Oakley Hall, R. I. P.

Oakley Hall, 87, Novelist Attuned to the Old West, Is Dead - New York Times: "Oakley Hall, the author of the novels “Warlock” and “The Downhill Racers” and a literary heir to fellow California writers like Wallace Stegner, died Monday at his home in Nevada City, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Nevada City, Squaw Valley and San Francisco."

Thanks to Jeff Meyerson for the link.

Update: Here's a personal remembrance from David Laurence Wilson, whose name you may have seen on a few introductions in Stark House volumes:

"Oakley was a good guy, with a distinctive voice that I will hear
until the end of my own years. I knew him for almost forty years,
more than two-thirds of my life, ever since my first week of college,
when I won a lottery and was admitted into one of his writing
classes. He turned me from a Biological Sciences Major to whatever
it is that I am now. I wasn't part of the UCI Writing Program, since
I was an undergraduate, but I was editor of the newspaper at the
school, and Managing Editor for the literary magazine. In his own
undergrad days Oakley was at San Diego State, in a class with Sid
Fleischman and Bob Wade and Bill Miller, who wrote under the name
"Wade Miller". San Diego had never had it's own Private Eye
character but "Wade Miller" gave it one, followed by Sid Fleischman
and then Oakley, with his first effort, Murder City. Like a lot of
writers, Oakley was particularly known for one novel, Warlock, but he
had a lot more affection for that effort that many other novelists so
afflicted. He'll be missed by a lot of writers whose horizons were
expanded by this fine teacher."

David Laurence Wilson