US: It was somehow fitting that the last weekly column by writer Hunter S. Thompson this month was headlined Death in the Afternoon. The writer, who popularised the first-person form of journalism in books that often dealt with near-death experiences, committed suicide on Sunday.
Thompson (67) "took his life with a gunshot to the head" in his home at Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, according to Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis. Thompson's wife, Anita, was not home at the time and his son, Juan, found the body. In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News they asked for privacy, adding the brief epithet: "He stomped terra (earth)."
Thompson did just that, challenging convention and chronicling decadence as a scribe of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. He was the founder along with Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese of "New Journalism", which he called "gonzo journalism", the intensely personal - and in his case often drug-enhanced - reporting which he exemplified in books such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in 1972, and in long subjective articles for Rolling Stone magazine.
The Death in the Afternoon column, about an auto-racing driver's fatal crash, seemed to hold a clue to Thompson's state of mind. He wrote that the violent death "seemed to send a message, an urgent warning signal that something with a meaning beyond the sum of its parts had gone Wrong & would go Wrong again if something big wasn't cured - not just in racing, but in the machinery of the American nation".
Thompson was the model for cartoonist Garry Trudeau's balding Uncle Duke in the comic strip "Doonesbury", named after Raoul Duke, a character in Fear and Loathing, and was played on screen by Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of the book and by Bill Murray in Where The Buffalo Roam.
In another of his last weekly Hey Rube columns on sports channel ESPN's website, Thompson recounted a midnight call to Bill Murray suggesting tongue-in-cheek (or perhaps not) that the actor co-operate in marketing "shot-gun golf", where players would aim weapons rather than clubs at the ball.
The opening to Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is often cited as a classic example of his style: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive....' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?' Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. 'What the hell are you yelling about?' he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses.
"'Never mind,' I said. 'It's your turn to drive.' I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough."
Thompson was born in Kentucky. He served two years in the Air Force and later covered the Caribbean for Time and the New York Herald Tribune before joining The Nation and then Rolling Stone, where his fights with editor Jann Wenner over expenses became legendary.
His most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness.
In later life he played down his drug abuse, saying, "Obviously, my drug use is exaggerated or I would be long since dead."