Larry D. Sweazy

Photo Credit: Rose M. Sweazy

After fifteen years of submitting fiction, and collecting hundreds of rejection slips, Larry D. Sweazy’s first professionally published short story, “The Promotion” was published by Berkley in the anthology, Texas Rangers, in 2004. “The Promotion” went on to win the WWA (Western Writers of America) Spur award for Best Short Story, 2005, and was honored, as well, by the mystery genre with an appearance in the 2004 best mystery short story anthology edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Ed Gorman, The Adventure of the Missing Detective: And 25 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories!

Larry's first novel, a western featuring Texas Ranger, Josiah Wolfe, The Rattlesnake Season, was released by Berkley Books on October 06, 2009. Long time western and mystery writer, Loren D. Estleman had this say about Larry’s debut novel: "Very rarely--not as much so as a total solar eclipse, but far less often than a perfect storm--a novel comes along that fulfills all the expectations of genre while rising to the level of a classic. Larry D. Sweazy's The Rattlesnake Season combines the slam-bang action of a good western with the sensitivity of style and depth of character that used to be the hallmark of literary fiction before it got bogged down in Middle Eastern mythology and polemics from beyond the grave. Josiah Wolfe is an American original created by American original, and the fact that this is the first title in a series catapults this debut novel into the rarefied category of a newly discovered planet."

Larry has been a freelance indexer for eighteen years, which continues to serve as an inspiration for the Marjorie Trumaine Mystery series. In that time, he has written over 825 back-of-the-book indexes for major trade publishers and university presses such as Addison-Wesley, Cengage, American University at Cairo Press, Cisco Press, Pearson Education, Pearson Technology, University of Nebraska Press, Weldon Owen, and many more. He continues to work in the indexing field on a daily basis.

As a writer, Larry is a two-time WWA (Western Writers of America) Spur award winner, a two-time, back-to-back, winner of the Will Rogers Medallion Award, a Best Books of Indiana award winner, and the inaugural winner of the 2013 Elmer Kelton Book Award. He was also nominated for a Short Mystery Fiction Society (SMFS) Derringer award in 2007 (for the short story, “See Also Murder”). Larry has published over 60 nonfiction articles and short stories, and is the author of ten novels including books in the Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger western series (Berkley), the Lucas Fume western series (Berkley), a thriller set in Indiana, The Devil’s Bones (Five Star), another stand-alone set in the Dust Bowl of Texas, A Thousand Falling Crows (Seventh Street Books), and the Marjorie Trumaine Mystery series (Seventh Street Books). He currently lives in Indiana with his wife, Rose.

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