This reporter, who was his board operator, took phone calls from scores of listeners who loved to start their Sundays with a cup of coffee, listening to 'The Green Hornet' and 'The Shadow.' Fans would have off-air conversations with Dunning about what the world was like before television. But every weekend, he would lug in his boxes of reel-to-reel tapes, thread them on a machine and let them run. No one knew where he got his collection of unique recordings. In the 1980’s, Dunning played hours of old radio shows on Sunday mornings on KNUS 710, the now-defunct AM radio station. The next morning at 4 a.m., he would finish his thought and rewrite the last couple of pages.ĭunning’s detective books won two Edgar Award nominations and the novel 'Booked to Die' won the prestigious Nero award and was nominated for Best Novel for the 1993 Anthony Award. He told his writing students at Metro State University that when he was in the process of creating a novel, he would stop typing each at the end of each working day in mid-sentence. “He was a wonderful storyteller and a real thorn in the side of management because he was so outspoken,” he said.Īs a writer, Dunning treasured his 1964 Hermes Ambassador manual typewriter, choosing to peck away at the old machine over a computer, which he said in a 1992 interview were “destructive to the creative process.”

Kreck described him as one of the last of the old newspaper guys. Kreck, who knew Dunning when they were reporters at the Post, lost touch and said they renewed their friendship later on. “If we were looking for an obscure book, John is one of the first people we would call.”Īuer said Dunning was a book sleuth who could track down any publication and answer any question. “He lived in a world of books,” said Marilyn Auer, who had dealings with Dunning when she was publisher of the Bloomberg Review. “I could not read those books without seeing Dunning as Cliff Janeway,” Danbom said of Dunning's fictional crime hero.ĭunning, co-owner of the now-defunct Old Algonquin Books, was also a respected antiquarian bookseller. Others knew Dunning as an old-time radio show collector and successful crime writer whose main character, an ex-Denver cop and expert on rare books, was awfully familiar. Some recall the Denver Post city-side reporter who would run through the newsroom on assignment with his shirt hanging out.

'I could tell he was beginning to slip,' said his friend Dick Kreck, sadly, remarking that a man with a brain so full of knowledge would die this way.Įveryone who knew Dunning described him as a force of nature.

Booked to die by john dunning