Vince Flynn dyslexia, Vince Flynn, a best-selling author of thriller novels set in a world of canny terrorists, inept politicians and freedom-loving counterterrorist assassins, died on Wednesday in St. Paul. He was 47.
The cause was prostate cancer, said a spokesman for his literary agency, ICM Partners.
Mr. Flynn wrote 14 books, with a total of 15 million copies sold in the United States. All but the first book featured his protagonist Mitch Rapp, the sometimes freelance, sometimes C.I.A.-employed killer whose vigilante instincts were ignited by the death of his high school sweetheart, Maureen. (The story line puts her on Pan Am Flight 103, destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 by a terrorist bomb.)
His first book, “Term Limits,” in which commandos assassinate three powerful politicians in Washington, was rejected by so many publishers, Mr. Flynn said, that he decided to publish it himself and sell copies out of the trunk of his car. His brisk sales, and his charismatic salesmanship, landed him a deal with Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books, which included the first chapter in a booklet insert in USA Today. In 1999, “Term Limits” became a paperback best seller.
The Mitch Rapp character was born in his second book, “Transfer of Power.” Mr. Flynn wrote about a novel a year from then on. All of them made The New York Times’s best-seller list. The last six, including his final novel, “The Last Man,” reached No. 1.
Mr. Flynn’s fans included former Central Intelligence Agency operatives; the talk-show hosts Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt, who frequently had him on their shows; and President George W. Bush, who invited him to the White House.
Mr. Flynn spoke of his books’ popularity in an interview last year with FrontPage magazine, an online journal. “In my series,” he said, “the heroes are the men and women of the Secret Service, the C.I.A., Special Forces, the whole national security apparatus. And the villains are, shockingly enough, Islamic radical fundamentalists.” He added: “The secondary villains that I have are politicians and bureaucrats. It’s very easy to build a story around that because it’s reality.”
Vincent Flynn was born in St. Paul on April 6, 1966. He graduated from St. Thomas Academy and the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul with a degree in economics. He was working as a salesman at Kraft Foods in the 1990s when he began writing his first book.
He is survived by his wife, Lysa, and three children.
“I didn’t read at all when I was growing up; I was dyslexic,” he said in a 2010 radio interview with Don Imus.
But the skills he acquired to compensate for dyslexia — intuiting the direction of events, even when not understanding the words to the story — served him well as a writer. Imagining shadowy plots and ways to foil them requires a lot of “filling in the blanks,” he said. “That’s a dyslexic gift.”
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