James E. Keirans

 James E. Keirans, 88, of Fort Collins, passed away on May 31, 2023. Born on April 4, 1935 in Rutland Massachusetts, he was the son of James and Helen (Young) Keirans. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps from 1956 to 1958, an experience that he always considered to be formative. He studied biology at Boston University, and was awarded a PhD in medical entomology from the University of New Hampshire in 1966. He devoted his career to the study of ectoparasites and became one of the world’s foremost experts on tick biology and taxonomy. He worked for the U.S. Public Health Service from 1966-1990. As a field biologist, he traveled all around the world collecting tick specimens. He held positions at the Technical Development Laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control in Savannah, Georgia; Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1990 he became the curator of the U.S. National Tick Collection at the newly-formed Institute of Arthropodology and Parasitology at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia. He was the author of six books and over a hundred journal articles on ticks and the diseases they carry. He retired in 2005. He was also a lifelong paperback book collector, loving to scour bookshops for Golden Age mystery novels. He contributed articles to The Armchair Detective, (Give Me That) Old-Time Detection, CADS (Crime and Detective Stories), and other mystery fan magazines. In 2015 he published the John Dickson Carr Companion, a fully-indexed guide to all the characters, settings, and murder weapons that appear in the novels of his favorite author. His survivors include his wife of sixty years, Laura (Millar) Keirans, of Fort Collins; his daughter Elizabeth (Keirans) Mason, of Fort Collins; daughter Jennifer Keirans of Lynnwood, Washington; two sons-in-law, three grandsons, and one great-grandson.

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