Matt Wayne here, longtime pal of Dwayne’s. I’ve been leaving the hard work of posting content for this site to Eugene, as I try to come up with a way to share memories of my friend without getting personal. I keep hoping to invent a system to make all these random memories resolve into a portrait of the finest man and the finest mind I’ve ever met. Seems simple enough, but I haven’t worked it out.

Instead, I’m going to list a bunch of things that I got into because Dwayne recommended them to me. I’m sure that this won’t leave us with a complete sense of Dwayne, but it’s all I can do. Blogging isn’t supposed to add up to anything, after all. Merely to add up.

Let’s start with some novelists:

ROBERT PARKER – I bought all the used Spenser paperbacks I could one day around 1989, on Dwayne’s strong recommendation. I’m almost certain that we were standing in a great used book and knickknack store called the Scouting Party, on 7th Avenue and 10th street in Brooklyn. This was just about the time that the Spenser series had misfired a couple times, in Dwayne’s opinion. But I went back and read them from the beginning, and I have to say, they’re almost always well-crafted and among the best detective fiction written to that point. (Dennis Lehane was kind of a game-changer for the genre. Dwayne was an early adopter, as usual.)

Once, I was planning a dinner for my girlfriend in Brooklyn, and told Dwayne about it on the phone. I told him what I was concocting from what was already in the freezer and a few bucks (I was broke for all of the 80s). And I guess it did mirror a recurring bit in the Parker mysteries. When I mentioned slicing a pork tenderloin into medallions he drawled. “Spen-suh!” a la Hawk, and we both broke up laughing. From then on, whenever I was telling him something that implied I was a resourceful and capable cook, which happened a lot, I’d get the same “Spen-suh!” and it was always funny. Because, you see, it was Dwayne doing it.

Which brings up Hawk. Dwayne overlooked Parker’s occasionally Tonto-like portrayal of Spenser’s black friend—Hawk’s dialogue could be relentless with dropped articles and even verbs when possible–because there was so much he did right with the character and the work was well-structured. He overlooked it just like he overlooked the descriptions of Spenser’s wardrobe in the early (1970s) books. Dwayne was aware of the mainstream’s prejudices but he never forgave them or pretended they weren’t there. Which is something you’ll hear again and again if we continue these media memoirs. And he loved Avery Brooks’ portrayal of Hawk on TV. He was also fond of Parker’s more recent heroes, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall–he viewed them as necessary, in some ways a reboot of Spenser. Thirty years ago, Spenser had been past his prime and a bit more cautious in a fight. In his 60s the obligatory man-of-action stuff was becoming too painful to enjoy.

RITA MAE BROWN – When she’s on, she’s amazing. Rubyfruit Jungle and In Her Day are classics. The Southern stuff with Wheezie and Juts was fantastic. While I found her mysteries (which feature a dog and cat as the sleuths) to be whimsical and adorable, Dwayne was a mystery connoisseur and felt they were hacky. He also recommended her book on writing, Starting From Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Manual-although he felt that Brown went to great lengths to show off her command of literature and name-drop. “I always like an author’s SECOND-most famous work best,” was Dwayne’s ironic mimicry of that common pretentious pose. Dwayne also thought she had one of the best ears for dialogue of any writer. Brown’s “Somebody shot the dots off her dice” to describe a crazy relative was one of his favorite lines ever, one he sneaked into a few different scripts over the years… most recently in an episode of Ben 10: Ultimate Alien.

Dwayne took dialect very seriously; aside from ten minutes in a core English class in college, I never thought about regional dialects until I had access to Dwayne’s library in Brooklyn. He had many books on the subject.

One of Dwayne’s many rules of writing: “Writing in dialect is a tricky business. Unless you’re Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, don’t even try.” Notice that he didn’t exempt Robert Parker or Rita Mae Brown.

The “Don’t even try” in that last bit reminds me of another big influence on Dwayne, Fran Lebowitz. She wrote, and Dwayne often quoted the following: “Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.” More on her (and possibly Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston) later.