Joe Gores, Crime Writer in Dashiell Hammett Mode, Dies at 79

Joe Gores, a crime writer whose spare, chiseled sentences and deadpan dialogue put him squarely in the Dashiell Hammett tradition and persuaded Hammett’s daughter to let him write a follow-up to “The Maltese Falcon,” died on Monday in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 79 and lived in San Anselmo.

The cause was complications of bleeding ulcers, his stepdaughter, Gillian Monserrat, said.

Mr. Gores, well known to crime-fiction fans as a short-story writer, scored a critical success in 1969 with his first novel, “A Time of Predators,” the story of an ordinary man who wrestles with his conscience as he tries to avenge the murder of his wife by a teenage gang. It was named the best debut mystery novel by the Mystery Writers of America, which gave it its Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1970.

He also won an Edgar that year for his short story “Good-bye, Pops,” which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Mr. Gores followed up with “Dead Skip“ (1972), the first in a series of taut, ingeniously plotted stories about Daniel Kearney Associates, a detective agency whose main business is repossessing cars, a job Mr. Gores once held. In describing the agency’s workings, he created what the crime writer Lawrence Block pronounced a new genre, the “detective-agency procedural.”

In “Hammett“ (1975) Mr. Gores skillfully blended fact and fiction, inventing a murder case for his protagonist to solve at the time the actual Hammett was finishing “Red Harvest.” Critics praised Mr. Gores’s evocation of Hammett’s literary style and character, as well as his fictional world.

“Gores in his way is as resourceful as the Master himself, and has dreamed up an evocative picture of San Francisco in 1928 — with its beauty, its venality, its dirty cops and politicians,” wrote Newgate Callendar (the book-reviewing pseudonym of the music critic Harold C. Schonberg) in The New York Times Book Review.

The book was made into a less than successful 1982 film by Wim Wenders, but it helped convince Hammett’s daughter, Jo Marshall, that only Mr. Gores could be trusted to write a sequel to “The Maltese Falcon.” Mr. Gores, pointing out that most of the characters are either dead or in prison by the end of the book, proposed a prequel instead, and “Spade & Archer“ was published in 2009.

Joseph Nicholas Gores was born on Dec. 25, 1931, in Rochester, Minn. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Notre Dame University in 1953 he took a series of jobs that would stand him in good stead as a writer. At various times he was a hod carrier, a logger in Alaska, a stock clerk, a truck driver, a manager of a hot-sheet motel and a gym instructor.

For several years he also worked as a private detective in San Francisco, including a stint with David Kikkert & Associates, the model for his fictional agency. He was hired as a repo man after he successfully tackled a bogus assignment to find a man who had skipped out on his car payments.

“I talked to 167 people at 57 different addresses, trying to run this guy down,” Mr. Gores told Stanford magazine in 2009. He found the culprit in a grave in Colma, Calif., where he had been buried two years earlier.

“He gave me a file on a dead man to see if I could find him,” Mr. Gores recalled. He later claimed that writing reports as a detective taught him the essentials of good storytelling.

There were lots of stories to tell. On his first date with Dori Corfitzen, who would become his second wife, he repossessed a Cadillac from Jimmy Fratianno, an organized-crime boss known as the Weasel.

In addition to his stepdaughter, Gillian, of Antioch, Calif., he is survived by his wife; a stepson, Timothy Gould of Carson, Calif.; and two step-grandchildren.

Mr. Gores sold his first story in 1957 to Manhunt, one of the last of the pulp magazines. After earning a master’s degree in English literature from Stanford University, he taught English at a boy’s secondary school in Kenya and pondered his future as a writer.

“While living in Africa, I read Robert Ardrey’s ‘African Genesis,’ and a few years later Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces,’ “ he told the reference work Contemporary Authors. “From these I came to understand what my basic fictional theme was: a hero who has been stripped of society’s defenses must overcome danger and death armed only with the genetic survival skills inherited from his prehuman ancestors.”

In addition to a half-dozen DKA novels, notably “Gone, No Forwarding“ (1978) and the farcical “32 Cadillacs“ (1992), he wrote “Interface“ (1974), “Come Morning“ (1986) and “Glass Tiger“ (2006), as well as the semi-autobiographical “Cases“ (1999).

He wrote many screenplays, as well as television scripts for the series “B. L. Stryker” (for which he was a story editor), “Remington Steele,” and “Magnum, P. I.” One of his scripts for “Kojak,” “No Immunity for Murder,” won an Edgar Award in 1976.