We lost Bill Crider to cancer in February of last year. February 12, 2018, to be exact. Today (July 28) would have been his 78th birthday.
I took the picture on the left at the 2017 World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio. That’s Joe Lansdale on the left. It was my last time to see Bill. We didn’t get to visit much; his stamina was low. I understood and was thankful for the time I did get to chat with him.
Bill Crider is best remembered as a mystery writer, and that’s as it should be. He was good, very good at that genre. Along with some westerns, he also wrote bit of fantasy and science fiction. It would be great if someone could collect those stories.
I first became aware of Bill in 1999, when he was the guest at a writing symposium held at the university I was at. We didn’t meet then, but I started watching for his books. Then I moved to another part of the state. About a year or two later, ConDFW got started. Bill was a regular attendee there, as well as Aggiecon and Armadillocon, two other conventions I was attending at the time. Although he didn’t write much fantasy and science fiction, Bill was a fan especially of the older, pulpier stuff. We’d both grown up reading a lot of the same authors and stories, although he had read them in their original publications while I had read reprints.
We had some mutual friends, and I got to know Bill and and to a lesser extent his wife Judy by hanging with that group. I tended to stay at the back of the crowd and just listen. Bill was an accomplished raconteur, and when he and Joe Lansdale got going, well, you couldn’t find better entertainment than that.
Bill was always a gentleman, courteous, kind, approachable. He was soft spoken, and he never failed to have something interesting to say. I didn’t know him as well as Joe or Scott Cupp or James Reasoner did. They knew him for far longer after all. Still, he was my friend, and I miss him.
If you’ve not read Bill Crider, give his work a try. He never engaged in literary pyrotechnics. He just told good stories.
