James Sallis
James Sallis (born 21 December 1944 in Helena, Arkansas) is an American crime writer, poet and musician, best known for his series of novels featuring the character Lew Griffin and set in New Orleans, and for his 2005 novel Drive, which was adapted into a 2011 film of the same name.
If you like author James Sallis here is the list of authors you may also like
Buy books on AmazonTotal similar authors (31)
-
John Steakley
John Steakley, born 1951 in Cleburne, Texas was best known for his science fiction writing. He wrote two major novels, Armor (1984) and Vampire$ (1991), the latter of which became the basis for John Carpenter's Vampires movie. He also wrote several short stories in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Not a prolific writer, he lived most of his life in Texas, aside from brief spells in South America and Hollywood in his youth. Steakley died after a five-year battle with liver disease at his home in McKinney, Texas. He was 59 years old.
Buy books on Amazon -
Bill Pronzini
Mystery Writers of America Awards "Grand Master" 2008
Buy books on Amazon
Shamus Awards Best Novel winner (1999) for Boobytrap
Edgar Awards Best Novel nominee (1998) for A Wasteland of Strangers
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1997) for Sentinels
Shamus Awards "The Eye" (Lifetime achievment award) 1987
Shamus Awards Best Novel winner (1982) for Hoodwink
Married to author Marcia Muller.
Pseudonyms:
Robert Hart Davis (collaboration with Jeffrey M. Wallmann)
Jack Foxx
William Jeffrey (collaboration with Jeffrey M. Wallmann)
Alex Saxon -
Buddy Giovinazzo
Buddy Giovinazzo is a filmmaker and author, perhaps best known for his shocking debut film Combat Shock about a troubled Vietnam War veteran. He holds a Masters in Cinema from College of Staten Island.
Buy books on Amazon -
William Diehl
William Diehl was an American novelist and photojournalist.
Buy books on Amazon
Diehl was fifty years old and already a successful photographer and journalist when he decided to begin a writing career. His first novel, Sharky's Machine, which became a movie by the same name was directed by and starred Burt Reynolds. Diehl saw the movie shot on location in and around his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia.
Following the success of Sharky's Machine, Diehl relocated to St. Simons Island, GA in the early 80's where he lived for the next 15 years before going back to the Atlanta area. While living on St. Simons, he completed eight more novels, including Primal Fear, which also became a movie by the same name starring Richard Gere and Edward Norton. Diehl died at Emory Uni -
John Dudley Ball
John Dudley Ball writing as John Ball, was an American writer best known for mystery novels involving the African-American police detective Virgil Tibbs. He was introduced in the 1965 In the Heat of the Night where he solves a murder in a racist Southern small town. It won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America and was made into an Oscar-winning film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier; the film had two sequels, and spawned a television series several decades later, none of which were based on Ball's later Tibbs stories. He also wrote under the name John Ball Jr..
Buy books on Amazon
Ball was born in Schenectady, New York, grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and attended Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He wrote for a -
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Buy books on Amazon
Chandler had -
Jonathan Ames
Jonathan Ames is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs, and is the creator of two television series, Bored to Death (HBO) and Blunt Talk (STARZ). In the late '90s and early 2000s, he was a columnist for the New York Press for several years, and became known for self-deprecating tales of his sexual misadventures. He also has a long-time interest in boxing, appearing occasionally in the ring as "The Herring Wonder".
Buy books on Amazon
Two of his novels have been adapted into films: The Extra Man in 2010, and You Were Never Really Here in 2017. Ames was a co-screenwriter of the former and an executive producer of the latter. -
Chuck Palahniuk
Written in stolen moments under truck chassis and on park benches to a soundtrack of The Downward Spiral and Pablo Honey, Fight Club came into existence. The adaptation of Fight Club was a flop at the box office, but achieved cult status on DVD. The film’s popularity drove sales of the novel. Chuck put out two novels in 1999, Survivor and Invisible Monsters. Choke, published in 2001, became Chuck’s first New York Times bestseller. Chuck’s work has always been infused with personal experience, and his next novel, Lullaby, was no exception. Chuck credits writing Lullaby with helping him cope with the tragic death of his father. Diary and the non-fiction guide to Portland, Fugitives and Refugees, were released in 2003. While on the road in sup
Buy books on Amazon -
Irvine Welsh
Probably most famous for his gritty depiction of a gang of Scottish Heroin addicts, Trainspotting (1993), Welsh focuses on the darker side of human nature and drug use. All of his novels are set in his native Scotland and filled with anti-heroes, small time crooks and hooligans. Welsh manages, however to imbue these characters with a sad humanity that makes them likable despite their obvious scumbaggerry. Irvine Welsh is also known for writing in his native Edinburgh Scots dialect, making his prose challenging for the average reader unfamiliar with this style.
Buy books on Amazon -
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer.
Buy books on Amazon
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship -
Maj Sjöwall
Maj Sjöwall was a Swedish author and translator. She was best known for the collaborative work with her partner Per Wahlöö on a series of ten novels about the exploits of Martin Beck, a police detective in Stockholm. In 1971, the fourth of these books, The Laughing Policeman (a translation of Den skrattande polisen, originally published in 1968) won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Novel. They also wrote novels separately.
Buy books on Amazon
Sjöwall had a 13 year relationship with Wahlöö which lasted until his death in 1975. -
Jim Thompson
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Buy books on Amazon
James Myers Thompson was a United States writer of novels, short stories and screenplays, largely in the hardboiled style of crime fiction.
Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction.
Thompson's writing cul -
Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger.
Buy books on Amazon
Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra’s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlis -
Elmore Leonard
Elmore John Leonard lived in Dallas, Oklahoma City and Memphis before settling in Detroit in 1935. After serving in the navy, he studied English literature at the University of Detroit where he entered a short story competition. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures.
Buy books on Amazon
Father of Peter Leonard. -
-
Dashiell Hammett
Also wrote as Peter Collinson, Daghull Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, Mary Jane Hammett
Buy books on Amazon
Dashiell Hammett, an American, wrote highly acclaimed detective fiction, including The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934).
Samuel Dashiell Hammett authored hardboiled novels and short stories. He created Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse) among the enduring characters. In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film, Hammett "is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time" and was called, in his obituary in the New York Times, "the dean of the... 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction."
See http://e -
Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block has been writing crime, mystery, and suspense fiction for more than half a century. He has published in excess (oh, wretched excess!) of 100 books, and no end of short stories.
Buy books on Amazon
Born in Buffalo, N.Y., LB attended Antioch College, but left before completing his studies; school authorities advised him that they felt he’d be happier elsewhere, and he thought this was remarkably perceptive of them.
His earliest work, published pseudonymously in the late 1950s, was mostly in the field of midcentury erotica, an apprenticeship he shared with Donald E. Westlake and Robert Silverberg. The first time Lawrence Block’s name appeared in print was when his short story “You Can’t Lose” was published in the February 1958 issue of Manhunt. The f -
Zane Grey
Pearl Zane Grey was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the rugged Old West. As of June 2007, the Internet Movie Database credits Grey with 110 films, one TV episode, and a series, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater based loosely on his novels and short stories.
Buy books on Amazon -
Ross Macdonald
Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.
Buy books on Amazon
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories fo -
Dorothy B. Hughes
Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–1993) was a mystery author and literary critic. Born in Kansas City, she studied at Columbia University, and won an award from the Yale Series of Younger Poets for her first book, the poetry collection Dark Certainty (1931). After writing several unsuccessful manuscripts, she published The So Blue Marble in 1940. A New York–based mystery, it won praise for its hardboiled prose, which was due, in part, to Hughes’s editor, who demanded she cut 25,000 words from the book.
Buy books on Amazon
Hughes published thirteen more novels, the best known of which are In a Lonely Place (1947) and Ride the Pink Horse (1946). Both were made into successful films. In the early fifties, Hughes largely stopped writing fiction, preferring to focus on critic -
Barbara Pym
People know British writer Barbara Pym for her comic novels, such as Excellent Women (1952), of English life.
Buy books on Amazon
After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Barbara Pym served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. From 1950 to 1961, she published six novels, but her 7th was declined by the publisher due to a change in the reading public's tastes.
The turning point for Pym came with a famous article in the 1975 Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. A -
Jean-Patrick Manchette
Jean-Patrick Manchette was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the seventies and early eighties, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of the 1970s - 1980s . His stories are violent, existentialist explorations of the human condition and French society.
Buy books on Amazon
Manchette was politically to the left and his writing reflects this through his analysis of social positions and culture. His books are reminiscent of the nouvelle vague crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville, employing a similarly cool, existential style on a typically American genre (film noir for Melville and pulp novels for Manchette).
Three of his novels have been translated into English. -
John Le Carré
John le Carré, the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England), was an English author of espionage novels. Le Carré had resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, Great Britain, for more than 40 years, where he owned a mile of cliff close to Land's End.
Buy books on Amazon -
J.A. Jance
Judith Ann Jance is the top 10 New York Times bestselling author of the Joanna Brady series; the J. P. Beaumont series; three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family; and Edge of Evil, the first in a series featuring Ali Reynolds. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
Buy books on Amazon
Series:
* J.P. Beaumont
* Joanna Brady
* Ali Reynolds
* Walker Family -
Chester Himes
Chester Bomar Himes began writing in the early 1930s while serving a prison sentence for armed robbery. From there, he produced short stories for periodicals such as Esquire and Abbott's Monthly. When released, he focussed on semi-autobiographical protest novels.
Buy books on Amazon
In 1953, Himes emigrated to France, where he was approached by Marcel Duhamel of Gallimard to write a detective series for Série Noire, which had published works from the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson. Himes would be the first black author included in the series. The resulting Harlem Cycle gained him celebrity when he won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for La Reine des Pommes (now known in English as A Rage in Harlem) in 1958. Three of t -
W.G. Sebald
Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. His works are largely concerned with the themes of memory, loss of memory, and identity (both personal and collective) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical objects). They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German people.
Buy books on Amazon
At the time of his death at the age of only 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors, and was tipped as a possible future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. -
J. Todd Scott
A retired federal law enforcement agent with thirty years of experience, J. Todd Scott was a finalist for the 2024 International Thriller Writers Award for Best Paperback Original and is the critically acclaimed author of six crime, suspense, and thriller novels. He is also a film and TV producer and screenwriter, most recently for the Paramount+ series Lawmen: Bass Reeves.
Buy books on Amazon
Find Todd at JTODDSCOTT.COM. -
Gerald Petievich
Gerald Petievich belongs to that tiny group of writers who came to crime fiction from careers in law enforcement. He has been an Army counterspy and a U.S. Secret Service agent, using his real life experiences to achieve verisimilitude in his fiction. His novels are known to come as close as any in the mystery- and-thriller genre to a genuine realism. Three of his novels have been produced as major motion pictures.
Buy books on Amazon
Gerald grew up in a police family. His father and brother were both members of the Los Angeles Police Department. He attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey and later served in Germany as a US Army Counterintelligence Special Agent. As Chief of the Counterespionage Section, Field Office Nuremberg, he received commendat -
-
Dave Zeltserman
Author of the crime noir novel SMALL CRIMES named by NPR as the best crime and mystery novel of 2008, and by the Washington Post as one of the best novels of 2008, and made into a major film (to be released in 2017) starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Molly Parker, Gary Cole, Robert Forster, and Jacki Weaver.
Buy books on Amazon
Shamus Award winner for JULIUS KATZ. Ellery Queen's Readers Choice Award winner for ARCHIE'S BEEN FRAMED and ARCHIE SOLVES THE CASE.
PARIAH named by the Washington Post as one of the best books of 2009. THE CARETAKER OF LORNE FIELD (2010) shortlisted by American Library Association for best horror novel of the year and named a horror gem by Library Journal. MONSTER selected by Booklist Magazine for their 2013 list of top 10 horror novels a -
Andy Rausch
Andy Rausch is the author or editor of more than fifty books. His nonfiction (as Andrew J. Rausch) includes My Best Friend's Birthday: The Making of a Quentin Tarantino Film, The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood (w/ Charles E, Pratt Jr.), and Perspectives on Stephen King.
Buy books on Amazon
His fiction includes Layla's Score, American Trash, and Bloody Sheets. Several of his books have been optioned for film and his work has been translated into French, Spanish, Portugese, and Chinese. He is a web editor at Diabolique magazine and the screenwriter of the film Dahmer vs. Gacy.
He has edited numerous anthologies that have featured the work of such writers as Joe R. Lansdale, Max Allan Collins, Stewart O'Nan, John A. Russo, Richard Chizmar, Peter Leonard, Wrath