Warren Zevon, a singer and songwriter who came up with hard-boiled stories and tender confessions of love, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 56.
The cause was cancer, which was diagnosed last summer.
Mr. Zevon had a pulp-fiction imagination that yielded songs like "Werewolves of London," "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," "Lawyers, Guns and Money" and "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." They were terse, action-packed, gallows-humored tales that could sketch an entire screenplay in four minutes and often had death as a punchline. But there was also vulnerability and longing in Mr. Zevon's ballads, like "Mutineer," "Accidentally Like a Martyr" and "Hasten Down the Wind."