Richard Lipez, novelist who featured a gay private eye, dies at 83

Richard Lipez, who expanded the genre of detective fiction with novels featuring a gay private investigator and was also a longtime reviewer of mysteries for The Washington Post, died March 16 at his home in Becket, Mass. He was 83.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his husband, Joe Wheaton.

Mr. Lipez (pronounced lih-PEZ) wrote fiction under the pen name of Richard Stevenson — using his middle name — and published 16 novels in his Donald Strachey series, which took his gay detective down mean streets and into murky psychological corners of modern American life.