Long-time Bouchercon attendees have had opportunities to get acquainted with this gentleman with a sly smile — J. Robert Janes. In fact, I met Bob the first morning of my first Bouchercon in 1991 Pasadena. He is best known for his series set during World War II in Europe. The featured detectives were Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of France’s Sûreté and Detektiv Inspektor Hermann Kohler of the Nazi Gestapo. It is a well-written series but never took off like Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series eventually did.
I collected his books in the Constable British editions with wonderful Terry Pastor cover art on them. Here is a sample:
J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet knew him a lot better than I did and has penned a touching remembrance of Bob and his work. There is no separate link to this so I have taken the liberty of copying Jeff’s post:
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I have learned that Canadian novelist J. Robert Janes, the much-admired author of World War II-era mysteries starring Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of France’s Sûreté and Detektiv Inspektor Hermann Kohler of the Nazi Gestapo, died this morning at his home in southern Ontario. He was 86 years old.
His wife, Gracia, kindly sent me an e-mail message explaining that her husband of 65 years had “passed away … peacefully after a 2-year struggle with [congenital heart failure] and cancer.”
I first encountered the work of Joseph Robert “Bob” Janes, a Toronto-born former field geologist and petroleum engineer, in the late 1990s or early aughts. It was at a time when Philip Kerr, whose Bernie Gunther novels I’d so relished, had backed away from that series (only temporarily, as it turned out), and I was looking for more crime fiction set in Europe during the tumultuous early 1940s. I believe I began with his fourth St Cyr/Kohler book, Salamander (1994), but then moved on to Janes’ more recent entries in the series, Madrigal (1999), Beekeeper (2001), and Flykiller (2002).
A full decade went by before Janes’ 13th St Cyr/Kohler novel, Bellringer, saw print. I was so excited by the author’s return to work on that series, I tracked him down through his publisher for an online interview. The results appeared partly in Kirkus Reviews and partly in The Rap Sheet. This led to a periodic correspondence that culminated in our first and (sadly) only face-to-face meeting, at the 2014 Bouchercon convention in Long Beach, California.
After not hearing from Janes for some while, I wrote him a year ago to check on his status. He reported that he’d been confined to a wheelchair and had “totally retired” from penning fiction, though he remained an avid reader, “and that kind of keeps me going.” Given all I knew, Gracia’s report of her husband’s demise—three months shy of his 87th birthday, on May 23—didn’t surprise me, but I was touched by her mention that Janes had “very much appreciated your [Rap Sheet] write up last year, and kept it with him even in the hospital.”
I consider myself blessed to have met and exchanged missives with this quiet, kind, and generous author I so admired, and am glad also that I still have three or four of Bob Janes’ novels I haven’t yet cracked open. I’d been hoping for more, of course, but the fact that such an abundance—including 16 St Cyr/Kohler yarns—already exist is testament to the welcoming breadth of modern crime fiction. I hope that many new readers will discover Janes’ work in the future with the same joy and enthusiasm I have long experienced.”
DP Contributor Steele Curry (a fellow Canadian), wrote this: “I will miss him tremendously. He was a nonpareil storyteller of immense dedication to his craft.”