Robert Ellis | |
|---|---|
 Ellis, New York City (2015) | |
| Born | Robert Patterson Ellis Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Crime fiction |
| Website | |
| robertellis | |
Robert Ellis is an American writer of crime fiction. Ellis's novels are set in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but primarily in Los Angeles, California, where he lived most of his adult life before returning to the East Coast.
Ellis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as Robert Patterson Ellis, and encouraged by his parents to embrace the arts. In his teens, Ellis played rhythm guitar in numerous garage bands, and managed the kitchen at The Main Point, a nightclub in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where he had the opportunity to meet and hang out with blues and jazz greats like Muddy Waters, Chick Corea, Al Di Meola, and Larry Coryell, among others. [1]
Still haunted by the murder of Connie Evans, a fifteen-year-old girl found in a shallow grave near his home as a boy, Ellis's interest in crime fiction began to evolve with the films of Alfred Hitchcock and books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, and Dashiell Hammett. Soon he gave up music to write and study filmmaking, and began skipping classes at Conestoga High School to attend murder trials. These experiences became short stories, with Ellis sharing the position of co-editor of the school newspaper. Ellis attended Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, majoring in film and philosophy, and graduating summa cum laude. After surviving a catastrophic car crash by a tractor-trailer, he turned to screenwriting and studied with Walter Tevis, author of The Hustler , The Color of Money , and The Man Who Fell to Earth . [2]
Ellis made an early career in film, television, and advertising. His first film, The Great Lake States, written and co-produced for National Geographic, took more than a year to photograph and included breaking ice with the U.S. Coast Guard and working with the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin. The film won Best Educational Documentary at the New York Film Festival. His work in film continued, particularly in advertising where he won a regional Emmy in Philadelphia for CBS News. In 1988, Ellis found representation as a writer-director in feature films and moved to Los Angeles where he ghostwrote the final draft of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master . Maintaining a keen interest in politics ever since the Vietnam War, Ellis became associated with The Campaign Group. During political years, he wrote, produced, directed, and often shot and edited, more than fifteen hundred television ads for political candidates seeking every type of office, including President of the United States, and won numerous Pollie Awards from the AAPC, and the esteemed My Opponent Is Not A Nice Person Award from the Democratic Caucus. [3] [4]
By his own account, everything changed for Ellis when he was assigned the task of gathering surveillance footage of a mobster running for political office in a New Jersey ghetto. While Ellis and a collaborator hid on the third floor of a parking garage with a long-lens motion picture camera, the subject walked outside, stepped away from the building, looked straight up at the lens and froze. Says Ellis, "He thought the camera was a rifle. For a split second, he thought he was dead. And in a single instant, I realized that the horrific world Dashiell Hammett described so perfectly was alive and well and always would be." Ellis began working on Access to Power, the screenplay that would later become his first novel, the following day. [5]
Robert Ellis is the international bestselling author of Access to Power and The Dead Room, as well as two critically acclaimed series – the Lena Gamble novels and the Detective Matt Jones series. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages and selected as top reads by Booklist , Kirkus Reviews , Library Journal , Publishers Weekly , National Public Radio, the Chicago Tribune , the Toronto Sun (CA), The Guardian (UK), the Baltimore Sun , People magazine, USA Today , and The New York Times . Ellis's novels have garnered praise from authors as diverse as Janet Evanovich and Michael Connelly.
| Published | Title | Series |
|---|---|---|
| 2001 | Access to Power | |
| 2002 | The Dead Room | |
| 2007 | City of Fire | Lena Gamble |
| 2009 | The Lost Witness | Lena Gamble |
| 2011 | Murder Season | Lena Gamble |
| 2015 | City of Echoes | Matt Jones |
| 2016 | The Love Killings | Matt Jones |
| 2019 | The Girl Buried in the Woods | Matt Jones |
| 2021 | City of Stones | Matt Jones |
Crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, mystery novel, and police novel are terms used to describe narratives that centre on criminal acts and especially on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professional detective, of a crime, often a murder. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as historical fiction or science fiction, but the boundaries are indistinct. Crime fiction has several subgenres, including detective fiction, courtroom drama, hard-boiled fiction, and legal thrillers. Most crime drama focuses on crime investigation and does not feature the courtroom. Suspense and mystery are key elements that are nearly ubiquitous to the genre.
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the characters he created are Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, The Continental Op and the comic strip character Secret Agent X-9.
Mystery is a fiction genre where the nature of an event, usually a murder or other crime, remains mysterious until the end of the story. Often within a closed circle of suspects, each suspect is usually provided with a credible motive and a reasonable opportunity for committing the crime. The central character is often a detective, who eventually solves the mystery by logical deduction from facts presented to the reader. Some mystery books are non-fiction. Mystery fiction can be detective stories in which the emphasis is on the puzzle or suspense element and its logical solution such as a whodunit. Mystery fiction can be contrasted with hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism.
Black Mask was a pulp magazine first published in April 1920 by the journalist H. L. Mencken and the drama critic George Jean Nathan. It is most well-known today for launching the hardboiled crime subgenre of mystery fiction, publishing now-classic works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, Paul Cain, Carroll John Daly, and others.
Red Harvest (1929) is a novel by American writer Dashiell Hammett. The story is narrated by the Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction, much of which is drawn from his own experiences as an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The plot follows the Op's investigation of several murders amid a labor dispute in a corrupt Montana mining town. Some of the novel was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana.
The Continental Op is a fictional character created by Dashiell Hammett. He is a private investigator employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office. The stories are all told in the first person and his name is never given.
Hardboiled fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction. The genre's typical protagonist is a detective who battles the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition (1920–1933) and its aftermath, while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are often antiheroes. Notable hardboiled detectives include Dick Tracy, Philip Marlowe, Nick Charles, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Slam Bradley, and The Continental Op.
Donald Edwin Westlake was an American writer with more than one hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, especially comic capers, with an occasional foray into science fiction and other genres. Westlake created two professional criminal characters who each starred in a long-running series: the relentless, hardboiled Parker, and John Dortmunder, who featured in a more humorous series.
Robert Crais is an American author of detective fiction. Crais began his career writing scripts for television shows such as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice and L.A. Law. His writing is influenced by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Robert B. Parker and John Steinbeck. Crais has won numerous awards for his crime novels. Lee Child has cited him in interviews as one of his favourite American crime writers. The novels of Robert Crais have been published in 62 countries and are bestsellers around the world. Robert Crais received the Ross Macdonald Literary Award in 2006 and was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2014.
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The Golden Age of Detective Fiction was an era of classic murder mystery novels of similar patterns and styles, predominantly in the 1920s and 1930s.
Nell Columbia Boyer Martin (1890–1961), usually known as Nell Martin and also published under the name Columbia Boyer, was an American author from Illinois specializing in light-hearted mysteries and short stories.
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Leane Zugsmith was an American novelist and short story writer who frequently wrote about the economically disadvantaged and the shortcomings of capitalism.
Joseph Nicholas Gores was an American mystery writer. He was known best for his novels and short stories set in San Francisco and featuring the fictional "Dan Kearney and Associates" private investigation firm specializing in repossessing cars, a thinly veiled escalation of his own experiences as a confidential sleuth and repo man. Gores was also recognized for his novels Hammett, Spade & Archer and his Edgar Award-winning or -nominated works, such as A Time of Predators, 32 Cadillacs and Come Morning.
William Herbert Deverell is a Canadian novelist, activist, and criminal lawyer. He is one of Canada's best-known novelists, whose first book, Needles, which drew on his experiences as a criminal lawyer, won the McClelland & Stewart $50,000 Seal Award. In 1997 he won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for literary excellence in crime writing in North America for Trial of Passion. That book also won the 1998 Arthur Ellis Award for best Canadian crime novel, as did April Fool in 2003. Trial of Passion launched his first crime series, featuring the classically trained, self-doubting Arthur Beauchamp, QC, a series that continued with April Fool, Kill All the Judges, Snow Job, I'll See You in My Dreams, Sing a Worried Song, Whipped, and Stung.
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Howard Owen is an American author. He is a writer of literary fiction, mystery, and thrillers. He was the winner of the 2012 Hammett Prize awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers.
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Lou Berney is an American crime fiction author who has published six books since 1991. For his works, Berney has won multiple awards including an Anthony, Barry and Edgar for The Long and Faraway Gone. With November Road, Berney won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger while also winning additional Anthony and Barry awards. Apart from writing, Berney was a screenwriter whose written film, Angels Sing, was released in 2012. Berney has also taught at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma City University during the 2010s.
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