About Andrew F. Gulli
Andrew F. Gulli is managing editor of The Strand Magazine. He is also the coeditor of No Rest for the Dead, a thriller written by twenty-six internationally bestselling authors, including David Baldacci, Tess Gerritsen, Jeffery Deaver, Kathy Reichs, and Alexander McCall Smith.
About Lamia J. Gulli
Lamia J. Gulli is fiction editor at The Strand Magazine. Along with her brother, Andrew, she is the coeditor of No Rest for the Dead. She lives in Detroit, Michigan.
About Alexander McCall Smith
Sir Alexander McCall Smith is the author of over 120 books that have been published throughout the world. His best-known series is The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, of which twenty-five volumes have been published to date. Translated into over forty languages, these books became a successful television series and film under the direction of the late Anthony Minghella. His many other works of fiction include the world’s longest-running serial novel, the 44 Scotland Street series. The 44 Scotland Street books are published on a daily basis in The Scotsman newspaper and then appear in book form. There are seventeen volumes to date. He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the American Academy of Arts Medal for Literature, the Lifetime Award of the Scottish cultural organization, the Saltire Society, the UK Author of the Year Award, and honorary degrees from thirteen universities in Europe and North America.
About Michael Connelly
Michael Connelly was born in Philadelphia, PA, and is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of forty novels and one work of nonfiction. With over eighty-nine million copies of his books sold worldwide and translations into forty-five languages, he is one of the most successful writers working today. His debut novel, The Black Echo, won the prestigious Best First Novel Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1992. Over the course of his career, his work has been honored with the Diamond Dagger from the CWA in 2018 and the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Writing Award from Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England in 2022. He was also named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2023. Two of Connelly’s novels have been adapted for the screen: Blood Work, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, and The Lincoln Lawyer, with Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. Connelly serves as executive producer of Bosch and Bosch: Legacy—Amazon Studios original drama series based on his bestselling character Harry Bosch. He is also executive producer of The Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix, starring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Mickey Haller, as well as the documentary films Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story and Tales of the American. He both created and hosts the podcasts Murder Book and The Wonderland Murders & The Secret History of Hollywood. His recent New York Times bestsellers include The Waiting, Resurrection Walk, Desert Star, The Dark Hours, The Law of Innocence, The Night Fire, and Dark Sacred Night. He divides his time between California and Florida.
About Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver is a New York Times bestselling author whose novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world. His books are sold in 150 countries and have been translated into twenty-five languages. A two-term president of Mystery Writers of America, he was recently named a Grand Master by the organization, joining the ranks of Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Mary Higgins Clark, and Walter Mosley. The author of fifty novels, more than one hundred short stories, a nonfiction book on the law, and the lyricist of a country-western album, Deaver has received—or been shortlisted for—dozens of awards. The Bodies Left Behind was named Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers, while The Broken Window and Edge were also finalists. He won the CWA’s Steel Dagger for The Garden of Beasts and its Short Story Dagger for his short fiction. He has been nominated eight times for an Edgar Award by Mystery Writers of America. Deaver has received numerous lifetime achievement honors, including those from the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, The Strand Magazine, and the Raymond Chandler Award in Italy. Several of his works have been adapted for the screen: A Maiden’s Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin; The Bone Collector was turned into a feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie; and an adaptation of The Devil’s Teardrop aired on Lifetime. His Lincoln Rhyme series was adapted into the NBC drama Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector. More recently, The Never Game—featuring his character Colter Shaw—was adapted as the CBS series Tracker.
About James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author best known for his mysteries, particularly the Dave Robicheaux series. He has twice received the Edgar Award for Best Novel, for Black Cherry Blues and Cimarron Rose. Burke was born in Houston, Texas, but grew up on the Texas–Louisiana Gulf Coast. He attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Missouri, receiving a BA and MA from the latter. He has worked at a wide variety of jobs over the years, including as an oil lease negotiator, a reporter, and a social worker. He was Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, succeeding his good friend and posthumous Pulitzer Prize winner John Kennedy Toole, and preceding Ernest Gaines in the position. Shortly before his move to Montana, he taught for several years in the Creative Writing program at Wichita State University in the 1980s. Burke and his wife, Pearl, split their time between Lolo, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.
About John M. Floyd
John M. Floyd is the author of more than a thousand short stories in publications like Strand Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Best American Mystery Stories (2015, 2018, and 2010), and Best Mystery Stories of the Year (2021 and 2024). A former Air Force captain and IBM systems engineer, John is also an Edgar nominee, a Shamus Award winner, a six-time Derringer Award winner, a past recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement, and the author of nine books. He and his wife, Carolyn, live in Mississippi.
About Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”
About Jonathan Rabb
Jonathan Rabb is the author of the novels Among the Living (a finalist for the 2018 Townsend Prize for Fiction), The Second Son, Shadow and Light, Rosa (winner of the Director’s Prize at Semana Negra, 2006), The Book of Q, and The Overseer. He has published short fiction and non-fiction in a number of magazines and journals, including The Oxford American, Lit Hub, Huffington Post, Opera News, and the Journal for Interdisciplinary History. He originated the role of Fermat in the Off-Broadway production of Fermat’s Last Tango, and has soloed with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, the Albany Symphony, and the Harrisburg Symphony, among others. He has taught at NYU, Columbia, and is currently a Professor of Writing at The Savannah College of Art and Design.
About Andrew Crowley
Andrew Crowley lives in Toronto with his wife and daughters. His short fiction has appeared most recently in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine, and “Peephole” was his first published story. The idea for it came during a bout of insomnia: “I wanted to capture the feeling of a waking nightmare. I thought if I could commit it to paper, maybe I could finally get to sleep, so I wrote ‘Peephole’ without any plans to get it published. It did help, and I did get to sleep, and some months later I sent it in to The Strand and was very pleased to have it published under one of those great, dark, Strand covers that captured that middle-of-night atmosphere so well. It’s an honor to have ‘Peephole’ appear in The Strand’s twenty-fifth anniversary collection.”
About Michael Bond
Michael Bond, C.B.E., (1926–2017) was born in Newbury, Berkshire on 13th January 1926. He started writing while serving in the British Army and stationed in Cairo at the end of World War II, but it was to be over a decade later, while working as a television cameraman for the BBC, that he was inspired to start writing stories about a small bear found on a London railway platform. Although best known for his books about Paddington Bear, Michael Bond wrote many other stories for children, including a number of books about his daughter’s guinea pig, Olga da Polga, and two television series: The Herbs and The Adventures of Parsley. In 1983, he turned his hand to adult fiction and published the first in a series of eighteen humorous detective novels about Monsieur Pamplemousse, an ex-member of the French Sûreté turned food guide inspector, and his faithful bloodhound, Pommes Frites. In 2007, despite having left school at the age of fourteen without a single academic qualification to his name, Michael Bond was granted an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by Reading University. Eight years later, he was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for his services to children’s literature. Michael Bond continued to write every day of his life until he died at his home in London on 27th June 2017. He was honored with a Memorial Service in St. Paul’s Cathedral and is laid to rest, very appropriately, in Paddington Old Cemetery.
