About David Morrell

David Morrell was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. As a teenager, he became a fan of the classic television series Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible driving across the country in search of themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

The work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his MA and PhD. There, he also met the esteemed science fiction author William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a groundbreaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

That father of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986 while continuing to write novels; many of them went on to become international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for the only television miniseries to be broadcast after a Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.

Eventually wearying of working at two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full-time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.

“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of more than thirty books, including Murder as a Fine Art, Creepers, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). An Edgar and Anthony finalist, a Nero and Macavity winner, Morrell is a three-time recipient of the distinguished Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious Thriller Master Award.

With eighteen million copies of his work in print, his books have been translated into thirty languages. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he learned during his more than four decades as an author. Please visit him at www.davidmorrell.net, where you can also see images of Thomas De Quincey, De Quincey’s daughter Emily, and the fascinating Victorian locations featured in Inspector of the Dead.