Ed Gorman (b. 1941) US

Ed Gorman has been an astonishingly prolific writer since he turned full-time in 1984 after 20 years in advertising. Since then he has produced two to three books a year, several pseudonymously, written over a hundred short stories, edited many anthologies, and co-founded and edited the news magazine of the Mystery field, Mystery Scene.

He has been dubbed the “Poet of Dark Suspense” and much of his work haunts that ill-defined land between horror and mystery where the emphasis is as much on fear and shock as it is on crime and detection. Even his western fiction trespasses into this darkly psychological territory.

EG writes from the soul with deep passion and it is impossible for his work to leave you unaffected. Some of the material is pure horror and supernatural and has dismissed several of his early Daniel Ransom books as “trash.”

EG has created several series characters, most prominently Jack Dwyer, an ex-cop turned security guard and part-time actor. The books are violent and dark but not as “noir” as the one Walsh novel to date, The Night Remembers, which makes even your brain weep. Other series characters include former FBI psychological profiler Robert Payne, the temperamental and turbulent Tobin, a movie critic whose life is just too complicated; and more recently, Sam McCain, a young attorney in small-town Iowa in the fifties.

EG has written more one-off mysteries of late including some superior ones which he signs as E.J. Gorman. These include The Marilyn Tapes, which recreates the investigation into Marilyn Monroe’s death, and The First Lady, a political thriller where the President’s wife is accused of murder. One of EG’s best psychological noir novels is Daughter of Darkness, in which an emotionally and mentally troubled young woman may have murdered a man but she has no memory of it. Senatorial Privilege is a vivid recreation of small-town politics and violence.

EG’s western fiction should not be overlooked. Like most of his novels they are set in Iowa. The Leo Guild series is about a former lawman turned bounty hunter and are effective historical crime novels. Grave’s Retreat is an unusual novel about an early baseball hero who becomes entangled in a bank robbery, whilst Night of Shadows is an account of the first uniformed policewoman in Cedar Rapids (EG’s hometown). Over the 16 years that EG has been writing, his work has become slightly less intense and dark, but increasingly complex and deep. The light that now shines makes EG’s darkness multi-dimensional, illuminating other mysteries and casting further shadows.