William Diehl, the bestselling author known best for "Sharky's Machine" and "Primal Fear" -- fast-paced thrillers that became hit movies -- died Friday at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. He was 81.
The cause was an aortic aneurysm, said a longtime friend, Don Smith.
Diehl was a former journalist and photographer who became a novelist late in life after a dispirited awakening at his 50th birthday party. Over the next three decades he wrote nine novels that appealed to popular tastes with plotlines fueled by murder, greed, romance and other forms of mayhem.
For instance, in "27" (1990, later reissued as "The Hunt"), a woman is brutally murdered by Hitler's henchmen; in "Primal Fear" (1993), an archbishop is butchered by an angelic-looking Appalachian youth; in "Show of Evil" (1995), a young woman is found dead with a mysterious code printed in blood on the back of her head.
He was believed to have been nearly finished with his 10th novel when he was hospitalized last week. It is titled "Seven Ways to Die."
Diehl, a native of Jamaica, N.Y., often cited his experiences during World War II as a strong influence on his fiction. He lied about his age to join the Army Air Corps at 17 and served as a ball turret gunner on a B-24 during World War II. His conduct in that perilous job earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart and Air Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters.
Even without World War II, Diehl's life was more eventful than most.
According to family lore, Mae West was once his baby-sitter, before she became a Hollywood sex symbol.
On a school field trip in 1937, he witnessed the explosion of the Hindenburg, then the world's largest aircraft.
After the war, he graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in creative writing and history and in 1949 moved to Atlanta, where he joined the staff of the Atlanta Constitution. He got the job after staking out the newspaper lobby and waiting for editor Ralph McGill to walk by.
"I introduced myself and told him about my situation," Diehl told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2002. "He asked me if I had been in the war. I told him I had been a ball turret gunner.... He said anybody who had gone through that deserved a job, so he hired me as an obit writer."
He remained at the paper as a reporter and columnist until 1955, then freelanced for several years. In 1960 he became the first managing editor of Atlanta magazine. He taught himself how to take photographs for his stories and later worked as a freelance photographer.
