Judith Merkle Riley, longtime professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and bestselling novelist under her married name, Judith Merkle Riley, died at her home in Claremont, California, on September 12, 2010, of cancer. She was 68.

She taught under her maiden name, Judith Merkle, in the Claremont McKenna College government department from 1982 to 2005. She joined the college, formerly Claremont Men's College, in 1982, the year after it became fully coeducational and changed its name to Claremont McKenna College. She became the department's first tenured woman member. She is remembered as one of its most consummately attentive and successful teachers. Professor Merkle was one of a small cohort of women faculty hired in the 1980s who mentored the rapidly rising number of female undergraduates. She also championed the needs and interests of newly hired, younger female faculty. She taught organization and management, public and comparative administration, political ideologies, and health care and public policy courses.

Professor Merkle's magnum opus in political science was Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (University of California Press, 1981), described by Kenneth Minogue in a cover review in the Times Literary Supplement as “an interesting piece of work on a subject of central importance.” This book was a discussion of the spread of Frederick Winslow Taylor's doctrine of scientific management from the United States, where it inspired Henry Ford's production lines, to France, Germany, and especially the Soviet Union, where it was warmly embraced, and Great Britain, where it was largely frustrated by cultural barriers. Taylor (1856–1915) was considered the father of scientific management. His principles of measuring productivity outcomes at the bottom and imposing efficiency requirements from the top down still inspire health care and education reformers and draw opposition from the workers directly involved. Professor Merkle's sympathies were with the workers and the softer, more consultative principles of Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933), who is often described as the mother of scientific management.

By 2000, Professor Merkle's interests in organizational change focused her attention on the coming crises in the nation's health care system. With CMC colleague Fred Lynch, she developed and taught a very popular class on health care organization and public policy. They also began collaboration on a long-term study of the growing efforts of mainstream medicine and insurance companies to absorb or “co-opt” the more profitable and scientifically acceptable forms of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). “The CAM Establishment and the Co-optation Tango” was a well-received conference paper based on initial interviews and field research. The paper served as a pilot study for grant proposals and a possible book—efforts cut short by the onset of her final illness in 2005.

She was born to a family of scientists, mathematicians, and musicians and was a junior Phi Beta Kappa at the University of California, Berkeley. Her great uncle was the major league baseball player, Fred Merkle; her mother was a concert pianist. Her father, Theodore Charles Merkle, ran Project Pluto and was the associate director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Her brother, Ralph Merkle, is a pioneer in public-key cryptography and molecular nanotechnology. Her father's Project Pluto aimed to make a nuclear-powered ramjet engine for a cruise missile. After two prototypes were successfully tested, the project was canceled for fear that it would force the Soviets to copy it and that there would be no way to defend against it.

Professor Merkle received her BA and Ph.D. in political science from Berkeley and her MA from Harvard University. She was in the first class of women admitted to the master's program at Harvard in Soviet regional studies. She taught at the University of Oregon, where she was director of its Russian and East European Studies Center, and at the University of California, Berkeley. After receiving her master's degree, she worked for the U.S. Navy as an intelligence analyst.

Between 1988 and 1999, Professor Merkle published six historical novels: A Vision of Light (1989); In Pursuit of the Green Lion (1990); The Oracle Glass (1994); The Water Devil (1996/2007); The Serpent Garden (1996); and The Master of All Desires (1999). The New York Times Book Review praised A Vision of Light as “rich with the ambiance and flavor of the Middle Ages … a 14th-century story told with a 20th-century sensibility.” The Los Angeles Times proclaimed the book “fascinating and factual…. If all chronicles of earthly life were recorded with such drama, flair, and wit, the world would be filled with history majors.” The Oracle Glass (currently under option as a motion picture) was described as “intelligent, witty and elegantly written” by the San Francisco Chronicle. The Master of All Desires was praised as “a tightly woven, suspenseful and fiendishly funny novel” in Publishers Weekly. All her novels were meticulously researched for historical accuracy. They were translated into 11 languages, won many prizes, sold by the hundreds of thousands around the world, and gave her a huge worldwide following, inviting comparison to Claremont's greatest mass-audience authors of her time: Peter Drucker, David Foster Wallace, and Jamaica Kincaid.

She was an accomplished singer and musician and a longtime member of the Claremont Chorale. She also sang in the choir at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Upland. But her artistic interests went beyond music. In her younger years, she was a flamenco dancer, and research for one of her novels led to an interest in stained glass art, which she created until recently.

Her deepest passion was teaching. “Teaching is central to my life,” she noted in an article when asked about giving up teaching to pursue writing full-time. “I enjoy teaching too much to stop now. Teaching is what keeps me going. It's too much fun.”

Students and colleagues remember her as a supremely gifted storyteller, teacher, and colleague, with penetrating social science insights into the various ways that people arrange their lives. She had an eye for the telling example, especially the odd, outlandish, dramatic, and funny one. She also had a wicked, perceptive sense of humor and a native cheerfulness, curiosity, and zest, which she kept to the end.

Professor Merkle is survived by her daughter Elizabeth and son Marlow; two grandchildren, Graham and Iris Johnson; two brothers, Ralph and Ted Merkle, and generations of her grateful students.