Mitchell Smith is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 writing crime fiction

Crime fiction

Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...

 and science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

.

Biography

Mitchell Smith was born in upper New York State, and went to military school on Mississippi

Mississippi

Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...

's Gulf Coast. He attended Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 where he studied English and history. He enlisted in the army working in military intelligence

Military intelligence

Military intelligence is a military discipline that exploits a number of information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to commanders in support of their decisions....

 stationed in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 during the Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

. After leaving the army, he started his career in writing. He currently lives in Whatcom County, Washington.

Writing

Smith started his writing career with pulp

Pulp magazine

Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...

 Western

Western (genre)

The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...

s, including several "erotic Westerns" (in the Buckskin imprint) published under the pen-name of Roy LeBeau, and then switching to crime novels. His novels include Daydreams (1987), which centers on a female detective investigating the murder of a call girl; Stone City (1990), a mystery set entirely in a maximum security prison, where an imprisoned professor is appointed by the inmates to solve a series of murders (remarkably similar to the HBO series Oz

Oz (TV series)

Oz is an American television drama series created by Tom Fontana, who also wrote or co-wrote all of the series' 56 episodes . It was the first one-hour dramatic television series to be produced by premium cable network HBO. Oz premiered on July 12, 1997 and ran for six seasons...

 (1997) in its initial premise); Due North (1992), concerning a woman who returns to Seattle from the Alaskan wilderness to care for her dying mother; Karma (1994), a thriller featuring Hindu mobsters; Sacrifice (1997), a thriller in the vein of Floridian crime writers (Charles Willeford

Charles Willeford

Charles Ray Willeford III was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, Miami Blues , is considered one of its era's most...

, John D. MacDonald

John D. MacDonald

John Dann MacDonald was an American crime and suspense novelist and short story writer.MacDonald was a prolific author of crime and suspense novels, many of them set in his adopted home of Florida...

 and Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen is an American journalist, columnist and novelist.- Early years :Born in 1953 and raised in Plantation, Florida, of Norwegian heritage, Hiaasen was the first of four children and the son of a lawyer, Kermit Odel, and teacher, Patricia...

); and Reprisal (1999), a tale of familial revenge and psychological horror. Smith switched to science fiction with his latest books which form The Snowfall Trilogy consisting of Snowfall, Kingdom River, and Moonrise. His best work is marked by a keen sense of psychological realism, powerful sensory descriptiveness, and moments of intense violence.

External links