Michael Kurland

A plump, middle-aged man with greying hair and mild, hazel eyes looking out from behind wire-rim glasses, Author Michael Kurland has the perpetually nervous look of a rabbit invited to lunch at the Lions' Club. He has been a teacher of obscure subjects to disinterested children, the editor of a magazine even more idiosyncratic than himself, a seeker of absent persons, a magical explainer, and guest lecturer at numerous unrelated events. But he has never wandered far from his chosen profession of scrivener for very long, since he finds the fawning idolatry of his fans a useful counterbalance to the disinterest of landlords and the disapproval of bank managers.

In Kurland's over 30 books he has romped through a variety of fields. His non-fiction works cover topics as diverse as forensic science, criminal law, espionage, amateur radio, and the history of crime in America, and have been selections of the Military Book Club, the Readers' Digest Book Club and the Writers' Digest Book Club, among others.

Among the fiction works in print at the moment are Ten Little Wizards and A Study in Sorcery, tales set in Randall Garrett's Angevin Empire, where Richard the Lion Hearted survived his crossbow wound, the Plantagenets are still on the throne, and magic works. The Steam Punk novel Perchance, and The Unicorn Girl, middle book in the Greenwich Village Trilogy (the other two are ,The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson and The Probability Pad by T.A. Waters) The Princes of Earth, a Literary Guild Young Adult Book Club selection, is available as part of a Wildside Press double volume, the other half being Richard Lupoff's delightful werewolf novel, Lisa Kane.

Nonfiction books currently available are Irrefutable Evidence: Adventures in the History of Forensic Science and How to Solve a Murder: the Forensic Handbook.

Kurland has written another dozen or so science fiction novels which will shortly be in print again, He now writes mysteries, including A Plague of Spies, which was nominated for an Edgar, and Too Soon Dead and The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes, set in the 1930s and chronicling the mystery-solving talents of Alexander Brass, a columnist for the New York World.

The Infernal Device a Professor Moriarty novel was nominated for both an Edgar and an American Book award (and was recently done as a play for the Notre Dame Summer Play Program). The novels featuring Professor Moriarty now include Death By Gaslight, The Great Game, The Empress of India, and the forthcoming Who Thinks Evil.

A couple of his books, notably The Last President, and Button Bright fit tenuously into that nondescript category known as "mainstream."

His works have been translated into Czech, Chinese, French German, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and some alphabet full of hooks and buckets that he can’t make out.

It's a Mystery to Me: The Craft of the Mystery Story Revealed in Eleven Chapters and a Couple of Interludes is my attempt to impart the wisdom that I have acquired over the years, by assiduously aping those who know how to do it well, as to how to plot and write mystery stories. It is available as a trade paperback through your local book dealer -- they may have to special order it for a month or two -- or an ebook (Kindle only at the moment) on Amazon.
If you'd like an autographed copy, email me.

[For now, the paperback of "It's a Mystery to Me" is being discounted from $10.95 to $6.98 on Amazon, the Kindle version is down from $6.99 to $6.63, for some reason, and Prime members can borrow it for free. Can't do better than that.]

The Kindle version of my sf novel Star Griffin is on sale on Amazon for only $2.99.

"...What seems at first an amusing but random spoof of contemporary extremes gradually develops into a light, engaging story that draws together its many elements in a series of clever, pleasing surprises." -- Publisher's Weekly

Here's the link: