A few days ago I lost another friend. Arthur Kerns (http://arthurkerns.com) was a wonderful author and a long time member of my writers’ critique group. There were only six of us in this group, all published authors, and we were all friends and each other’s cheerleaders. Art was the only man in the group for the past couple of years, and he was really good-natured about our sometimes strong opinions about the sex scenes in his spy novels. Sometimes he’d listen and sometimes not, because as any writer knows, critiques are suggestions and your book is your own. He was a good critic himself, insightful and never mean or condescending. In fact, Art was just a really nice person, a true gentleman.
His passing was a shock. He wasn’t ill. He just took a fall and ended up in the hospital. It’s not too serious, he said. I’ll tell you all about it at our next meeting. Days later pneumonia set in and there ended up being no next meeting for him. We loved him and will miss him terribly.
Only months ago, he received the 2025 Claymore Award for Best Investigator Novel at the Killer Nashville International Writers Conference for a book we had critiqued. I’m so glad that happened for him when it did. Art had a fascinating background. He joined the FBI with a career in counterintelligence and counterterrorism. On retirement, he became a consultant with the Director of Central Intelligence and the Department of State, which took him to over sixty-five countries. His novels were full of fascinating characters, colorful settings, and delightfully twisty plots. I loved reading his insiders look at spy craft. He had just started a new novel for us to critique. Now we’ll never know how it ends.
I feel sad.
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