Brian Innes, a musician who "held down a series of day jobs in publishing," eventually became a founding partner of Orbis Publishing (which was sold to Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press) and later moved "to the south of France where he poured out a stream of books, mostly in the true crime genre," died July 14, the Guardian reported. He was 86. For several years, Innes chaired the Crime Writers' Association's nonfiction Dagger award committee.
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Louise Shivers, whose 1983 debut work, the novella Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail, was a surprise bestseller, died on Saturday. She was 84. The New York Times said that the book is "set amid the tobacco fields of North Carolina in 1937. Its first-person narrator is Roxy Walston, the 20-year-old wife of a tobacco farmer and the mother of their 2-year-old child. Restless and unfulfilled, Roxy is, in her own words, 'unstrung, unquieted, my heart like a grape stain with no wine made.' " Shivers published another novella, A Whistling Woman, in 1994. She was a longtime writer in residence at Augusta State University, now known as Georgia Regents University, in Augusta, Ga.