Dick Lochte

Dick Lochte is the co-author (with Al Roker) of a bestselling comedy-mystery series featuring celebrity chef Billy Blessing. The new addition to the series, "The Midnight Show Murders," is arriving this fall from Delacorte. His most recent crime novel is the comedy thriller “Croaked!” (Five Star Books), a whodunit set in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. He began his career as a novelist with the publication of the 1985 prize-winning mystery, “Sleeping Dog.” Chronicling the adventures of a precocious fourteen-year-old girl and a weary Los Angeles private detective as they search for the girl’s mother across most of California, the novel was nominated for the Edgar, Shamus and Anthony and won the Nero Wolfe Award. It also was selected by the New York Times as a “Notable Book of the Year.” The Independent Mystery Booksellers of America named it as one of the 100 Most Popular Mystery Novels of the Century. A trade paperback edition of “Sleeping Dog” was recently published by Poisoned Pen Press.

Lochte’s 1995 novel, “The Neon Smile” (Simon & Schuster, Ivy) featuring New Orleans detective Terry Manion, was praised by Publishers Weekly with a starred review. Joseph Wambaugh called it “as colorful and entertaining as any police thriller ever inspired by the fascinating and fantastical Big Easy.” Sue Grafton found the novel a “tantalizing blend of past and present.” Jonathan Kellerman described it as “Dick Lochte’s magnum opus . . . I couldn’t put it down.”

In 1998, Lochte began a collaboration with attorney Christopher Darden that resulted in four bestselling legal thrillers, the last of which was "Lawless" (NAL, Onyx).

Lochte is a native of New Orleans Louisiana. After graduating from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree, he served briefly as an officer in the United States Coast Guard before embarking on a business career, working first as a continuity writer for WDSU-TV, the NBC station in New Orleans, then for TV Guide and Playboy magazines. In the mid-1970s, Lochte moved to Southern California where he established a new career as a freelance journalist and novelist.He has written for numerous publications, including the Washington Post, Playboy, TV Guide, Chicago Tribune and Salon Internet Magazine. He was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, from 1980 to 2002, first as the creator and author of Book Notes, a weekly column devoted to news of the publishing industry, then as a reviewer of crime fiction in the column “Mysteries.”

He was a contributing editor and theater critic for Los Angeles magazine for sixteen years and received an Ovation Award in 1989 from the Los Angeles Theater Alliance for body of work, the only critic so honored in the history of the award. He wrote the final script for the Award-winning film, “The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane,” which starred Jodie Foster and Martin Sheen, and his original screenplay formed the basis for the feature film, “Escape To Athena,” a World War II comedy-drama starring Roger Moore and David Niven. He has written episodic television (“Life Goes On,” and a script for the proposed ABC-TV series, “Old Dogs”) and the screenplay for a two-hour Universal motion picture for television based on Frank Gruber’s suspense novel, “The Twilight Man.”

Lochte is currently president of the Private Eye Writers of America. He has served as president of the American Crime Writers League and is a member of Mystery Writers of America, International Association of Crime Writers, P.E.N., Book Critics Circle and the Writers Guild of America. He presently resides on the West Coast with his wife and son.

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