Greg Iles
- Iles passed away last week. He had battled multiple myeloma since his diagnosis in 1996.
The death of sensational Mississippi author Greg Iles last week after a long battle with cancer and the realities of the aftermath of a near-fatal 2011 car accident in his hometown of Natchez stills one of the state’s most courageous and meaningful literary voices.
Iles, 65, had battled multiple myeloma since his diagnosis in 1996. Multiple myeloma is a rare and incurable blood cancer in which blood plasma is impacted and begins to turn normal blood cells into abnormal cells that ultimately affect bones, platelets and red blood cells, and the kidneys. The novelist described his battle in living and working with the disease in a published note to readers on his website:
“Against all odds, I became one of the luckiest patients alive and survived more than 20 years with a “smoldering” form of the cancer, without terminal progression. During these years, I watched the illness take people like Geraldine Ferraro, Roy Scheider, and, more recently, Colin Powell and comedian Norm McDonald.
“Two years ago, however, my extraordinary run of luck ran out, and my myeloma ‘switched on.’ I nearly died before I was even aware that the disease had reawakened.”
After the 1996 cancer diagnosis, Iles was nearly killed in a two-car accident on Hwy. 61 in Natchez. That accident saw the writer ultimately put into an induced coma to save his life, but at the cost of the amputation of his crushed right leg below the knee, among a litany of injuries, including broken ribs, a shattered left foot, and a fractured pelvis.
Despite fighting cancer and battling back from his injuries, Iles rose from his health challenges to begin to focus in earnest on shifting his writing focus to complex issues of race, class and socioeconomic barriers in Mississippi and the greater South.
Iles first found literary success in historical fiction that centered on World War II and Nazi intrigues in his first novels, “Spandau Phoenix” (1993) and “Black Cross (1995).”
But beginning with 1999’s “The Quiet Game,” Iles introduced the Penn Cage series of novels that led to the “Natchez Burning” trilogy, which included “Natchez Burning” in 2014, “The Bone Tree” in 2015, and “Mississippi Blood” in 2017.
“Southern Man” was Iles’ final novel and is focused on the same Mississippi–Louisiana terrains as the “Natchez Burning” trilogy, but moves some 15 years into the future as the nation faces familiar political, social, and moral divides that might well have been torn from recent headlines.
Iles’ literary masterpiece was the “Natchez Burning” trilogy, which was based on a particularly heinous civil rights murder — in which Black shopkeeper Frank Morris died as the result of an apparent nighttime arson fire in his shoe repair shop in Ferriday, Louisiana, in 1964, at the hands of a virulent group of Ku Klux Klansmen who identified themselves as the “Silver Dollar Group”.
The trilogy of books examines the Morris murder and the ensuing cover-up of the shocking activities of December 10, 1964, when a gang of Klansmen allegedly showed up with guns and gasoline and burned Morris alive in his shoe repair store. Morris, hospitalized with severe burns, died four days later. Iles’ fiction drew heavily from the investigations of crusading journalist Stanley Nelson of the Concordia Sentinel newspaper in Ferriday. Ferriday is five miles across the Mississippi River from Natchez.
Ferriday became the focus of the fascination of Southerners enamored with the stories of cousins Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart and Mickey Gilley.
Born into poverty in 1935 in Ferriday, Jerry Lee’s parents sacrificed to buy Lewis a piano — recognizing his preternatural talents. As a boy, Lewis shared a love of music and talent on the piano with his double first cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, also born in Ferriday in 1935.
Swaggart’s mother and Lewis’s mother were sisters. They shared another first cousin with musical talent, country music icon Mickey Gilley. Gilley was born in Natchez in 1936.
Greg Iles was a talented writer and had succeeded as a novelist long before settling into his searingly honest accounts of life in the deep South in the 1950s and 1960s that will define his literary status – work that was perhaps more important to Mississippians than it was to the nation. He will be mourned and missed.
