“I’d begun to ponder my own obituary. It certainly wouldn’t make Newsweek, but I figured it would rate a couple of lines in the Chronicle: ‘He worked here for a while.’ That could probably sum up my earthly existence. ‘He worked here for a while’.” So muses private investigator Jacob Asch in one of 11 West Coast thrillers by Arthur Lyons, who combined writing with running two Palm Springs restaurants.

Arthur Lyons was born in 1946 to Los Angeles restaurateurs. He graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1967, and while working in his parents’ restaurants he lived in a caravan and wrote science fiction. His satanic interests led to a non-fiction study, The Second Coming: Satanism in America (1970). It inspired his first Jacob Asch novel, The Dead Are Discreet (1974).

Whether in the boxing world of Dead Ringer (1977), or the slaughter houses of The Killing Floor (1976), or even music industry of Three With a Bullet (1984), Asch’s asides were the main entertainment: “I’d read about people who got along just fine on one or two hours of sleep. I heard the chief engineer at Chernobyl was one.”

After two medical thrillers, written with a chief medical examiner, came The Blue Sense (1991), a study of psychic detectives. His last book was an account of film noir, Death on the Cheap (2000).

Arthur Lyons, writer, was born on January 5, 1946. He died on March 21, 2008, aged 62