Legendary Mississippi author Greg Iles died Friday after a long battle with cancer.

The 65-year-old best-selling author, who wrote 17 novels, lost his battle to multiple myeloma, a cancer in which white blood cells begin to grow abnormally in the bone marrow. He had been battling the disease since 1996.

“He gave us great books, and he stayed in Mississippi,” said Lemuria Bookstore owner John Evans. “He wrote about a lot of the wrongs to make people all over the country realize that some people were trying to do right.”

Iles became a supporter of Lemuria long before he ever began writing books, coming first with his father and later on his own, Evans said.

Once on Ernest Hemingway’s birthday, Lemuria had a keg of beer and threw a party.

When Iles arrived, he confessed that he felt “totally at home in this bookstore,” Evans said. “He was just a kid.”

He pursued a career in rock music, but traded it for love and a life of writing novels. His first novel, “Spandau Phoenix,” a 1993 book that involved one of the unsolved mysteries of World War II, became a national success.

Iles soon became a New York Times best-selling author, blending real-life history with his spellbinding tales.

In 2011, he faced his own life-or-death crisis when he was nearly killed in an accident on U.S. 61. His right leg below the knee had to be amputated, but Iles never gave up.

During his convalescence, he began writing a trilogy set in his beloved Natchez based on a Ku Klux Klan group known as the Silver Dollar Group, which was involved in the fatal firebombing of Frank Morris, a Black shoe repairman in Ferriday, Louisiana, in 1964 as well as others.

Iles based one of the characters, Henry Sexton, on real-life investigative reporter Stanley Nelson, who wrote about Morris’ killing and other Klan violence.

Nelson, who died June 5, was flattered that Iles penned such a character, but the journalist confessed that his alter ego “has had a much more adventurous life than me. He is a musician, has a girlfriend and is tech savvy — that’s something I don’t know a damn thing about.”

After he finished the trilogy in 2017, he appeared with Nelson at the Mississippi Book Festival, an event he did his best to champion.

The festival’s executive director, Ellen Rodgers Daniels, greeted Friday’s news with sorrow. “He was such a huge part of the festival,” she said. “I’m heartbroken for [his wife] Caroline and the children.”

Despite his national success, Iles continued to sign books and host events at Lemuria. He held the last of those events at Cathead Distillery in Jackson, where he sat in a wheelchair as he talked about his last novel, “Southern Man,” which author Stephen King called “his latest and best.” 

Ever since Evans learned the news Friday night, he said he’s been thinking about Iles and other authors who have left us too soon. “I’ve seen so many of my Mississippi friends go away,” he said. “It makes me sad, and it makes me think of others, too.”

In one of the last posts on his website, Iles wrote, “My last thought for today is that only two things matter: family and friends.”