Mark Smith

Mark Smith is best known for his novel, The Death of the Detective, a national book award finalist and NY Times paperback best seller said by some to be the best detective novel written. Born in Charlevoix, Michigan, he moved to Chicago at the age of nine and graduated from Northwestern University. After living for a year in Spain, he settled in New England where he became both a published novelist and a Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. His books have been published by Little, Brown, Knopf, Harper and Row, Morrow, Secker & Warburg in Great Britain and by Avon in paperback. A fellow of the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, he also served as the Senior Fulbright Lecturer to Yugoslavia. He has been praised for his style, narrative power, character studies and comedy. His work is wide ranging and difficult to categorize as witnessed by book reviewers who have compared him to Virgil, Camus, Faulkner, Marquez, Vonnegut, Conrad, Brecht, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dickens, Dreiser, Bellow, Farrell, Celine, Dostoyevski, Hugo, Richard Wright, Wolfe, Chandler, Gorki, Hammett, Algren, Pynchon, Gaddis, Joyce, Sandberg, Melville, Chekov, Donlevy, Hogarth, Breughel, Bosch and Van Eyck. He has written nine novels, a short story collection, four books of poetry and four detective novels. Two of his novels were Book-of-the-Month selections. Late in life, he took to writing poetry, He is married, has four daughters and lives in Florida.

Besides gardening, his favorite past times have been hiking in the White Mountains, cliff walking in Europe and collecting impressionist American paintings by women artists .