Tyler, W.T. 1929-2008 (S.J. Hamrick, Samuel J. Hamrick, Samuel J. Hamrick, Jr., Samuel Jennings Hamrick, Jr.)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 19, 1929, in Lubbock, TX; died of colon cancer, February 29, 2008, in Boston, VA. Foreign service officer, diplomat, novelist, and author. As an American soldier in the early 1950s, Tyler served in counterintelligence. For twenty years afterward, from 1960 to 1980, he was a foreign service officer for the U.S. Department of State, serving briefly in the Middle East and Canada, but mostly in Africa in the Congo, Ethiopia, and Somalia. When stuck behind a desk from time to time, Tyler relieved the boredom by writing spy fiction. After retiring from the diplomatic service in 1980, he began to publish his work, usually distancing himself from the government by adopting the pseudonym W.T. Tyler. Every one of Tyler's novels won praise for its unerring dialogue and descriptive passages so piercingly authentic that they spurred the reader onward, even if the story lines sometimes trailed into confusion. Several of the novels reflect settings in distant lands where Tyler had served. The Ants of God (1981) and The Lion and the Jackal (1988), for instance, are set in Africa. His first novel, The Man Who Lost the War (1980), revives the Cold War atmosphere of Berlin in the 1960s; and Rogue's March (1982), while set in Congo, is about a treasonous spy remarkably like British Cold War agent Kim Philby. Most of Tyler's characters have been described as disillusioned or otherwise marginalized intelligence agents who sometimes end up at the edge of loyalty or the law. The author himself once commented that his novels are basically about the same protagonist, with different identities, confronted by similar dilemmas. Tyler also wrote a novel set in Washington, DC, during the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, and one nonfiction book under his own name, S.J. Hamrick: Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess (2004), in which he explores the thesis that Kim Philby and his comrades in treason could have been manipulated by the British government to unwittingly deliver "manufactured" intelligence that was deliberately intended to deceive the Soviet agents who received it.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, March 10, 2008, p. A19.

Times (London, England), March 20, 2008, p. 77

Washington Post, March 12, 2008, p. B7.