Beverly Setlowe
   — In Memoriam

On April 24, 2012, my wife Beverly died. The broad strokes of her life are noted in her Variety obituary.

But, as in all journalism, there is something rapturous that is missed. As a novelist, I could only circle it. Yet for me, it shines through in the two photos shown here. The first of Beverly with a tiger cub, which I took at Lion Country Safari, and the second of her cuddling – there is no other accurate word for it – an adolescent snow leopard at the Wildlife Waystation outside Los Angeles, a refuge that became her great passion

I met and fell in love with Beverly when I was a young newspaper writer in San Francisco in the Sixties, before I had ever typed a word of my first novel. But there is no novel in which she is fictionally depicted as, say, Zelda is as Daisy in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Yet Beverly perfuses Nancy in The Brink, Ruth in The Experiment, Suzanna in The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell, Maggi in The Black Sea, and Joan in The Sexual Occupation of Japan.

Beverly taught me what I know of love. The rest was scribbling.

— Richard Setlowe