As I’ve mentioned, lately I’ve been pulling scattered emails by or about the late Dennis McMillan into a new folder. Need to find the snail mail, since it contains an early DMac sales catalog which I want to reference in an article on the subject of editing the six volumes of The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick.
Glancing into one of the longer emails Dennis sent out, August 13, 2009, I noticed he mentioned “Janwillem shot himself a year ago July 4.” That would be crime writer Janwillem van der Vettering, one of the Posse McMillan crew. I met him when Dennis assembled several of his writers at an event — probably the Tucson Book Fair.
I thought, how odd. Thomas M. Disch killed himself on July Fourth, too.
Then the thought dug in, nagging: What year did Disch commit suicide???
Looked it up, really surprised to find that Janwillem shot himself July 4, 2008 — and Disch shot himself the same day.
I used a non-fiction piece by Disch in the 1988 litcrit anthology Reign of Fear that I edited on bestseller Stephen King. Didn’t have much interaction with him — the exchange of a few letters to get reprint rights on some Kingcrit he’d written. Seemed kind of haughty — not bad, and what the hell, he had Camp Concentration, The Brave Little Toaster and other stuff under his belt, so he could swing a little haught around with impunity as far as I was concerned.
I was very surprised by his suicide. Didn’t really know him, hadn’t read much if anything he’d done. As I recall now, people who actually knew him were very surprised.
Whatever the prompt for those two writers, had to have been planned out. Guns. Fourth of July.
What a coincidence.
Checking just now, I see that at this moment Wikipedia doesn’t have any mention whatsoever of suicide with guns for either author. Yeah, yeah, I get it — don’t kill yourself. Not healthy.
But I think of history as history.
At least — I checked — Wiki deigns to mention that Robert E. Howard was a suicide.
