Greg Islands, the author of the Mississippi of the Burning Natchez trilogy and other works, has died. He was 65 years old.
Iles died Friday after a battle for several decades with the multiple blood cancer myelome, his literary agent, Dan Conaway, published on Facebook on Saturday.
Initially diagnosed with the incurable condition in 1996, he kept his private illness until he finished his latest novel, Southern Man, which was published in 2024.
Ile was born in Germany but moved to Natchez, Mississippi, with his family when he was only three years old and developed a deep connection with the region. Many of his stories take place at Mississippi, including the Burlogy Natchez trilogy, novels of suspense of historical fiction exploring the race and class in the 1960s Jim Crow South.
Conaway has described Iles as “warm, funny, fearless and completely sui generis”.
“Being at the other end of the phone while he was talking about character and intrigue, solving problem on the fly was witnessing a genius at work, simple and simple,” he wrote on Saturday. “As a writer, he merged the component, the deep humanity of the bones and an increasing feeling of moral and political responsibility with the ferocious details of a swirling dervish or a watchmaker.”
In March 2011, Iles underwent a broken aorta and a partial amputation of the legs and spent eight days in a medical induction coma after another driver hit his car on highway 61 near Natchez. He finally recovered.
Iles played with the musical group The Rock Bottom remains with popular authors Stephen King, Amy Tan and others.
A 2005 Guardian article on Iles described it as a “master of writing of the Southern American Gothic Crime”.
