Gordon Burn, who has died aged 61 of cancer, wrote himself into a highly distinctive place in modern British literature, covering a wealth of subjects in his books and journalism but avoiding all attempts at pigeonholing. He was respected as a serious researcher of notorious crimes, an analyst of celebrity disintegration and an authority on contemporary art. Terse via email, charming in person, he left those who encountered him thinking: "Is he literary? Or is he artistic?" and, most frequently, "whatever is he going to do next?"
Burn caught critics' attention in 1990 with his first book, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, which took its title from one of the baffled appeals for information by the head of the Yorkshire Ripper squad, George Oldfield. Unlike the hapless assistant chief constable, Burn got to know the background of Peter Sutcliffe. He spent three years in the murderer's home town of Bingley and presented its society in the 1980s, and especially the latent aggression towards women, with the anthropological skill of a Yorkshire Margaret Mead.
The book scotched the initial suspicions that surround a writer venturing on to such potentially exploitative territory, and allowed him to move on, reflectively and to good purpose, to studies of Fred and Rosemary West, the Moors murderers (fictionalised in his Whitbread-winning novel Alma Cogan, visualising how the singer's life could have gone had she not died in 1966) and even the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. In all of them, as with his books on snooker stars and the Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best, he dealt with previously sensationalised subjects in an unsensational way.
Burns started by writing about the world he knew. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the only child of a mother who worked at Binns, the city's department store, and a father who was a paint-sprayer. He had an outside lavatory, an uncle who kept pigeons and a regular place in the teenage queue for football stars' autographs outside St James's Park.
Calling himself "keen but clueless" at primary school, he nonetheless leapt the all-important hurdle of the 11-plus and landed safely in a grammar school, the great social escalator of the day. He was an entranced attender at Mordern Tower, a medieval turret in the remains of Newcastle's walls which was turned into a centre for readings and 1960s "happenings" by Tom and Connie Pickard, poets, writers and general activists.
Burn wrote later in the Guardian of how "we nervous grammar-school boys (never more than two of us) were exposed for the first time to mad riffers and homosexuals and junkies ... It is impossible to overstate the impact the Mordern Tower had on me as a diligent, booksniff sixth-former". His other crucial lift came from great good fortune; one of his cousins was Eric Burdon, who shot to fame with The Animals in 1964, singing on numbers such as The House of the Rising Sun and We've Gotta Get Outta This Place.
Getting out was what cousin Gordon did, too. With a head full of English literature from Newcastle central library, he spent a summer with Burdon in Los Angeles. Other international heroes drifted by the apartment – Joni Mitchell, John Mayall, Mick Fleetwood. Burn already knew from his library books that "ordinary" people could write books, and now he saw the real and often very un-glitzy side of celebrities' lives. The combination informed his writing, initially with journalism for outlets such as the Sunday Times colour magazine and Rolling Stone. His growing interest in contemporary art earned him several commissions for Radio Times, but these ended when an interview with Gilbert and George in 1973 collapsed in general drunkenness.
Acclaim for Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son was followed by similar receptions for Alma Cogan (1991), which won the Whitbread first novel award the following year, and Burn's second novel, Fullalove, which made the Booker's 20-strong "long shortlist" in 1995. The theme of this book again combined acute social observation with the seaminess often attached to fame; its alcoholic hack who sleeps with a teddy bear and children's audio tapes to compensate for his ruthless day job infiltrates a dying celebrity's hospital room, just as real journalists tried to do with Russell Harty.
Happy Like Murderers also earned respect in 1998, but Burn said afterwards that involvement in the disgusting world of the Wests was an experience he never wished to repeat, however illuminating the unpeeling of other layers of British society. He turned to another novel, The North of England Home Service (2003), which kindly and accurately examined the decline of a northern comedian. The adjective "tender" occurred repeatedly in reviews; a change from the variants on "dark" and "gritty" that attached to much of his previous work.
Burn also collaborated with his fellow northerner Damien Hirst (who grew up in Leeds) in an illustrated collection of interviews spanning a decade – On the Way to Work (2001) – after writing the text in 1997 for the artist's I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone … Burn's remarkable ability to combine such tasks with all his other work was also shown by the award in 1991 naming him the UK's magazine columnist of the year. It went to his sports column in Esquire.
Burns's last major work, Born Yesterday: the News As a Novel (2008), saw him strike out in several different directions at once, placing himself as spectator to all manner of links and connections between headline events – Tony Blair's departure as prime minister, the McCann tragedy, Paul McCartney's divorce – during the summer of 2007. He was taken ill last year with diverticulitis but continued to be busy, drawing on a formidable canon of reading including Eric Morecambe's only novel, Mr Lonely, and a dozen stories left by Breece Pancake, a talented American who took his own life in 1979 at the age of 26.
The bowel cancer from which Burns died was diagnosed only recently, and it is not yet clear whether his latest novel, set in Rome in the 1950s and again illuminated by coincidences, will be published posthumously. The fascination with celebrity continued in his final journalism, including a piece on Jade Goody for the Guardian.
He had lived in Chelsea for many years but remained close to the north and had recently bought a house in Northumberland. He is survived by his long-standing partner Carol Gorner.
Richard Williams writes: Sport is not always kind to the sort of writers who like to see if two plus two can somehow make five, but Gordon Burn was an exception. Gordon wrote well and interestingly about almost anything, but he brought to his books and columns about sport a balanced combination of insight, enthusiasm, forensic skills and imagination.
Pocket Money, his extended report from the world of professional snooker, was published in 1986. Standing alongside Michael Mewshaw's Ladies of the Court, Daniel Coyle's Tour de Force and a very few others, it remains a textbook example of an observant journalist getting inside a sport and making the best possible use of his hard-won access. Twenty years later, Best and Edwards, his study of the doomed Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best, brought a characteristic flinty originality to bear on familiar subject matter.
Perhaps sport represented no more than light relief from the business of serial killers, but it allowed him to play to his considerable strengths.
David Robson writes: I was fortunate to be a friend of Gordon's for nearly 40 years, and as a magazine editor commissioned many pieces from him. He always knew what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. Not much editing was required, which was just as well – he didn't take kindly to it. He had a phenomenal eye for telling detail, an acute ear and an unusual ability to get to the truth of a situation. From the start he was clear to the point of truculence about what he was and was not interested in, and over the years he showed such constancy of vision and fixity of purpose that his became a strong and unique voice. He was never middle-of-the-road, and spotted many truths about modern life that others missed.
In 1995 I went down to stay with him and Carol in a cottage they rented for a few weeks in Cornwall. He had just finished writing his second novel, Fullalove, and gave me the typescript to read, a potentially hazardous privilege. What if I didn't like it? I loved it, couldn't put it down, stayed up all night reading. I was relieved, chuffed and proud to have a friend who had done something so damn good. As soon as he got up I told him so, but I'm sure he already knew.
• Gordon Burn, writer, born 16 January 1948; died 17 July 2009
