The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

RIDLEY PEARSON

Born in Glen Cove, New York, and raised in Riverside, Connecticut, Ridley Pearson was educated at the University of Kansas and at Brown. He was the first American to receive the Raymond Chandler-Fulbright Fellowship at Oxford University in 1991.

He has written nine novels set in and around Seattle featuring police detective Lou Boldt and forensic psychologist Daphne Matthews, and three about Sun Valley sheriff Walt Fleming. He has also written several stand-alone thrillers, including Never Look Back (1985), Blood of the Albatross (1986), and The Seizing of Yankee Green Mall (1987). Under the pseudonym Wendell McCall, he wrote three novels about Chris Klick: Dead Aim (1988), Concerto in Dead Flat (1999), and Aim for the Heart (1990). As Joyce Reardon, PhD, he wrote The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2003).

With humorist Dave Barry, he has written two very successful children’s series, one about Peter Pan, including Peter and the Starcatchers and Peter and the Shadow Thieves, and the other set in Never Land, beginning with Escape from the Carnivale (2006).

Pearson also plays bass guitar and sings with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band made up of such successful authors as Amy Tan, Stephen King, and Dave Barry-a band that, according to Barry, “plays music as well as Metallica writes novels.”

Pearson divides his time between the Northern Rockies and Saint Louis.