Narcejac, 89, French high school teacher who went on to write more than 40 best-selling thrillers. Narcejac’s highly successful collaboration with coauthor Pierre Boileau produced more than 40 books, making them France’s most popular detective writers in the postwar era. Their work influenced film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Henri-Georges Clouzot. Born Pierre Ayraud, Narcejac taught philosophy and literature at a high school in Nantes, and spent his spare time writing mysteries. He published his first manuscript in 1946, almost 12 years after it was written while he was serving in the French army. “The Midnight Assassin” was an immediate success. In 1948, his book “Death’s on the Trip” won the prize for France’s best adventure novel. But Narcejac was reluctant to follow in the footsteps of Americans Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet, who were creating a new genre of detective thriller. Instead, Narcejac wrote a treatise on the detective novel, which he saw as following the style of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. He met Boileau soon after, and the two went on to publish 43 thrillers, 100 short stories and four plays. Narcejac was known as the literary master, while Boileau crafted the plot. In Nice on an unreported date.