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.
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
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Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of Am
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Kate Lister
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Kate Lister is a lecturer at Leeds Trinity University, where she researches the history of sexuality and curates the online research project Whores of Yore. Kate is also a columnist for iNews, Vice, and the Wellcome Trust where she writes about the history of sex. Kate won a Sexual Freedom Award for Publicist of the Year in 2017. -
Charlie Huston
Charlie Huston is an American novelist, screenwriter, and comic book writer known for his genre-blending storytelling and character-driven narratives. His twelve novels span crime, horror, and science fiction, and have been published by Ballantine, Del Rey, Mulholland, and Orion, with translations in nine languages. He is the creator of the Henry Thompson trilogy, beginning with Caught Stealing, which was announced in 2024 as a forthcoming film adaptation directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Austin Butler. Huston’s stand-alone novels include The Shotgun Rule, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, Sleepless, and Skinner. He also authored the vampire noir series Joe Pitt Casebooks while living in Manhattan and later California
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Thomas Berger
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Thomas Louis Berger was an American novelist, probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man, which was adapted into a film by Arthur Penn. Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure.
Berger's use of humor and his often biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist, though he rejected that classification. -
Edward Anderson
Edward Anderson (1905–1969) was born in Texas in 1905 and grew up in Oklahoma, serving his apprenticeship as a journalist on a small paper in Ardmore, Okla. Restless, he worked as a deckhand on a freighter, plied his fists as a prizefighter, had some small success as a musician and, when the Great Depression of the 1930s hit, roamed the roads and rails, learning the life of the hobo. This crucial experience led to fiction, and to his first novel, “Hungry Men”, which in 1933 caused the Saturday Review of Literature to pronounce him the heir to Hemingway and Faulkner.
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Margaret Millar
Margaret Ellis Millar (née Sturm) was an American-Canadian mystery and suspense writer. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she was educated there and in Toronto. She moved to the United States after marrying Kenneth Millar (better known under the pen name Ross Macdonald). They resided for decades in the city of Santa Barbara, which was often utilized as a locale in her later novels under the pseudonyms of San Felice or Santa Felicia.
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Millar's books are distinguished by sophistication of characterization. Often we are shown the rather complex interior lives of the people in her books, with issues of class, insecurity, failed ambitions, loneliness or existential isolation or paranoia often being explored with an almost literary quality that transcen -
Win Scott Eckert
WIN SCOTT ECKERT is a novelist, editor, essayist, and author of short fiction. He is steeped in the works of famed science fiction writer Philip José Farmer, particularly Farmer’s shared universe literary-crossover Wold Newton cycle and the Lord Grandrith/Doc Caliban series. He has a deep interest in studying fictional biographies, creating detailed chronologies of fictional characters and universes, and exploring the metafictional connections between seemingly unrelated works, which resulted in MYTHS FOR THE MODERN AGE: PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER’S WOLD NEWTON UNIVERSE (MonkeyBrain Books), a 2007 Locus Awards finalist, and the critically acclaimed, encyclopedic CROSSOVERS: A SECRET CHRONOLOGY OF THE WORLD 1 & 2 (Black Coat Press, 2010).
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Jim Thompson
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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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 -
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Eric Knight
An author who is mainly notable for creating the fictional collie Lassie.
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He was a native of Yorkshire in England, and had a varied career, including service in the Canadian Army during World War I and spells as an art student, newspaper reporter and Hollywood screenwriter.
His first novel was Song on Your Bugles (1936) about the working class in Northern England. As "Richard Hallas," he wrote the hardboiled genre novel "You Play The Black and The Red Comes Up" (1938). Knight's "This Above All" is considered one of the significant novels of The Second World War.
Knight and his wife Jere Knight raised collies on their farm in Pleasant Valley, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His novel Lassie Come-Home (ISBN 0030441013) appeared in 1940. It was adapt -
Compton Mackenzie
Compton Mackenzie was born into a theatrical family. His father, Edward Compton, was an actor and theatre company manager; his sister, Fay Compton, starred in many of James M. Barrie's plays, including Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. He was educated at St Paul's School and Magdalen College, Oxford where he obtained a degree in Modern History.
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Mackenzie was married three times and aside from his writing also worked as an actor, political activist, and broadcaster. He served with British Intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean during World War I, later publishing four books on his experiences. Compton Mackenzie was from 1920–1923 Tenant of Herm and Jethou and he shares many similarities to the central character in D.H. Lawrence's -
Charles Willeford
Charles Willeford was a remarkably fine, talented and prolific writer who wrote everything from poetry to crime fiction to literary criticism throughout the course of his impressively long and diverse career. His crime novels are distinguished by a mean'n'lean sense of narrative economy and an admirable dearth of sentimentality. He was born as Charles Ray Willeford III on January 2, 1919 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Willeford's parents both died of tuberculosis when he was a little boy and he subsequently lived either with his grandmother or at boarding schools. Charles became a hobo in his early teens. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps at age sixteen and was stationed in the Philippines. Willeford served as a tank commander with the 10th Armo
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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.
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Chandler had -
Dashiell Hammett
Also wrote as Peter Collinson, Daghull Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, Mary Jane Hammett
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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."
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James Ellroy
Lee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Confidential (1990).
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Sam Lipsyte
Sam Lipsyte was born in 1968. He is the author of the story collection Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five book of its year by the Village Voice Supplement) and the novels The Subject of Steve and Home Land, winner of the Believer Book Award. Lipsyte teaches at Columbia Universitys School of The Arts and is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Manhattan.
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Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley (b. 1952) is the author of the bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins, as well as numerous other works, from literary fiction and science fiction to a young adult novel and political monographs. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the Nation, among other publications. Mosley is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.
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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.
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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 -
Mickey Spillane
Mickey Spillane was one of the world's most popular mystery writers. His specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers who launder money or spout the Communist Party line.
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His writing style was characterized by short words, lightning transitions, gruff sex and violent endings. It was once tallied that he offed 58 people in six novels.
Starting with "I, the Jury," in 1947, Mr. Spillane sold hundreds of millions of books during his lifetime and garnered consistently scathing reviews. Even his father, a Brooklyn bartender, called them "crud."
Mr. Spillane was a struggling comic book publisher when he wrote "I, the Jury." He initially envisioned it as a comic book ca -
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.
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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 -
Eric Ambler
Suspense novels of noted English writer Eric Ambler include Passage of Arms (1959).
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Eric Ambler began his career in the early 1930s and quickly established a reputation as a thriller of extraordinary depth and originality. People often credit him as the inventor of the modern political thriller, and John Le Carré once described him as "the source on which we all draw."
Ambler began his working life at an engineering firm and then at an advertising agency and meanwhile in his spare time worked on his ambition, plays. He first published in 1936 and turned full-time as his reputation. During the war, people seconded him to the film unit of the Army, where he among other projects authored The Way Ahead with Peter Ustinov.
He moved to Holl -
Will Hodgkinson
Hodgkinson is a journalist and author from London. He has written for The Guardian,The Independent and Vogue.Hodgkinson presents the Sky Arts TV show Songbook, in which he interviews contemporary songwriters.
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Written in 2014, The House Is Full Of Yogis is his memoir.
Abridged from Wikipedia. -
John D. MacDonald
John D. MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and educated at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Syracuse and Harvard, where he took an MBA in 1939. During WW2, he rose to the rank of Colonel, and while serving in the Army and in the Far East, sent a short story to his wife for sale, successfully. He served in the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations. After the war, he decided to try writing for a year, to see if he could make a living. Over 500 short stories and 70 novels resulted, including 21 Travis McGee novels.
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Following complications of an earlier heart bypass operation, MacDonald slipped into a coma on December 10 and died at age 70, on December 28, 1986, in St. Mary's Hospital in -
Derek Raymond
Aka Robin Cook.
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Pen name for Robert William Arthur Cook. Born into privilege, Raymond attended Eton before completing his National Service. Raymond moved to France in the 50's before eventually returning to London in the 60's. His first book, 'Crust on its Uppers,' released in 1962 under his real name, was well-received but brought few sales. Moving through Italy he abandoned writing before returning to London. In 1984 he released the first of the Factory Series, 'He Died With His Eyes Open' under the name Derek Raymond. Following 'The Devil's Home On Leave' and 'How The Dead Live' he released his major work 'I Was Dora Suarez' in 1990. His memoirs were released as 'The Hidden Files'. -
Fiorella De Maria
Fiorella De Maria is an Anglo-Maltese writer, born in Italy and currently living in Surrey. She grew up in rural Wiltshire and attended Cambridge University, where she received a BA in English Literature and an MPhil in Renaissance Literature. A winner of the National Book Prize of Malta, she has published nine novels, specialising in historical and crime fiction. Fiorella’s novels have received endorsements from veteran author and journalist, Piers Paul Reid, and her most recent novel was described as “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie meets I Capture the Castle.”
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Besides writing novels, Fiorella is a qualified English Language teacher and a respected bioethicist. She has delivered lectures and papers at conferences all over the world. Her boo -
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Brett Halliday
AKA David Dresser
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Excerpt from Wikipedia:
Brett Halliday (July 31, 1904 - February 4, 1977), primary pen name of Davis Dresser, was an American mystery writer, best known for the long-lived series of Mike Shayne novels he wrote, and later commissioned others to write. Dresser wrote non-series mysteries, westerns and romances under the names
Asa Baker, Matthew Blood, Kathryn Culver, Don Davis, Hal Debrett, Anthony Scott, Peter Field, and Anderson Wayne. -
Sara Gran
Sara Gran's most recent book is LITTLE MYSTERIES, available from Dreamland Books on 2/11/25. She is the author of 7 1/2 previous novels, a screenwriter, and a publisher.
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Jim Crace
James "Jim" Crace is an award-winning English writer. His novel Quarantine, won the Whitbread Novel award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Harvest won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
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Crace grew up in Forty Hill, an area at the far northern point of Greater London, close to Enfield where Crace attended Enfield Grammar School. He studied for a degree at the Birmingham College of Commerce (now part of Birmingham City University), where he was enrolled as an external student of the University of London. After securing a BA (Hons) in English Literature in 1968, he travelled overseas with the UK organization Voluntary Services Overseas (V -
Jed Rubenfeld
Jed Rubenfeld a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University and magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School is the author of the hystorical and psychoanalytical novel Intepretation of Murder.
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His experience in both Shakespearean Plays and his thesis on Sigmond Frued helped him to make an anlytical yet fictional work; Intepretation of Murder.
A master in the field of Law, he has proved himself to be also a master in fiction and thus making a mark in the history of literature through his psychoanalytical novel Intepretation of Murder. -
Kate Christensen
KATE CHRISTENSEN is the author of eight novels and two food-centric memoirs. Her most recent novel is Welcome Home, Stranger (December 2023). Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award. Her stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. She currently writes a regular monthly column for Frenchly.us called Bouffe. She lives in Taos, New Mexico with her husband and their two dogs.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work.
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This famous portrait of Vincent (as she was called by friends) was taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1933. -
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..
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Ball was born in Schenectady, New York, grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and attended Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He wrote for a -
Stella Tillyard
Stella Tillyard is a British novelist and historian. She was educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her bestselling book Aristocrats was made into a miniseries for BBC1/Masterpiece Theatre, and sold to over twenty countries. Winner of the Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Longman-History Today Prize, and the Fawcett Prize, Tillyard has taught at Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, London. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her latest novel is Call Upon the Water (published in the UK under the title The Great Lev
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Dan J. Marlowe
aka Albert Avellano, Jaime Sandaval, Gar Wilson (house name)
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Dan J. Marlowe was a middle-aged businessman who, in the personal turmoil after the death of his wife of many years, decided to abandon his old life. He started writing, and his first novel was published when he was 45.
Marlowe's most famous book and his best-known character arrived from Fawcett Gold Medal Books in 1962 ("The Name of the Game Is Death"). -
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
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Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W -
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.
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Chandler had -
George MacDonald
George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet and Christian Congregational minister. He became a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow-writer Lewis Carroll. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology, including several collections of sermons.
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John Dickson Carr
AKA Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger Fairbairn.
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John Dickson Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1906. It Walks by Night, his first published detective novel, featuring the Frenchman Henri Bencolin, was published in 1930. Apart from Dr Fell, whose first appearance was in Hag's Nook in 1933, Carr's other series detectives (published under the nom de plume of Carter Dickson) were the barrister Sir Henry Merrivale, who debuted in The Plague Court Murders (1934). -
Dashiell Hammett
Also wrote as Peter Collinson, Daghull Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, Mary Jane Hammett
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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."
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Margery Allingham
Aka Maxwell March.
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Margery Louise Allingham was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a family of writers. Her father, Herbert John Allingham, was editor of The Christian Globe and The New London Journal, while her mother wrote stories for women's magazines as Emmie Allingham. Margery's aunt, Maud Hughes, also ran a magazine. Margery earned her first fee at the age of eight, for a story printed in her aunt's magazine.
Soon after Margery's birth, the family left London for Essex. She returned to London in 1920 to attend the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster), and met her future husband, Philip Youngman Carter. They married in 1928. He was her collaborator and designed the cover jackets for many of her books.
Margery's bre -
Rex Stout
Rex Todhunter Stout (1886–1975) was an American crime writer, best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe, described by reviewer Will Cuppy as "that Falstaff of detectives." Wolfe's assistant Archie Goodwin recorded the cases of the detective genius from 1934 (Fer-de-Lance) to 1975 (A Family Affair).
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The Nero Wolfe corpus was nominated Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon 2000, the world's largest mystery convention, and Rex Stout was nominated Best Mystery Writer of the Century. -
Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine was her mother's first name and Tey the surname of an English Grandmother. As Josephine Tey, she wrote six mystery novels featuring Scotland Yard's Inspector Alan Grant.
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The first of these, The Man in the Queue (1929) was published under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot , whose name also appears on the title page of another of her 1929 novels, Kif; An Unvarnished History. She also used the Daviot by-line for a biography of the 17th century cavalry leader John Graham, which was entitled Claverhouse (1937).
Mackintosh also wrote plays (both one act and full length), some of which were produced during her lifetime, under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot. The district of Daviot, near h -
Mickey Spillane
Mickey Spillane was one of the world's most popular mystery writers. His specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers who launder money or spout the Communist Party line.
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His writing style was characterized by short words, lightning transitions, gruff sex and violent endings. It was once tallied that he offed 58 people in six novels.
Starting with "I, the Jury," in 1947, Mr. Spillane sold hundreds of millions of books during his lifetime and garnered consistently scathing reviews. Even his father, a Brooklyn bartender, called them "crud."
Mr. Spillane was a struggling comic book publisher when he wrote "I, the Jury." He initially envisioned it as a comic book ca -
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Mysteries of the well-known American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart include The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Door (1930).
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People often called this prolific author the American version of Agatha Christie. She is considered the source of the phrase "The butler did it," though the exact phrase doesn't appear in her works, and she invented the "Had-I-But-Known" school of mystery writing.
Rinehart wrote hundreds of short stories, poems, travelogues, and special articles. Many of her books and plays were adapted for movies, such as The Bat (1926), The Bat Whispers (1930), and The Bat (1959). Critics most appreciated her murder mysteries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ro... -
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie also wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and was occasionally published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan.
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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen -
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Michael Gilbert
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Born in Lincolnshire in 1912, Michael Francis Gilbert was educated in Sussex before entering the University of London where he gained an LLB with honours in 1937. Gilbert was a founding member of the British Crime Writers Association, and in 1988 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America - an achievement many thought long overdue. He won the Life Achievement Anthony Award at the 1990 Boucheron in London, and in 1980 he was knighted as a Commander in the Order of the British Empire. Gilbert made his debut in 1947 with Close Quarters, and since then has become recognized as one of our most versatile British mystery writers.
He was the fat -
Dolores Hitchens
Julia Clara Catharine Dolores Birk Olsen Hitchens, better known as Dolores Hitchens, was an American mystery novelist who wrote prolifically from 1938 until her death. She also wrote under the pseudonyms D.B. Olsen, Dolan Birkley and Noel Burke.
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Hitchens collaborated on five railroad mysteries with her second husband, Bert Hitchens, a railroad detective, and also branched out into other genres in her writing, including Western stories. Many of her mystery novels centered around a spinster character named Rachel Murdock.
Hitchens wrote Fool's Gold, the 1958 novel adapted by Jean-Luc Godard for his film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964). -
Stanley Ellin
Stanley Bernard Ellin was a mystery writer of short stories and novels. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award three times and the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere once, and in 1981 he was awarded with the Mystery Writers of America's highest honor, the Grand Master Award.
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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.
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Edmund Crispin
Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of (Robert) Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978). His first crime novel and musical composition were both accepted for publication while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. After a brief spell of teaching, he became a full-time writer and composer (particularly of film music. He wrote the music for six of the Carry On films. But he was also well known for his concert and church music). He also edited science fiction anthologies, and became a regular crime fiction reviewer for The Sunday Times. His friends included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Agatha Christie.
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He had always been a heavy drinker and, unfortunately, there was a long gap in his writing during a time when he was suffering from alcohol problems. O -
James Runcie
James Runcie is a British novelist, documentary film-maker, television producer, theatre director, and Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival.
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François Mauriac
François Charles Mauriac was a French writer and a member of the Académie française. He was awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life." Mauriac is acknowledged to be one of the greatest Roman Catholic writers of the 20th century.
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Anthony Berkeley
Anthony Berkeley Cox was an English crime writer. He wrote under several pen-names, including Francis Iles, Anthony Berkeley Cox, and A. Monmouth Platts. One of the founders of The Detection Club
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Cox was born in Watford and was educated at Sherborne School and University College London.
He served in the Army in World War I and thereafter worked as a journalist, contributing a series of humourous sketches to the magazine 'Punch'. These were later published collectively (1925) under the Anthony Berkeley pseudonym as 'Jugged Journalism' and the book was followed by a series of minor comic novels such as 'Brenda Entertains' (1925), 'The Family Witch' (1925) and 'The Professor on Paws' (1926).
It was also in 1925 when he published, anonymously to b -
Rex Stout
Rex Todhunter Stout (1886–1975) was an American crime writer, best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe, described by reviewer Will Cuppy as "that Falstaff of detectives." Wolfe's assistant Archie Goodwin recorded the cases of the detective genius from 1934 (Fer-de-Lance) to 1975 (A Family Affair).
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The Nero Wolfe corpus was nominated Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon 2000, the world's largest mystery convention, and Rex Stout was nominated Best Mystery Writer of the Century. -
Joe Gores
Joe Gores (1931-2011) was the author of the acclaimed DKA series of street-level crime and detection, as well as the stunning suspense novels Dead Man and Menaced Assassin.
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He served in the U.S. Army - writing biographies of generals at the Pentagon - was educated at the University of Notre Dame and Stanford, and spent twelve years as a San Francisco private investigator. The author of dozens of novels, screenplays, and television scripts, he won three Edgar Allan Poe Awards and Japan's Maltese Falcon Award. -
Peter Rabe
Peter Rabe aka Peter Rabinowitsch, was a German American writer who also used the nom de plumes Marco Malaponte and J.T. MacCargo (though not all of the latter's books were by him). Rabe was the author of over 30 books, mostly of crime fiction, published between 1955 and 1975.
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Jimmy Webb
JIMMY WEBB, “America’s Songwriter”, is the author of the musician’s “bible”, TUNESMITH: INSIDE THE ART OF SONGWRITING. Webb’s songs with their complex chord structure have been recorded or performed by artists from Frank Sinatra to Carly Simon, to R.E.M. He tours extensively performing his own works and stories in the United States and around the world. He was the youngest man ever inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame and was named by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the top fifty songwriters of all time. A father of six and grandfather of one, Webb lives with his wife, Laura Savini, in New York.
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Dolores Hitchens
Julia Clara Catharine Dolores Birk Olsen Hitchens, better known as Dolores Hitchens, was an American mystery novelist who wrote prolifically from 1938 until her death. She also wrote under the pseudonyms D.B. Olsen, Dolan Birkley and Noel Burke.
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Hitchens collaborated on five railroad mysteries with her second husband, Bert Hitchens, a railroad detective, and also branched out into other genres in her writing, including Western stories. Many of her mystery novels centered around a spinster character named Rachel Murdock.
Hitchens wrote Fool's Gold, the 1958 novel adapted by Jean-Luc Godard for his film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964). -
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
People note French politician and gourmet Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, for his Physiologie du Goût (1825), a witty dissertation on the art of dining.
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This lawyer gained fame as an epicure and gastronome. The Rhone River then separated France from Savoy at his hometown in a family of lawyers. He studied law, chemistry and medicine in Dijon in his early years and thereafter practiced in his hometown. In 1789, at the opening of the revolution, people sent him as a deputy to the Estates-General, quickly the national constituent assembly, and he acquired some limited fame, particularly for a public speech in defense of capital punishment. He adopted his second surname upon the death of an aunt, who, named Savarin, left him her entire fortu -
Martin Cruz Smith
AKA Simon Quinn, Nick Carter.
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Martin Cruz Smith was an American writer of mystery and suspense fiction, mostly in an international or historical setting. He was best known for his series featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko, ten novels as of 2025, who was introduced in 1981 with Gorky Park and appeared in Independence Square (2023) and Hotel Ukraine (2025). -
Janwillem van de Wetering
Jan Willem Lincoln "Janwillem" van de Wetering was the author of a number of works in English and Dutch.
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Holger H. Herwig
Holger Herwig holds a dual position at the University of Calgary as Professor of History and as Canada Research Chair in the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies. He received his BA (1965) from the University of British Columbia and his MA (1967) and Ph.D. (1971) from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Dr. Herwig taught at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1971 until 1989. He served as Head of the Department of History at Calgary from 1991 until 1996. He was a Visiting Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, in 1985-86, and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia in 1998.
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Helen Nielsen
Helen Nielsen was author of mysteries and television scripts for such television dramas as "Perry Mason" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents".
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She studied journalism, art and aeronautical drafting at various schools, including the Chicago Art Institute. Before her writing career, she worked as a draftsman during World War II and contributed to the designs of B-36 and P-80 aircraft. Her stories were often set in Laguna Beach and Oceanside, California where she lived for 60 years.
Some of her novels were reprinted by Black Lizard, including "Detour" and "Sing Me a Murder". -
Paul Cain
Paul Cain was the pen name of George Caryl Sims (1902–1966), a pulp fiction author and screenwriter. His sole novel, Fast One (1932), is considered a landmark of the hardboiled style.
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Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder (born Samuel Wilder) was a Polish-born, Jewish-American journalist, screenwriter, Academy Award-winning film director and producer, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Many of Wilder's films achieved both critical and public acclaim.
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James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles lettres. Cabell was well regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare."
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Carroll John Daly
With a single screen writing credit to his name, Carroll John Daly is an unlikely mention as being the originator of the private eye... but he just might be. And he was, by contemporary accounts, a strange guy; born in Yonkers, New York in 1889, he most certainly was neurotic, agoraphobic and had a severe fear of dentists. These considerable obstacles to a conventional career were fortuitously offset by the genetic good fortune of having a sympathetic wealthy uncle who encouraged his writing efforts. Daly began to make a name for himself in the nickel and dime pulps in the early 1920s. He was 33 when he managed to get published in the fledgling Black Mask. His character Terry Mack is significant as the first tough-talking private eye (debut
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Richard Rayner
Richard Rayner is a British author who now lives in Los Angeles. He was born on December 15, 1955 in the northern city of Bradford. Rayner attended schools in Yorkshire and Wales before studying philosophy and law at the University of Cambridge. He has worked as an editor at Time Out Magazine, in London, and later on the literary magazine Granta, then based in Cambridge.
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Rayner is the author of nine books. His first, Los Angeles Without A Map, was published in 1988. Part-fiction, part-travelogue, this was turned into a movie L.A. Without a Map (for which Rayner co-wrote the screenplay with director Mika Kaurismaki) starring David Tennant, Vinessa Shaw, Julie Delpy, Vincent Gallo, and, in an uncredited part, Johnny Depp.
(from Wikipedia) -
Richard S. Prather
Richard Scott Prather was an American mystery novelist, best known for creating the "Shell Scott" series. He also wrote under the pseudonyms David Knight and Douglas Ring.
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Prather was born in Santa Ana, California. He served in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. In 1945 year he married Tina Hager and began working as a civilian chief clerk of surplus property at March Air Force Base in Riverside, California. He left that job to become a full-time writer in 1949. The first Shell Scott mystery, 'Case of the Vanishing Beauty' was published in 1950. It would be the start of a long series that numbered more than three dozen titles featuring the Shell Scott character.
Prather had a disagreement with his publisher in the 1970s -
Sheryl Kaskowitz
Sheryl Kaskowitz is a nonfiction author who has written two books and several articles focusing on the role of music in American culture. She earned her PhD in ethnomusicology from Harvard and lives with her family in Berkeley, California.
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Daisy Ashford
Daisy Ashford, full name Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (later Devlin) was an English writer who is most famous for writing The Young Visiters, a novella concerning the upper class society of late 19th century England, when she was just nine years old. The novella was published in 1919, preserving her juvenile spelling and punctuation. She wrote the title as "Viseters" in her manuscript, but it was published as "Visiters"
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Lizzie Collingham
Dr. Elizabeth M. Collingham is an English historian interested in linking the minutiae of daily life to the broad sweep of historical processes. Her first book, Imperial Bodies, explored the physical experience of the British raj and the way in which concerns about race and imperialism found expression in debates about physique and diet.
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She studied at Sussex and Cambridge where she completed her PhD on the nabobs of the British Raj. She has lectured at Warwick University and been a reasearch fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. -
William Campbell Gault
William Campbell Gault (1910–1995) was a critically acclaimed pulp novelist. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he took seven years to graduate from high school. Though he was part of a juvenile gang, he wrote poetry in his spare time, signing it with a girl’s name lest one of his friends find it. He sold his first story in 1936, and built a great career writing for pulps like Paris Nights, Scarlet Adventures, and the infamous Black Mask. In 1939, Gault quit his job and started writing fulltime.
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When the success of his pulps began to fade in the 1950s, Gault turned to longer fiction, winning an Edgar Award for his first mystery, Don’t Cry for Me (1952), which he wrote in twenty-eight days. He created private detectives Brock Callahan and Joe Puma -
Thomas B. Dewey
Thomas Blanchard Dewey was an American author of hardboiled crime novels. He created two series of novels: the first one features Mac, a private investigator from Chicago, the second features Pete Schofield.
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Hilda Lawrence
Hilda Kronmiller Lawrence was a mystery writer. She worked in the clipping department of Macmillan Publishers, and as a reader to the blind. She published her fiction under her married name, Hilda Lawrence.
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W.R. Burnett
William Riley "W. R." Burnett was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for the crime novel Little Caesar, the film adaptation of which is considered the first of the classic American gangster movies. Burnett was born in Springfield, Ohio. He left his civil service job there to move to Chicago when he was 28, by which time he had written over 100 short stories and five novels, all unpublished.
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Burnett kept busy, producing a novel or more a year and turning most into screenplays (some as many as three times). Thematically Burnett was similar to Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain but his contrasting of the corruption and corrosion of the city with the better life his characters yearned for, represented by the paradise of the -
Chandler Brossard
Chandler Brossard was an American novelist, writer, editor, and teacher. He wrote or edited a total of 17 books. With a challenging style and outsider characters, Brossard had limited critical success in the United States. His novels were more appreciated in France and Great Britain.
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His early works have been described as "landmarks of the postwar American novel." -
John Buntin
John Buntin is a staff writer at Governing Magazine where he covers crime and urban affairs. A former resident of Southern California, he now lives in Washington, D.C. with his family.
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