“When you have a terminal illness, even one without obvious symptoms, you mourn your life far in advance of your death,” ailing protagonist Penn Cage shares with readers in Greg Iles’ final novel, “Southern Man.”
Like the author, Cage (who also starred in Iles’ best-selling “Natchez Burning” trilogy) had been secretly and asymptomatically carrying a deadly disease with him for years: multiple myeloma. Through the book, published in 2024, Iles expressed his feelings both about his mortality and his fears for what he saw as the dangerous path America was on.
Last year, he told the Los Angeles Times that he understood “this might be the last thing I ever do” and described living with knowledge of his secret cancer as “like walking in permanent shadow, with the hawk of mortality hovering over your shoulder day and night.”
On Friday, Aug. 15, the Mississippi author died at 65. His literary agent, Dan Conaway, said Iles passed after his decades-long battle with blood cancer. Initially diagnosed with the incurable condition in 1996, he kept his illness private until completing “Southern Man.” The novel weaves the history of Southern slave plantations into a modern political thriller featuring a populist presidential candidate as its antagonist.
Iles was born in Germany but moved to Natchez, Mississippi, with his family when he was just 3 years old and developed a deep connection with the region. Many of his stories are set in Mississippi, including the “Natchez Burning” trilogy, starring Penn Cage in a thriller that delves into the history of race, class and lynchings in the Jim Crow South.
Iles Drew From America’s Past, Fearing for Its Future
In his 2024 Los Angeles Times interview, Greg Iles acknowledged that he had earlier in his career fallen prey to the same toxic nostalgia that afflicts many southern writers, including while writing about Natchez for the first time in 1999’s “The Quiet Game.” Learning about the history of lynchings in 1960s Natchez changed the trajectory of the stories he would go on to tell and led to his best-selling “Natchez Burning” trilogy, he explained.
When writing about race, he said he was “writing for a white audience about a subject most would prefer not to think about, but they can be seduced into reading a thriller.” He explained that he came to understand that too many white Americans only want a version of “democracy” like the one of the Jim Crow South, “where they sat atop the pyramid.”
“Otherwise, they’ll exchange democracy for autocracy in a flash,” he said.
The author also explained that while he knew he had “nothing to teach Black readers” about racism, he sought to include Black characters’ perspectives in his later books to help bridge America’s social and racial chasm.
“If I can make white readers see America—even a little bit—through a Black character’s eyes, we have a better chance of finding common ground,” he said.
‘A Growing Sense of Moral and Political Responsibility’
Following Greg Iles’ death, Dan Conaway described him as “warm, funny, fearless, and completely sui generis.”
“To be on the other end of the phone as he talked through character and plot, problem-solving on the fly, was to be witness to genius at work, plain and simple,” Iles’ literary agent wrote on Saturday. “As a writer he fused story-craft, bone-deep humanity, and a growing sense of moral and political responsibility with the ferocious precisions of a whirling dervish or a master watchmaker.”
In March 2011, Iles suffered a ruptured aorta and a partial leg amputation and spent eight days in a medically induced coma after another driver struck his car on Highway 61 near Natchez. He eventually recovered.
Iles performed with the musical group The Rock Bottom Remainders along with popular authors Stephen King, Amy Tan and others.
In the epigraph to his ultimate novel, Iles quotes Walker Percy’s 1961 novel, The Moviegoer: “In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. To do anything less is to be less than a man.”
