The Excruciatingly Long and Somewhat Silly Version

I was born in a crossfire hurricane. I’m just kidding. It was just a regular hurricane, with the winds moving in a counterclockwise direction.

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Sorry, still kidding: no hurricane.

I entered the world in 1969, in Missoula, Montana, just after the new year began. Six months later, Buzz Aldrin landed the Eagle on the moon. Coincidence? If so, I like it better than Nixon’s inaugural.

As a child, my interest in writing was already evident. At the age of 5, I dictated my first play to my father, who typed it up on his Hermes portable typewriter. Reviews of Zorro and the Bad Guy, however, were unkind. The Entertainer called it “evidence that some talents are better left untutored” while Variety headlined their review Tot’s Swashbuckler Totally Pointless.

My sensitive psyche severely stung, I would not return to playwriting until my arrival in Chicago many years later.

In middle school, I submitted my first query, for the inaugural issue of Mondo Montana. The reply, addressed to “Ms. Graff,” would foreshadow my later experiences in publishing. Mondo Montana rejected my work but ceased publication soon after it started. Coincidence? This time, I think not.

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The Hallowed Halls of Hell

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During my junior year of high school, fueled by the writings of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Stephen Davis (Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga), and Matt “Aleister” Crowley (“Deadly Sex Thrills”), I submitted a work of fiction to my English teacher. I don’t remember the assignment; I hope it was to write a work of fiction. Called “Wolves’ Cry,” it was the story of a messianic rock star named “Keith” who took a lot of drugs. What a knowledge you possess! my teacher scrawled in the margins. Oh, how I wished he were right.

But I did start writing novels during my senior year at Hellgate High School. (Yes, Virginia, there really is a Hellgate High School.) As part of a semester-long elective called “The Detective Novel,” or perhaps, “The Mystery Novel,” my teacher, Greg Lenihan, asked us to start writing our own detective novels. Well, he told us to—it was a graded assignment. I wrote the first chapters of what would become Dark Suns, a haunting tale of detection, vampirism, and deus ex machinations. If you have a copy, please return it to me, postage due, so I can add it to my kindling pile.

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Bright College Days, O Carefree Days Gone By

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After applying to Hampshire College three times, I was finally allowed to attend. With the perspective of adulthood, I can see that they were right to be wary of me, because I was a halfhearted high-school student. But couldn’t they see that I had finally decided to live up to my potential? My mother, bless her, made me feel better by performing brutal copyedits of the director of admissions’ rejection letters. (I won’t even use the director’s initials, but her name, seared into my memory, was Olga E. Euben.)

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As a student at Hampshire (I would go on to be called “the ideal Hampshire student” by one professor), I began yet another novel, called This Ruined Planet. A post-apocalyptic tale employing Faulknerian narrative techniques, it was most notable for the thirty-seven different adjectives I used in place of the word gray. Mercifully, this novel was never finished.

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I did, however, finish a semiautobiographical novel called The Basement Dwellers. With the help of my adviser, Lynne Hanley, I was able to cut the 300-page first draft down to 175 pages. It was still probably too long, but at least it was no longer big enough to hurt anybody. I still recall Lynne’s explanation of mimetic fallacy: “If you’re writing about something that’s boring,” she told me, “don’t make the writing boring, too.”

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Point taken and, mercifully, this novel was never published. One copy, however, resides in the Hampshire Colllege library. I would never, ever advocate the theft and destruction of any library property, ever—but, let’s just say that some library holdings would be missed less than others.

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After graduating, I filled my lungs with fresh air and lit out for the territories. I didn’t apply to graduate school. I wanted to experience life as it was lived—and to earn my living as a working writer, not some tweedy, out-of-touch academic.

One year later, I was working the graveyard shift at Kinko’s in my hometown. This allowed me to make cheap copies of my novellas, Dark Suns, Limbo, and In the Dark. (Had I written a fourth novella, I suspect it would have been called Limbo in the Dark.) Not enough has been written about the dangers posed to the world of literature by the ready availability of cheap photocopies. As above, if you have any of these in your possession, send them to me and I will replace them with better writing, no questions asked. Your name will be held in the strictest confidence, Sean Dwyer.

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When the novellas didn’t make me famous, even locally, I decided to become a filmmaker. Then a rock star. Then a filmmaker who scored his own films. I published a short story. I had my picture published with the short story! To celebrate, I drank fifteen beers.

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I decided to leave my hometown for Austin, Texas, where I would be a rock star and novelist. Hey, if Nick Cave could do it, so could I—and I wasn’t even addicted to heroin!

Then I met Marya Key and fell in love. Having grown up in suburbs of the Twin Cities, she loved Missoula and didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to leave without her. She agreed to consider alternate locales. Six weeks after we started dating, on an American tragedy–themed road trip that included visits to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, I proposed marriage in Austin, Texas, as bats flew from the Congress Street Bridge. But we decided not to move to Austin.

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Five months later, we were married in St. Timothy’s Chapel, overlooking Georgetown Lake. We had our reception at Club Moderne in Anaconda. The following year, we visited Chicago and loved it. We went home, packed, and went back to Chicago. When we want to do something, we don’t mess around. (The whole thing was chronicled, if not copyedited, in the Chicago Sun-Times.)

I Call Hollywood; Call Goes to Voicemail

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“The movie medium is the manna of the masses!” I crowed, and quit my job. Putting myself on wife support, I spent 1997 writing screenplays—five in all. As I cast calls and queries at production companies, I got some nibbles but no bites. It soon became apparent to me that I would need to earn some money to support my screenwriting. What better way, thought I, than by becoming a freelance writer?

In 1996, I published my first article for Newcity. Called “Pop Culture,” it was a taste test of Dr. Pepper knockoffs. I was paid 35 dollars.

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I would like to say it soon became apparent to me that I would need a job to support the freelancing that was supposed to support the screenwriting. Alas, I didn’t realize this until the spring of 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst.

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But these years were productive, if poorly paid. I wrote or cowrote ten screenplays in all. If you have any of these in your possession, please consider producing them as motion pictures. A few of them aren’t half bad. I even wrote and directed a play, Driving a Bargain, which was later optioned for film by Luminair.

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I also wrote articles for Playboy.com, the Chicago Tribune Magazine, Fiction Writer, Billiards Digest, Chicago Social, NewCity, the Chicago Reader, et cetera and so forth.

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More importantly, I began revising a novel that I had written in my parents’ basement over the course of three weeks in the winter of 1993, after I had returned from a brief sojurn as a bookseller on Charing Cross Road in London but before I began my tenure at Kinko’s. The novel, a mystery, was my attempt at selling out. 

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“You can’t sell out until you’ve sold something!” old me shouts at young me. But young me still won’t listen.

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I submitted Into the Cold, Cold Mountains two dozen times and was told repeatedly to change the name, perhaps because Charles Frazier had already locked up the words “Cold Mountain” back in 1997. I changed the title to Cold Lessons—it is set in winter, and it is about a teacher—but they declined to publish it under this title, too.

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Graff Needs Work

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After a six-week period with no assignments, no checks, and no hope of either, in 2001 I turned my writing skills to yet another form: the resume. Having published a wide variety of articles for respected publications, I was confident of securing a position as assistant editor, if not associate.

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Months later, I accepted my only offer, as editorial assistant at Booklist magazine. Then nearly 100 years old, Booklist provided prepublication book and media reviews to aid public librarians in their purchasing decisions. Books! More books! What’s not to love?

Well, I was working for Reference Books Bulletin, a once-separate publication that now appeared in the back pages of Booklist, right before the index. I love dictionaries and encyclopedias as much as the next guy, but did you know that there’s a three-volume set titled The Encyclopedia of Meat Sciences?

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I worked hard and kept my head down. Actually, I kept my head up, hoping to be noticed. I streamlined procedures. I weeded the files. I rewrote the style manual and put in plenty of jokes. I began contributing reviews to the Adult Books section of Booklist. (That means books written for adults—get your mind out of the gutter.)

Eventually, when Editor & Publisher Bill Ott decided that Booklist needed one of those new-fangled website thingies, there was only one logical choice. Fortunately, he was unavailable and I got the job.

I should mention that, before I was promoted from Editorial Assistant to Senior Editor, I had fallen into a despairing funk over the impossibility of ever being promoted. People who love books and more books, it seems, have little incentive to leave Booklist, leaving little chance of upward mobility. Therefore, I used my spare time—when I was done entering bibliographic information for The Library Book Cart Precision Drill Team Manual [By Linda D. McCracken and Lynne Zeiher. 2001. 160p. McFarland, paper, $25 (0-7864-1159-7). 021.2.] I used time at my desk to write a novel called Like Getting Paid to Read.

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Like Getting Paid to Read is about a guy who quits his job at Kinko’s to write screenplays but soon finds he needs money to support him in that goal and so becomes a freelance writer, eventually ending up as an editorial assistant at a prepublication review source called Book Journal. So, you know, science fiction.

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Actually, it’s really not a roman a clef; I intended it as humorous metafiction and really wasn’t trying to settle any scores. Nevertheless, I knew I couldn’t publish it while employed by Booklist. But, since I wasn’t going to be at Booklist long, it wouldn’t be long before I would be able to thrill the world with my harrowing tale of bibliographic data entry, screenwriting, and Serbian war criminals. (As you may guess, there’s a twist.)

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What’s not a twist is that Like Getting Paid to Read remains unpublished. If you possess a copy of the manuscript, please return it to me postage due, et cetera.

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Success! (Sort Of)

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I recount these tales of woe not to gain the reader’s sympathy but as an aid to aspiring writers. Unless your first name is Jonathan and you live in Brooklyn, or your first name starts with a vowel or consonant and you roomed with the daughter of Binky Urban in college, you will have to write a lot, and submit a lot, before good things start happening for you.

So, shortly after I got my corner office—and just a little while before they took it back—I worked a referral from a friend to get Cold Lessons in front of a decision maker at Tekno Books, a packager that acquired manuscripts for Five Star Mystery. They wanted to publish it! How much was I paid? Well, I don’t like to brag, so let me just say it was in the high three figures.

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Why did I publish Cold Lessons under the name Michael McCulloch? Well, I was proud of the book, but it was about thirteen years old by that time, and even though I’d revised it, I felt I could do better. So I decided to save my real name for my next book.

Or the book after that one. Having been introduced to the chairman of Severn House, I pitched him my idea for a contemporary political thriller, in the style of Eric Ambler, over breakfast in Chicago. He asked for an outline and two chapters, then offered me a contract for—yes, I had broken into the low four figures! I told him I wanted to publish it under the name Walter Key. Why? Addicted to anomynity, I guess. Or maybe I just wanted to save my real name for the book that would win the National Book Award.

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Anyway, just before the book went to press, Severn asked me to use my real name instead. Vanity won; I consented.

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I sat back and waited for the reviews. Publishers Weekly was the first to weigh in. According to them, My Fellow Americans was “thoughtful . . . challenging . . . intriguing.” There were more words—145 of them, to be precise—but those 3 were the only ones worth quoting. I held a wake in my office; my fellow book reviewers consoled me, at least until the whiskey ran out.

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(For what it’s worth, Library Journal gave me a terrific review.)

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The next book was harder to write, partly because I now had two bouncing, burping children, partly because one of them (he knows who he is) felt that sleep was a luxury wasted on parents. Publishers Weekly hated One Nation, Under God, too—what is it with those anonymous reviewers?—but the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that it “evokes such paranoid 1970s thrillers as The Parallax View and Six Days of the Condor.”

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I renewed my subscription to the Chicago Sun-Times.

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My fourth novel, and the third in what I informally call the Homeland Insecurity series, was called The Price of Liberty and published in 2010. On its back cover was a rousing blurb from the actual author of Six Days of the Condor, James Grady. That’s worth any six PW reviews, even good ones, if you ask me. But—and the clouds parted and the angels sang!—PW gave The Price of Liberty a good review, too.

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Success seemed within reach. I had married my ongoing political concerns to action and humor, and readers responded enthusiastically. Reviews and sales were strong. But the machinery of publishing has been carefully calibrated to keep authors humble. After selling out the first print run, my publisher declined to go back to press, forcing me to decline invitations to events where my books would have been sold.

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Severn did offer me a contract for another book, under the same terms as the previous three, but I turned them down, because I had decided to bet on myself. 

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It’s a good thing I didn’t ask a bookie for the odds before I did.

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Back to Grade School

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Around this time, however, those sleepless nights of parenting finally paid off. (In print, because I had been receiving emotional payoffs from day one—obviously.) I parlayed a child’s recurring nightmare into a two-book deal with Roaring Brook Press. The first book, The Other Felix, about a bullied boy whose dreamland doppelganger teaches him how to fight monsters, came out in 2011. 

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The second book, The Matchstick Castle, was . . . declined. “Declined? On what grounds?!?” demanded my inner attorney. My editor had greeted the first draft with some fairly broad notes, which I believed I had addressed in revision, but apparently not. So they didn’t want that book, but they did want a book, which seemed  . . . arbitrary and capricious. (Again, I’m quoting my inner attorney.)

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Oh, and while this was happening, my esteemed and excellent agent left Writers House to lead the children’s division of a Big Six publisher (there were still six back then)—and didn’t take my book with him.

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I Write Like a Girl

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Late one night in the bar, in 2011, at the late, not-too-lamented conference Love Is Murder, I made a handful of new writer friends, including a Denver-based author named Linda Joffe Hull. We ran into each other again a short while later at Bouchercon in St. Louis, and a friendly chat in the book room led to an agent suggesting we write a book together.

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A book about swingers.

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How we got there is a long story, and since this is the Excruciatingly Long and Somewhat Silly Version of my biography (you have no one to blame but yourself if you’ve made it this far), I will tell it in full. 

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I have always been interested in subcultures. Groups of people who live outside society according to their own rules are catnip to a writer. Pool players, hoboes, mole people, cult members, and actuaries all fascinate me. (Just checking to make sure you’re still with me.) When I read a book called The Lifestyle and watched the companion documentary, I was fascinated by the realization that most so-called swingers aren’t svelte, sexy, and sultry but are normal-bodied empty-nesters who sometimes have potlucks before they swap spouses. I had been wanting to write something funny about them but hadn’t yet found my way in. (Ba-dum!)

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Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Linda had a friend who moved to a south Denver suburb and breathlessly reported: “Linda, there are swingers in our neighborhood!!!” Linda had been pondering a serious novel about the effect of consensual, extramarital sex on relationships and families. But she, too, had not yet found her way in. (When you write about swingers, almost everything’s a groaner. And a double entendre, too.)

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So when the agent—who represented neither of us professionally—asked, “If you could write about anything at all right now, what would that be?” and we both said, “Swingers!” It was an NC-17 you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment. Things got even more interesting when our agent friend said, “You should write it together!”

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It’s always exciting when an agent or editor enthusiastically suggests you write something, because they think in terms of commercial potential, but the word “together” startled both of us. As writers, we were both interested in swinging, but neither of us were particularly interested in swinging as writers, if you take my meaning.

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(And allow me to issue a categoric denial to the titillated: neither Linda nor I have EVER engaged in swinging. We are both still happily and monogamously married to our respective spouses. Like most writers, we only explore sex with strangers and murder in Microsoft Word.) 

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But writing a book with someone else seemed like both an interesting challenge and a learning opportunity, so we kept in touch and continued to talk. Linda’s agent, Josh Getzler, was enthusiastic about the idea and soon became my agent, too. We started outlining in 2012 and finished the book in 2014. (For more on how we learned to work together, see the interviews here.) After many misadventures while submitting (editors couldn’t get their heads around the fact that the book included sex but wasn’t erotica), The Swing of Things was published by Lake Union Press, a division of Amazon Publishing in 2018.

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Crucially, we published it under the pseudonym Linda Keir. Because in 2017, thanks to Josh, The Matchstick Castle had been published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Random House. And I really, really didn’t want a well-intentioned parent to accidentally buy a book about the swing set for a kid who still played on a swing set.

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Repeating a Grade

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I’m apparently a fan of unofficial trilogies, and The Matchstick Castle led to two more middle-grade novels set in unusual domiciles with zany humor and larger-than-life adventures: The Phantom Tower and The Tiny Mansion. All three were well reviewed and even received some honors. My publisher supported the first two books mightily (I toured coast to coast!) but, as with my first unofficial trilogy, things didn’t end quite the way I would have wished.

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The Tiny Mansion was slated for publication in September 2020, also known as the year and month kids didn’t go back to school. Books for school-age readers are typically promoted through author visits to schools. My publisher, like most publishers, didn’t know how to pivot, so I arranged my virtual book tour and partnered with local bookstores for sales. The school visits went wonderfully! The book sales did not!

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Also, while publishing three books in four years with Putnam, I had worked with no fewer than five editors—whether it was working with me that drove them out of publishing or some other reason, they just kept leaving! And editor number five didn’t find my books quite as funny as I did.

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Fortunately, James Patterson came calling in 2021, and I became his cowriter on the MK’s Detective Club series with The Poison Puzzle (2023) and The Double Trouble Puzzle (2025). People often ask how I became a Patterson cowriter, and I’d love to tell you, because I’m still not sure how it happened.

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Boy, This Is Long

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Look, even I’m getting a little sick of me by now. Let’s just say that Linda Keir published two more books with Lake Union (Drowning with Others in 2019 and The Three Mrs. Wrights in 2020) before signing with Blackstone Publishing for The Royal Game in 2024 and I Did Not Kill My Husband in—wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, because IDNKMH, our fifth book won’t come out until April 2026.

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And my latest book, which published in June 2025, was my first work of nonfiction: Chicago’s Fine Arts Building: Music, Magic, and Murder. How did I come to write that? Well, that’s a story all in itself.

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Fifteen books in, I’m a full-time writer with a career more varied than I ever could have imagined. I write novels for adults and for kids both by myself and with cowriters, under my own name and pseudonyms. I’m also a ghostwriter, an editor, and an occasional teacher. I have had setbacks and success, and most of my success has come because I’m too stubborn to quit.

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And there are still many books I want to write.

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If you want to collaborate, hire me, or simply learn more . . . get in touch!