L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories

About the Authors

Megan Abbott is the Edgar award–winning author of the crime novels Queenpin, The Song Is You, Die a Little, and Bury Me Deep. Her writing has appeared in Wall Street Noir, Detroit Noir, Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year, Phoenix Noir, Storyglossia, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Believer, Queens Noir, and The Speed Chronicles. She is also the author of a nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, an anthology of female-themed crime fiction. She has been nominated for the Hammett Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. Her newest novel, The End of Everything (Little, Brown, July 2011), is set in the suburbs of the 1980s and tells the story of a thirteen-year-old girl whose best friend disappears. Abbott lives in Queens, New York.

Charles Ardai is the Edgar and Shamus Award–winning author of four novels, two of which (Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence) are currently in development as feature films from Universal Pictures. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, ranging from Time to Twilight Zone, as well as in series such as The Year’s Best Horror Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. As founder and editor of the acclaimed pulp-fiction series Hard Case Crime—described by Neal Pollack in The Stranger as “the best new American publisher to appear in the past decade”—Ardai has had the opportunity to work with authors such as Stephen King, Mickey Spillane, Pete Hamill, Donald E. Westlake, Ed McBain, Madison Smartt Bell, and Lawrence Block. He is also a writer and producer on the TV series Haven.

In addition to his work as a writer, publisher, and entrepreneur, Ardai serves as a managing director at the D. E. Shaw group, in which capacity he has had responsibility for technology ventures such as Schrödinger, a leading developer of software for computational chemistry (Ardai serves as the firm’s chairman). His best-known creation is the Internet service Juno, which provided free e-mail and Internet access to millions of computer users in the 1990s.

Lawrence Block is the highly prolific and respected author of more than sixty novels and eleven collections of short fiction. He has won almost every major award available to mystery writers, including four Edgar Awards, four Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards (presented by the Maltese Falcon Society in Japan), and the Nero Award. A past president of the Private Eye Writers of America and the Mystery Writers of America, Block has published articles and short fiction in American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, GQ, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and the New York Times. Three of his novels have been turned into major studio films.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of more than thirty novels and many short stories and articles. He also writes comic scripts and screenplays. His novella Bubba Ho-Tep was turned into a film of the same name, and his short story Incident On and Off a Mountain Road was made into an episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror. He is currently producing a film based on his story Christmas with the Dead.

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a more than fifty novels, twenty collections of short fiction, ten poetry collections, and numerous nonfiction pieces and plays, including, most recently, the story collection Give Me Your Heart and the memoir A Widow’s Story. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, she is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award, honoring excellence in the art of the short story, an O. Henry Award, the Bram Stoker Award, National Book Award, the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle, and the 2010 National Humanities Medal.

Francine Prose has written fifteen novels, among them Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and, most recently, My New American Life. Her books of nonfiction include The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired, Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles, Gluttony, and Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife. Her book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them was a New York Times bestseller. Her stories, reviews, cultural criticism, and essays have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and ARTNews, and she is a contributing editor at Harper’s and BOMB. Formerly the president of PEN American Center, Prose is the recipient of the Washington University International Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edith Wharton Achievement Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA grants, and a PEN Translation Prize. She is currently a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New York Institute for the Humanities, and has been a resident in literature at the American Academy in Rome. She was one of the first recipients of a Director’s Fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Jonathan Santlofer is the author of five crime novels, among them his debut novel, The Death Artist, which received national attention and was translated into more than twenty languages, and Anatomy of Fear, winner of the Nero Award in 2008. He is also coeditor of the highly acclaimed anthology The Dark End of the Street. The recipient of two NEA grants, he has been a visiting artist at the Vermont Studio Center, the American Academy in Rome, and serves on the board of Yaddo, the oldest arts community in the U.S. His short fiction appears in several anthologies and collections, including The Rich and the Dead, edited by Nelson DeMille, and the forthcoming New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Santlofer is also a well-known artist: his work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and JPMorgan Chase.

Duane Swierczynski is the author of several crime thrillers, including the Edgar Award–nominated Expiration Date and Fun & Games, the first in a new series published by Mulholland Books. He’s also written about the characters Punisher, Cable, the Immortal Iron Fist, Werewolf by Night, Black Widow, and Deadpool for Marvel Comics, and is collaborating with CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker on the Level 26 series of bestselling “digi-novel” thrillers, including Dark Origins and Dark Prophecy. He and his family live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Andrew Vachss is a lawyer who represents children and youth exclusively. His many books include eighteen novels in the Burke series and four collections of short stories. His work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, and The New York Times, among other publications. For more information about Mr. Vachss and his work, visit www.vachss.com.