Op-Ed Contributor - Catch-2009 - NYTimes.com LET me interrupt normal programming about climate change, White House party crashers, Tiger Woods's late-night driving habits, the deficit and the public option to note the 10th anniversary of the death of Joseph Heller. The author of "Catch-22" and I became friends after I wrote a respectful but not altogether favorable review of the sequel to his 1961 masterpiece. I was stunned to receive a handwritten note thanking me for the review. I wrote back. A friendship ensued. Five years later, by the time Joe died, we'd accumulated a correspondence of several hundred letters, most transmitted by fax. Remember faxes? Joe was 76 when he died the night of Dec. 12, 1999. I remember the date because the last fax I had from him was dated Dec. 11. It's thumb-tacked to the bulletin board over my desk. I was writing him back when a newspaper rang and asked if I might "write something about Joe Heller." Any particular reason? He died last night. I had to hang up and compose myself. The letter I'd been on the verge of writing included an extract that I'd found in his 1986 memoir, "No Laughing Matter," about his ordeal with Guillain-Barré syndrome. Mario [Puzo] had called George Mandel to say he'd heard Joe was paralyzed. No, Mario .... He's got something called Guillain-Barré. "My God," Mario blurted out. That's terrible! A surprised George murmured, "Hey, Mario, you know about Guillain-Barré?" "No, I never heard nothing about it," Mario replied. But when they name any disease after two guys, it's got to be terrible! I thought it was delightful. Now it didn't seem very funny. (An odd coincidence: Joe learned he had Guillain-Barré on Dec. 13, 1981. I wonder if the chronological symmetry in those two calamities would have amused him.) The death of any friend leaves a hole. In this case, a succession of holes, for I've often found myself wondering over the last 10 years, "What would Joe have made of this?" Having died just before the start of a tumultuous - to say the least - decade, the author of a landmark 20th-century satire missed, or perhaps another way to put it, avoided: the Florida recount weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein's hanging, available on cellphone and YouTube Dick Cheney shooting his lawyer Hurricane Katrina John Kerry, war hero, being depicted as a Swift-boating wimp Lady Gaga A.I.G. bonuses Bernard Madoff the election of Barack Obama Glenn Beck the "controversy" over Barack Obama's birth certificate Sarah Palin, best-selling author. I'd love to have heard his take on all this over our ritual martinis. Joe was not a manufacturer of bons mots. Au contraire - as he himself would have gleefully put it. His conversation was non-ornamental. He did not strive to be witty or to dazzle. He was amused but mostly repelled by professional talking heads, those conveyor belts of forced insight. But behind the warm smile, he had a switchblade-sharp mind, and his fraud-detector (what Hemingway called, in somewhat saltier terms, the writer's most indispensable tool) was as fine-tuned as a Predator drone. He could spot phoniness at a thousand yards and destroy it with a single Hellfire-missile glance. For all that, he was playful and avuncular. He provided one of my books with a blurb. The subsequent Publisher's Weekly review was decidedly mixed. I faxed it to him with a sigh. He drew lines through the decidedly mixed portions and wrote at the bottom, "Now it's a total rave." So this Dec. 12, I mark a sad anniversary, and wonder, among so many other things, what "Catch-22"s" author would have had to say about President Obama's accepting the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after ordering 30,000 more Americans to war. Christopher Buckley is the editor at large of ForbesLife magazine.