Greg Iles, a Mississippi-bred novelist whose best-selling late-career thrillers explored the toxic racism that historically blighted the Jim Crow South, died on Aug. 15 at his home in Natchez, Miss. He was 65.
The cause was multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, said Dan Conaway, his agent. Mr. Iles learned he had the disease in 1996 but was asymptomatic until a few years ago.
Mr. Iles’s Southern-based books sold more than 10 million copies, and 17 of them were New York Times best sellers. About 15 years ago, he moved from straightforward crime thrillers into more thematically powerful territory through the influence of the crusading journalist Stanley Nelson.
Mr. Nelson, the editor of The Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday, La., who investigated cold cases of Ku Klux Klan murders, brought Mr. Iles’s attention to lynchings that occurred in or near Natchez in the 1960s and to the Silver Dollars, an ultraviolent Klan offshoot that Mr. Iles would call the Double Eagles in his novels.
“Despite being considered a Southern novelist, I have always fought off any temptation to use the Ku Klux Klan as antagonists, because in real life, by 1967-68, they were pretty much irrelevant, and had long been totally penetrated by the F.B.I.,” Mr. Iles told Book Page in 2014. “But in this case, when I found out about the real-life Silver Dollar group and how that worked and how none of those murders had been solved, I realized, OK, this is the story; this really is scary stuff.”
Mr. Nelson, Mr. Isles wrote in a tribute to his friend after he died in June, “led me through the secret pasts of our home states — Mississippi and Louisiana — among men who lived in the shadow of crimes that had no statute of limitations.”
“Natchez Burning” (2014), the first book in the trilogy, is dedicated to Mr. Nelson — whom he called a “humble hero” — and the journalist character Henry Sexton is based on him. Mr. Iles wrote the foreword to Mr. Nelson’s 2016 book, “Devils Walking: Klan Murders Along the Mississippi in the 1960s.”
Mr. Iles relied on a recurring protagonist, Penn Cage, a prosecutor in Houston turned novelist who becomes the mayor of Natchez, his hometown. Penn is featured in eight of Mr. Iles’s 18 books, including the 2,300-page trilogy that opened with “Natchez Burning,” continued with “The Bone Tree” (2015) and ended two years later with “Mississippi Blood.”
In “Natchez Burning,” Penn’s father, Tom, a local doctor (modeled on Mr. Iles’s father, whom he called “Atticus Finch with a stethoscope”), is charged with the murder of his former nurse, Viola, a Black woman with whom Tom once had an affair.
“More than anything,” the author Bill Sheehan wrote in a review of “Natchez Burning” in The Washington Post, “this impassioned novel is concerned with the pervasive impact of past events, events that refuse to remain buried.”
“The Bone Tree” propels Penn and his fiancée, a journalist, into the dangerous world of the Double Eagles and their ties to the Mississippi state police and organized crime. “Mississippi Blood” continues with the trial of Dr. Cage, who won’t help in his defense, preferring to keep the terrible secrets of his past buried.
Mr. Iles told The Los Angeles Times in 2024 that his novels had nothing to teach Black readers about racism, but that white readers “could be seduced into reading a thriller” about the subject even if they would “prefer not to think about” the actual horrors of the era.
In “Southern Man” (2024), Penn returns and, like Mr. Iles, has multiple myeloma. He asks his daughter, Annie, a civil rights lawyer, to investigate a conservative radio host who hopes to exploit racial tensions in his bid for a third-party campaign for the presidency.
While Mr. Iles was writing the book, he had a recurrence of his multiple myeloma and was treated with chemotherapy, causing delays in the book’s publication.
Mark Gregory Iles was born on April 8, 1960, in Stuttgart, West Germany, where his father, Jerry, was a physician at the United States Embassy clinic in Bonn while serving in the Army Medical Service Corps.
During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, Greg, his parents and his younger brother, Geoff, left for the United States by ship, and the family settled in Natchez. His mother, Betty Joe (Thornhill) Iles, was a high school librarian and English teacher who died of multiple myeloma in 2020.
While studying English at the University of Mississippi, Mr. Iles earned money playing guitar. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1983, he played in a band, Frankly Scarlett, until he told his first wife that he was quitting music and wanted to write a book. “There was a long silence,” he later told The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., “then she said, ‘We’ll make it somehow.’”
He worked for a year on the manuscript of “Spandau Phoenix,” about the blockbuster contents of a fictional diary left behind posthumously by Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler’s deputies, after he died in 1987 and Spandau Prison, where he had been held, was demolished. The book questions whether it was, indeed, Hess in the prison.
Mr. Iles then found an agent and sold it. Published in 1993, it became his first best seller.
Mr. Iles’s first Penn Cage novel, “The Quiet Game” (1999), follows the character as a recent widower who returns to Natchez and investigates the unsolved murder of a Black Korean War veteran.
His next book, “24 Hours” (2000), about a psychotic who kidnaps the daughter of two doctors, was adapted into a film, “Trapped” (2002), starring Kevin Bacon and Charlize Theron. Mr. Iles wrote the screenplay.
In 2002, he joined the Rock Bottom Reminders, the all-author rock band whose other members included Stephen King, Amy Tan, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. After Mr. Iles’s death, Mr. King wrote on the social media site X, “He was a hell of a writer and a hell of a player.”
Multiple myeloma was not the only health crisis of Mr. Iles’s life.
In 2011, Mr. Iles was pulling onto a highway near Natchez when a pickup slammed into his driver’s side door at 70 miles per hour. His aorta was ruptured, his ribs were broken, and his right leg was partly amputated. He woke up eight days later from a medically induced coma.
He had nearly completed a draft of “Natchez Burning” before the accident. While he recovered, he had what he called a “Road-to-Damascus moment,” he told The Courier News, a central New Jersey newspaper, in 2017: “I realized that one book wouldn’t do it. Nor would a second.”
“I was writing about race and civil rights and the South and America, about horrific murders carried out by the most violent offshoot of the K.K.K. ever to exist,” he said. “Not one was punished until 40 years after the fact. Some were never punished.
“To realize I had grown up 12 miles away and had no idea, that they weren’t talked about,” he added. “That began to drive me — to find the reason.”
He mapped out a more ambitious plan for a trilogy, one that his publisher, Scribner, had not signed on for. So he repaid his advance and sold the idea for the trilogy to William Morrow.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Iles is survived by his wife, Caroline (Hungerford) Iles, whom he married in 2014, and their two children, Eleanor and Elliot; and by two children, Mark Jr. and Madeline Iles, from his marriage to Carrie McGee, which ended in divorce.
In 2015, Mr. Iles waded into the debate in Mississippi over removing the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag.
“Of course the flag doesn’t bother someone necessarily if they are white and the flag represents their heritage,” he said in a speech at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, Miss., “but they clearly have no feelings whatsoever for those who were enslaved under that flag. Changing that flag has nothing to do with history. It’s about choosing which history to honor.”
In 2020, about 70 percent of voters in Mississippi approved a new state flag on which the Confederate symbol was replaced with a magnolia.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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