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- Author biography - |
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Read our author interview I was born and brought up in Mexia (that's prounounced Mah-HAY-uh by the natives) Texas, and I've lived in small Texas towns ever since, unless you count Austin as a large Texas town. It was much smaller when I lived there than it is now.I attended The University of Texas in Austin for many, many years. My wife, Judy, says I would never have left if she hadn't forced me to get out of grad school and get a real job. Eventually, I earned a Ph.D. there. On the way, I earned a Master's degree at the University of North Texas. My doctoral dissertation was entitled The Private-Eye Hero, so I was able to put my mystery reading habit to good use. After graduate school, I taught for twelve years at Howard Payne University before moving to beautiful Alvin, Texas, to teach at Alvin Community College, where I'm the Chair of the Division of English and Fine Arts. I write all kinds of books. The Sheriff Dan Rhodes series features the small-town adventures of the sheriff in a small Texas county where there aren't any serial killers, where a naked man hiding in a dumpster is big news, and where the sheriff still has time to investigate the theft of a set of false teeth. The latest in the series is DEATH BY ACCIDENT published by St. Martin's Press, soon to be a Worldwide paperback. I also write about a college English teacher named Carl Burns, a reluctant amateur sleuth, who, as one reader complained, is always getting beaten up by women. Burns teaches at a small denominational college and . . . A DANGEROUS THING is available in paper from Worldwide. And then there's my private eye. His name is Truman Smith, and he operates on Galveston Island, not far from Houston. The first book in the series, DEAD ON THE ISLAND, was nominated for a Shamus award by the Private Eye Writers of America, but no one has had the wisdom to issue the books in paperback. I also write non-series books. In the mystery field there's THE TEXAS CAPITOL MURDERS (St. Martin's Press), in which you get politics, murder, and a bunch of pretty strange characters, some of whom aren't even state legislators. BLOOD MARKS St. Martin's), my venture into serial-killerdom, is quite different from anything else I've done - it's bloody and violent, whereas most of the other books are practically cozy. Reviewers loved it - even Kirkus - and it sold to both Japan and Iceland. Japan I can understand. But Iceland? I've even written children's books, including the award-winning MIKE GONZO AND THE UFO TERROR. And of course, there are the westerns, the latest being TEXAS VIGILANTE and OUTRAGE AT BLANCO, both available in paperback from Dell Books. In my spare time, I run. Five or six days a week. All right, sometimes I run only four days a week. It's not easy to be a runner in Alvin, Texas, especially not in the summer (March through October) when the temperature gets up around a hundred and the humidity gets about the same. My wife Judy says that I'm a fanatic, but she exaggerates. When I write, I like to listen to music. I have an extensive library of CDs, and I pop in whatever I'm in the mood to hear. Most of this music is from another era, which proves once and for all that I'm an old fogy, but I can't help it. Mostly I listen to New York doo-wop, rockabilly, The Platters, the Coasters, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Dion and the Belmonts, and any group or solo singer from the 1950s that you can think of. There's earlier stuff, too, like Les Paul and Mary Ford and the Ink Spots. I also like the music of the "folk era" of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Lots of that has been reissued on CD recently, and I'm an eager customer. Of course, I don't really hear the music most of the time. I tend to get so involved in the writing that everything around me disappears. But I like to think that the songs have some kind of subliminal effect and maybe even seep into the novel I'm working on. I'd love to write a book that was like a Buddy Holly record, with that same infectious sense of fun, or a book that caught the spirit of the end of the school year like the Jamies' "Summertime, Summertime." I have the five-CD set of Elvis' 1950s' masters and the four-CD Roy Orbison set, not to mention a lot of great stuff by the Everly Brothers, CDs containing all the records of the real Kingston Trio (the one with Dave Guard), the Atlantic "History of Rhythm and Blues" CDs, a double set by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, and more wonderful stuff than I can list here. I'm also a big mystery fan: I've had a letter in every single issue (more than 150 now) of Cap'n Bob Napier's letterzine, MYSTERY AND DETECTIVE MONTHLY. I also do my own fanzine, MACAVITY, which appears in DAPA-Em, the only amateur press association devoted to mystery fiction. I haven't missed a mailing in more than twenty years. And then there are the cats: Three of them. Geri, Speedo, and Sam. All three are different ages, and all three of them just turned up here. I was too soft-hearted to turn them away, so by now they've just about taken over the place. Not that anyone seems to mind. |
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