So Ira Levin has died, just days after Norman Mailer’s passing. If I was Philip Roth, I’d be looking both ways before crossing the street.
Trivial observation: If you think about it, both Levin and Mailer wrote definitive books about World War II, though of course they were “definitive” to very different audiences. Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” was a fuggin’ masterpiece of ground-level observation — a fictional work that paved the way for the rise of New Journalism — and Levin wrote “The Boys from Brazil”, which gathered up almost every post-war conspiracy theory into a single insane thriller.
(Well, I said it was a trivial observation.)
Oh, and if you’d been under the impression Levin had been dead for a decade or more, join the club; I’m not entirely sure how the thought got stuck in my head, but I’d been certain “Sliver” was published posthumously.
With no offence intended to the late Mr. Levin’s memory, I’m with ya. I thought he was gone when Sliver hit the shelves. At the very least, you’d think the movie would have killed him.