Michael Crichton has passed. I didn’t even know he was sick.

I hadn’t followed him as closely as I used to. I’d heard bad things about Next and didn’t even read it. I read State of Fear and liked it, even though I ultimately disagreed with it.

And that was one of the things I respected about the man. He always showed his work. Even though I don’t come to the same conclusions about global warming as he does in that book, in that book I can see every single reference, every single study, every single article he cites in coming to his conclusions. That kind of discipline and honesty in argument is rare these days.

I’ve read almost all of his books. He’s one of the few authors where I actually looked forward to his next book coming out. He’s one of the few authors whose books I’ve read more than once.

I think two things kept me coming back to his work. I always felt like I was learning something when I read a Crichton book. He’s one of the few fiction writers that gave me the same thrill as a non-fiction writer like Malcolm Gladwell.

And then there’s his sense of narrative. At his best, he kept to a very simple but effective puzzle structure, laying out all the clues you’d need in a pattern that you could not recognize until the most powerful moment.

The best example of this can be found in my favorite Crichton novel, Sphere. I still remember the sensation of reading the plot point that occurs about 3/4 of the way through. My jaw literally dropped. And it was a plot point that answered the unanswerable questions that came before it with elegance and teeth.

That skill – to set up the seemingly inexplicable and get your audience to ponder that and engage with it until you finally pull the rug out from under them with the hidden reality of the world or situation you’ve created – is something that sets a bar for me as a storyteller.

Film adaptations of his work were inconsistent at best, although if you look at the early ones (The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man) you’ll be more impressed than you will with the second wave that came after the success of Jurassic Park.

And then there’s his own film work (Looker, Runaway, Westworld) which I always enjoyed with a bit of camp flavor in retrospect, but still engaged me with interesting concepts (I mean how cool were the heat-signature-seeking bullets in Runaway, seriously?)

But ultimately it’s Crichton the novelist that I celebrate. He helped me fall in love with writing and with books, and you can’t ask for much more than that from an author.