Richard Setlowe

Richard Setlowe (1933 – 25 August 2022) was an American author and journalist best known for his suspense novels, which have enjoyed critical and academic recognition. His early career as a Navy officer in the Far East and a fascination with technology inform his thrillers. The Brink, published in 1976, was acclaimed as "the classic novel of the Era of Undeclared War" and was a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Award for First Novels. The Experiment (1980) and The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell (1984) venture into the realm of science fiction and the supernatural, while exploring deep personal themes. With The Black Sea (1991), a prescient narrative about a lone Navy frigate's encounter with terrorists, the novelist Clive Cussler commented, "Setlowe has to be the finest adventure novelist in the country today". The Sexual Occupation of Japan (1999) was lauded by English professor and novelist Les Standiford as "rivaling Michael Crichton in topicality, le Carre in authority, and Martin Cruz Smith in emotional depth". Setlowe's five novels to date have been translated into a dozen languages.

Setlowe's play The Apple That Fell Far From the Tree was staged at the East West Players' David Henry Hwang Theater in Los Angeles in May 2007. Norma Jean & Johnny was staged at the Blank Theatre in Hollywood in March 2010. Setlowe regards both plays as works in progress.

The menace of past lives colliding with the present explored in The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell is a theme Setlowe revisits in his fifth novel, The Sexual Occupation of Japan (1999). Again, moldering memories and the psychic scars of wartime, this time World War II Japan and Vietnam, propel the main characters toward an uncertain future.

Setlowe's fourth novel, The Black Sea, was a nominee for the PEN West Literary Award in Fiction. Published in 1991, this tale of terror set in Southeast Asia presaged a post-9/11 world in which piracy, ancient ethnic conflicts and ideological zealotry threaten to undermine the hegemony of the superpowers, despite the advantages of their military and technological superiority. As a thriller and gripping sea adventure, The Black Sea's clash between a lone U.S. Navy frigate and the mysterious cultures of the Far East and the Muslim fundamentalist world drew critical attention. J. C. Pollock, author of Goering's List, observed presciently, "The Black Sea ushers in [the] new era [for the adventure novel] with a masterfully told tale so real it could be true."

The Black Sea dramatizes historical events—the Iran-Contra guns for hostages affair, which came to light in 1986, and the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro—and anticipates the future. The Islamic fundamentalism and piracy portrayed in Setlowe's thriller not only reflects the zeitgeist of its time but also foresees with uncanny accuracy events that would take center stage in world affairs a decade later. The novel has been republished by the authoritative Naval Institute Press as one of the "exceptional works on naval and military subjects".

The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell is a departure from the previous two novels. Published in 1984, the story weaves together multiple storylines and elements of love, war and occult genres into a ghost story suffused with smoldering passion, foreboding and suspense.

Setlowe's second novel, The Experiment, published in 1980, is a medical science fiction thriller. The story of "a human Neptune in the grotto of marine science. And, more particularly, our imagination", was a Literary Guild selection. The New York Times review by Jack Sullivan praised "an underwater phantasmagoria, [that] delivers a welcome sense of wonder in the tradition of H. G. Wells's In The Abyss. The renowned science fiction author and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, corresponded with Setlowe. The Experiment resonated with Clarke, who had a lifelong interest in the sea and diving. He respected the meticulous scientific research—Clarke had personally known several of the scientists cited—and commented on the novel's place in the sci-fi pantheon.

Feminist critics have argued the book perpetuates a literary tradition of fetishizing Japanese women. The book begins with an act of literal reciprocity for the metaphorical emasculation of Japanese men bent on revenge for the humiliations suffered at the hands of American occupiers. The gruesome "night letter" nailed on Saxon's hotel room door recalls the true story of geisha Sada Abe, well known in Japan for having carried her lover's severed genitalia in her handbag after killing him by erotic asphyxiation. Abe's notoriety gained international infamy primarily through Nagisa Oshima's film, In the Realm of the Senses (1976). Narrelle Morris regards Setlowe's scene as an example of his story's cultural mythologizing with specific reference to Sada Abe's story.

Setlowe successfully ventured from journalism into motion pictures, in the early 1970s at ABC Pictures as Vice President of Creative Affairs. The feature films produced during his tenure included several critically significant pictures: the comedy Kotch (1971), starring Best Actor Oscar winner Walter Matthau, with Jack Lemmon in his directorial debut (Academy Award nominations also for Film Editing, Best Song, and Sound); Sam Peckinpah's controversial thriller Straw Dogs (1971), starring Dustin Hoffman; and the Bob Fosse (Best Director) musical Cabaret (1972), starring Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey in Oscar-winning performances (the film won 8 of 10 Oscars for which it was nominated). Kotch and Cabaret also garnered back-to-back Writer's Guild Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1972 and 1973, respectively.

He also served as Press and TV Director for the first National Air Races staged in Reno, Nevada, in 1964, drawing on his Navy flight experience. Setlowe subsequently worked in television news in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Ensign Setlowe volunteered for Navy flight school with the ambition of becoming a fighter pilot. But after a year of flight training in Florida, in a budget cutback the Navy reassigned him to the USS Midway as an operations officer and flight controller in the Far East. The aircraft carrier was the flagship during the international crisis in the Taiwan Straits in 1958. Setlowe disembarked from the Midway in San Francisco with the material for his first novels in his sea bag.

Setlowe was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York during the height of the Depression. His father Ernest quit law school to become an actor, and a playwright, and met his future wife Marion, a dancer, while performing in the 1927 production of the Broadway musical Good News. With a growing family, Setlowe's father abandoned his theatre ambitions and went to work in a family furniture manufacturing business.