Remembering Greg Iles

I learned today that one of my favorite authors passed away. Greg Iles, author of numerous books but most meaningfully to me his Penn Cage novels, died on Friday after a long bout with cancer. I only learned of the news thanks to an email from the fine folks at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.

I don't mean to mislead. I did not know the man. But I felt like I knew him. That's the power of an author who speaks to something deep inside of you, and that's the kind of author he Iles was to me.

To the best of my recollection, my reading relationship with Iles traces back almost 20 years ago, back to when I was a freshman in college. I wandered the small collection of fiction books in the university bookstore, and I was taken by the back-of-the-book summary of Turning Angel, Iles's second book in his Penn Cage series.

That book, those characters, the world he'd created — they completely sucked me in. I flew through the book, and while there's nothing particularly special about that, it felt special because it was total dumb luck that I found the book at all to give it a chance.

I didn't fly through the book simply because it was an engaging page-turner (though it is); I felt like I was reading about myself. I didn't fully realize it at the time, but I was looking for some degree of validation that who I was, who I was becoming as I found myself at college, wasn't such an aberration.

Don't get me wrong: I wasn't then nor am I now quite as put together and accomplished as Iles's most enduring character, but I saw bits of myself in him. Probably more importantly, I saw bits of who I wanted to be.

I already had aspirations to be a lawyer, like Cage had been before he become a famous author. And I was just years removed from discovering John Grisham, who seemed like such an obvious inspiration for Cage. I'd already read every single book he'd published up to that point, and I think there was already some part of me who thought maybe I, too, wanted to put in some valuable years as a lawyer to gain stories and references only to then turn them into best-sellers.

But beyond the career-related stuff was the identity stuff. Again, don't get me wrong: I don't think that being a straight white man from the South is particularly unique or remarkable in the least. But those things do describe me. And in Iles's writing of Cage, I felt like he gave me something akin to a blueprint.

Cage clearly loved his native Mississippi, and he was conflicted by that love. He saw its ugliness, the ways it refused to be better than its past and yet he saw still its goodness and the ways the ugliness of its past could never fully define the place or its people.

I wrestled with a version of that as a kid coming into adulthood. I was trying to discover what I thought about the world, what I stood for, and at the time I picked up Iles's novel, I was still early in my search. It was one that would persist through college and through law school and even into Iles's and Cage's very own state of Mississippi as an attorney. My politics were still evolving and becoming my own. And I was looking around for permission that this way of being, though it was largely out of step with so many of my friends with whom I'd come up, was in fact OK. Iles provided it.

I'm sure many people, and tons not from the South, read his novels and sided with his protagonist. Rooted for him. Sympathized with him. Because that's what good fiction can bring out in all of us.

The first time I ever ordered a dress shirt from Charles Tyrwhitt was because one of Iles's characters wore it and spoke of it so highly. The only time I've been to Natchez was fueled by my infatuation with the place I'd previously only read about in Iles's novels. Once there, the cemetery in town that houses the titular Turning Angel statute was one of my must-visit locations.

But it wasn't just the big action pieces that were central to the novels that made me side with Cage; I found his descriptions of living everyday life in the South, with viewpoints different than those around him, the things I most wanted to mimic. Those were the reasons I became so invested in Penn Cage and his version of Natchez, Mississippi.

The fandom that was sparked from that random find at a college bookstore prompted me to go back and read the first entry, The Quiet Game, which I might have enjoyed even more. I waited and hoped for more from Iles, more of this character, and in the meantime, I went back and read everything else he'd written that wasn't a Penn Cage novel. But sometime around 2010 or 2011, I began to wonder where was the next Penn Cage book. Hadn't I seen a listed publication date on Amazon at one point?

Turns out the delay was much more than writer's block: Iles had been in a terrible car wreck and had very nearly died. During the years-long recovery process, he churned out hundreds of thousands of words for a Penn Cage trilogy.

It was the first of that trilogy — Natchez Burning — that allowed me to meet him. It was April 30, 2014, and I'm sure I left straight away after school was out for the day. I was still teaching school in Lexington, Mississippi, and I was about two hours to the south of Oxford and Square Books, where he was signing the book. Part of me couldn't believe I was so close to such an event, and I wasn't about to miss it.

I waited my turn, and when I got to approach the table at which he remained seated the entire signing (the wreck had required, among other things, the amputation of one of his legs below the knee), I told him, shyly, that I'd just weeks before returned from my first trip to Natchez and that he was the biggest inspiration for the visit. I wish I'd had a bit longer with him, to tell him thanks for writing a character that so connected with me. I wish I'd known where the stories would go, to fully understand what I already surmised: just how deeply he'd imbued Penn Cage with so much of himself.

I would have told him how very nice it was to get to know him, and myself, through his creation.