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Bill Pronzini

kevinburtonsmith

Pseudonyms include Jack Foxx, Alex Saxon, Brett Halliday, William Jeffrey, Romer Zane Grey, and Robert Hart Davis
(1943 –)

BILL PRONZINI is simply one of the genre’s masters. Top of the Line. An Ace Performer. The Bomb.

He seems to have taken a crack at just about everything in the mystery genre: noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men’s action and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its sixth (sixth!) decade, with no signs of creative flagging. Other long-running privates have risen, crashed and fallen by the wayside, but Nameless has somehow persevered.

He’s also ghosted several Michael Shayne short stories under the house name of Brett Halliday for Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Colin Wilcox and Marcia Muller, whom he married in 1992.

Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a beloved place in the P.I. genre’s Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls “alternative classics”), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he’s the co-author (with Muller) of 1001 Midnights, one of the seminal books of crime fiction criticism.

He’s also one hell of an editor, helping compile some truly great anthologies, many of them theme-based, in not just crime and detective fiction, but alsi in the horror and western genres.

The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he’s published in over thirty countries. He was the very first president of The Private Eye Writers of America, and he’s received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His passion for the old crime pulps is largely responsible for keeping them in the public’s eye. He’s amassed a huge collection of books and magazines and has always been an omnivorous reader; all of which made him a natural when it came to editing various anthologies. He admits “it was a pleasure tracking down good stories to fit a particular anthology theme.” But after editing 80 or so of them over a period of twenty-some years, he decided it was “more than enough.”

Always a critical darling, though never a true best-seller, the twenty-sixth installment in the long-running Nameless series, Crazybone (2000) ended with the intriguing possibility that Nameless and his wife, Kerry, would adopt a child, suggesting a move far from the hard-edged dramas of a lone wolf private eye, and in fact, Pronzini at the time let it be known, in Mystery & Detective Monthly, and perhaps elsewhere, that he wasn’t going to write any more Nameless novels, unless he got an exceptional offer from some publisher. He therefore hoped to end the series on an upbeat note and to allow for its possible (and from this quarter, much-hoped for) revival.

Well, that wish came to pass, and he has, in fact, continued the series on pretty much an annual basis. Nameless now has a name (Surprise, surprise, it’s “Bill”) and is now semi-retired, but running a small detective agency.

Not too shabby. Not too shabby at all.

* * * * *

Pronzini was born April 13, 1943 in Petaluma, California. He discovered his grandfather’s cache of science fiction and mystery digests at about the age of twelve and, a few years later, discovered a stack of pulp magazines in a secondhand bookstore he used to frequent in San Francisco. It was evidently love at first site. His collection now contains some 3000 pulp and digest magazines. It’s an obsession from which Nameless, his greatest character, also suffers.

“Nameless owns 6000, but then he’s a lot older than I am.,” Pronzini confesses. “Or at least he started out that way.”

Pronzini subsequently attended junior college for a few years, and worked as a newsstand clerk, plumbing supply salesman, warehouseman, sports reporter, office typist, car-park attendent, and a part-time civilian guard for a U.S. marshal transporting federal prisoners (“It sounds a lot more exciting than it was.”). He published his first short story, “You Don’t Know What It’s Like” in the November 1966 issue of Shell Scott Mystery Magazine and by the late sixties he was writing full-time, both under his own name and a slew of pen and house names, pumping out mostly pulp fiction for Leo Margulies’ string of digest magazines. His first novel, The Stalker, was published in 1971 and he was so prolific in those early years that he took to writing novels under pseudonyms as well, including Jack Foxx and Alex Saxon, so that he wouldn’t spread his own name “too thin.” In the early seventies Pronzini traveled in Europe, and actually resided for a time in Majorca and West Germany.

He currently lives in San Francisco with his third wife, Marcia Muller. She is, of course, the creator of private eye Sharon McCone, who’s been known to share a stakeout or two with Nameless. Pronzini and Muller have, in fact, collaborated on numerous short stories and novels over the years.

HELP!

SHORT STORIES AND NOVELLAS

NOVELS

COLLECTIONS

   

NON-FICTION

ANTHOLOGIES, AS EDITOR

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Bluefox808 and Don Longmuir of Scene of the Crime Books for the leads.

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