About the Author

The author-site era of this domain opened with a plain autobiography, and it remains one of the more honest accounts you'll find of how noir writers actually get made: slowly, sideways, and with a day job. This page preserves that story in its essentials.

A Boston Kid With the Late Movies

He was born in Boston and lived in the Boston area his whole life, except for five years at the University of Colorado in Boulder earning a B.S. in Applied Math and Computer Science. The education that mattered came earlier, in front of the television: old movies, with Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, and film noir the favorites — The Roaring Twenties, The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon. The reading ran from comic books and Mad Magazine to the pulps, Robert E. Howard above all, and science fiction. Then, at fifteen, spending a few summer weeks at an uncle's house in Maine, he picked up a dog-eared copy of I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane — and from that point on was hooked on crime fiction. Spillane led to Hammett, Chandler, Rex Stout, and Ross Macdonald, and eventually, in the early 1990s, to Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford.

The Thompson Lesson

Thompson, in particular, changed everything — not just the way he got inside the heads of broken psychopaths and had you rooting for them, but the way he took chances. Before reading Hell of a Woman, the apprentice work had amounted, by the author's own description, to bad Ross Macdonald. Thompson opened his eyes to the idea that a writer could break every rule he wanted as long as he could make it work, and that realization led to finding his own voice. The first novel, Fast Lane, fused the two teachers: the sins-of-the-father theme Macdonald did so well, told from the unreliable mind of a killer in the manner Thompson excelled at. Years later he learned that Macdonald's last, unfinished Lew Archer novel shared a major plot point with Fast Lane — the kind of coincidence that suggests an influence fully absorbed.

The Day Job Years

After college came a career developing data communication software at some of the world's leading networking and computer companies. Writing kept pulling at him — usually dark crime fiction — but for years it seemed more of a lark than anything real. He was a math and computer science guy, with one creative writing course in college and a shelf of books on the craft; the writing happened at an instinctive, gut level. Then a kind of crazy creative fever took over during the writing of Fast Lane, and when it was done he knew he had something publishable — a book noir readers would genuinely enjoy. It took twelve years. The Italian rights sold first, to Meridiano Zero, before Point Blank Press published the U.S. edition in 2004. In between came the ups and downs every unpublished novelist knows, including long stretches of quitting writing entirely to focus on the engineering career.

Things Looking Up

By the time this page was written, the long road had bent upward: stories placed in Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazines, the three-book man-just-out-of-prison noir cycle (Small Crimes, Pariah, Killer) sold to the prestigious UK publisher Serpent's Tail, and Fast Lane, Bad Thoughts, and Bad Karma in print from Five Star. The letters from noir fans discovering Fast Lane proved the twelve-year bet right. Writing programs and institutions like the Iowa Writers' Workshop mint one kind of novelist; the other kind is minted exactly this way — on lunch breaks, against the odds, by readers who couldn't leave the genre alone.

For the bibliographic record of the books and their reception, see the books. For the editor's side of the same life, see About Dave Zeltserman.