Jeremiah Healy

"Describing his private eye, Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler wrote that "down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid". Of all the detectives who followed Marlowe down those mean streets in the Chandlerian renaissance of the 1970s and 80s, none dealt more seriously with the paradox of trying to be a white knight in a dirty world than John Francis Cuddy, the Boston-based creation of Jeremiah Healy, who has taken his own life at the age of 66.
Educated by Jesuits at Holy Cross College and toughened by service as a military policeman in Vietnam, Cuddy specialises in cases that fall between cracks in the justice system, and he is driven, and sometimes hindered, by his strong moral compass. The Cuddy novels are set apart by the effect on the detective of having lost his wife, Beth, to cancer: Cuddy spends time at her grave, discussing with her his cases and dilemmas. The first in the Cuddy series, Blunt Darts (1984), was nominated by the Private Eye Writers of America for the Shamus award as best first novel; the second, The Staked Goat (1986), won the Shamus as best novel.
The fourth Cuddy novel, Right to Die (1991), which focused on assisted suicide, was the first published as a paperback original. Although the series was admired by fellow writers, and the remaining nine Cuddy novels drew five more Shamus nominations, Cuddy lived in the shadow of Robert B Parker's Spenser, as if Boston (Beantown in the books) were not big enough for both. But where the Spenser books are relentlessly upbeat, Cuddy's optimism was constantly being challenged. The final Cuddy novel, Spiral (1999), opens with him losing his long-term girlfriend and dealing with the disturbing family of a former commanding officer.
In some ways, Cuddy resembled his creator, not least in his Irish background. Son of Jeremiah and Evelyn, Healy was born in Teaneck, New Jersey. His father had been a military police captain during the second world war, and he had an uncle who was an insurance investigator. Healy also rose to the rank of military police captain, during the Vietnam war, though he saw no service overseas. He graduated from Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, and Harvard Law School, where he fell in love with Boston. He worked as a trial attorney, and for 18 years as a professor at the New England School of Law, Boston, where he continued to teach until turning to writing full-time."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/22/jeremiah-healy