Dennis Lynds, 81; Author Used Detective Novels to Explore Social Conditions

Dennis Lynds, a prolific mystery novelist best known for injecting compassion into the hard-boiled private eye with his series featuring one-armed detective Dan Fortune, which he wrote under the pseudonym Michael Collins, has died. He was 81.

Lynds, who lived in Santa Barbara, died Friday at UC San Francisco Medical Center, where he had collapsed Thursday on his way to visit a hospitalized daughter, said Kathleen Sharp, a longtime friend and fellow writer. She said he had recently undergone several operations for gastrointestinal problems and died of complications from an undiscovered bowel infection.

Sharp said that although Lynds had been ill about a year, he was still writing and had recently completed two short stories scheduled for publication in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Lynds, a former chemist and technical magazine editor, wrote more than 80 densely plotted novels and more than 200 short stories.

A master of the detective genre, he earned a lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1988 and the Marlowe Award for body of work from the Southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America in 2003.

Particularly in his Dan Fortune series, Lynds is credited with sensitizing his main character and with turning crime-solving exploits into vehicles for sociological observation.

“He didn’t have much patience with style without substance,” Sharp said. “He thought the mystery novel should be written to say something beyond just being a good yarn.”

The Fortune mysteries became one of the longest-running private eye series, encompassing 20 books, from the initial “Act of Fear” in 1967, which won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, to the collection of Dan Fortune short stories, “Fortune’s World,” in 2000.

Lynds has often been compared to mystery writer Ross Macdonald who, as Kenneth Millar in real life, befriended Lynds when he moved to Santa Barbara and encouraged his work on the manuscript that became “Act of Fear.”

Tom Nolan, author of “Ross Macdonald: A Biography” and a frequent book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, said Monday that Lynds was “in the school -- or the graduate school -- of Macdonald.... I think he took heart from the idea that you could use the detective novel to explore serious social and cultural themes as entertainment.”

Nolan said Lynds once explained the concept by saying, “Suspense novels are no less novels than sonnets are poems.”

Lynds, Nolan said, “was one of the most interesting and serious writers in the field in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. He was very special and maybe unique in crafting books that combined the excitement and commitments of the detective story with social awareness.”

Former Times entertainment editor Charles Champlin, in reviewing Lynds’ “Chasing Eights” featuring Fortune in 1990, wrote: “Fortune is less introspective than Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, the prototypal Santa Barbara operative, but Collins has much the same affectionate sensitivity to the city’s unique look, diversities and unifying ambience.”

In reviewing the more recent “Fortune’s World” for The Times, Dick Lochte said: “To spin tales as intriguing and thought-provoking as these for three decades is a remarkable enough achievement. Even more remarkable is the sustained quality.”

Among the pseudonyms Lynds used in addition to Michael Collins were William Arden, Nick Carter, John Crowe, Carl Dekker, Mark Sadler and, for the eight mysteries he wrote in “The Shadow” series, Maxwell Grant.

His gritty heroes -- Fortune, Paul Shaw, Kane Jackson, George Malcolm and Slot-Machine Kelly -- explored greed, hatred and murder, mostly in urban back alleys from New York to California.

The Buena Costa County series he wrote as Crowe was set in a fictional coastal community more akin to his Santa Barbara home for the last 40 years than his formative New York.

The characters of his novels often wandered into his short stories published in the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

In addition to private eye books, Lynds wrote literary novels, poems and articles for the Literary Review and other scholarly journals, biographies and juvenile mysteries.

“I write because I can,” he once told Contemporary Authors. “It is my way of trying to understand the world I live in and, perhaps, the people who live in it with me.”

Born Jan. 15, 1924, in St. Louis, Lynds grew up in New York City, where he attended Brooklyn Technical High School.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Hofstra College in Hempstead, N.Y., and a master’s in journalism from Syracuse University.

Lynds served in the Army infantry in Europe during World War II, and was awarded a Bronze Star, Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman Badge.

He worked successively for Chemical Week, Chemical Engineering Progress, Chemical Equipment and International Instrumentation technical magazines before turning to fiction.

In 1962, using his own name, he published his first novel, “Combat Soldier,” based on his own war experiences.

During that period, he also wrote television scripts for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” He later wrote book versions of television plays, including “Charlie Chan Returns” and “S.W.A.T.-Crossfire.”

In Santa Barbara, the home of Lynds and his wife, Gayle, an author whom he married in 1986, became the center for writers’ gatherings.

Lynds was known for his generosity in nurturing other writers in the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and for his work with copyright protection for the Authors Guild and the National Writers Union.

Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Millhone mystery series set in a city modeled on Santa Barbara, said Monday that she met Lynds before she began writing mysteries.

“He was always interested in other writers,” she said. “He was generous with his time and attention. He made other writers feel like their work was important. I adored him.”

In addition to his wife, Lynds is survived by two daughters from a previous marriage, Katherine, who remains hospitalized in San Francisco, and Deirdre; and two stepchildren, Julia and Paul.

A memorial celebration is scheduled for Saturday at 10:30 a.m. at the Unitarian Church, 1535 Santa Barbara St., Santa Barbara.

The family has asked that memorial donations be made to the Democratic Socialists of America, 180 Varick St., New York, NY 10014, or to the University of California regents for the Davidson Library, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9010 for support of the Dennis Lynds Collection.