Evan Lewis

EVAN LEWIS fell under the spell of Davy Crockett at a tender age. He wore a coonskin cap and buckskin jacket. He had a toy flintlock rifle, a cap gun, a bedspread, a terrycloth bearskin rug, a light fixture, a saddle-shaped clothes rack and a waste basket. He had books, records, a cereal bowl, jig-saw puzzles and a plastic wallet with a fuzzy coonskin on it. He spent countless hours in the basement with an official Marx Davy Crockett at the Alamo playset. Yeah, he had it bad.

Years later, he took an interest in the real Crockett, collecting a stack of biographies, joining the Alamo Society and making two pilgrimages to San Antonio. And he acquired more stuff, of course. Cap guns, coffee cups, a wrist watch and more than fifty versions of ‟The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Yeah, he still had it bad.

He often felt that he heard Davy’s voice in his head—sort of like a conscience—so he wrote stories about a modern day descendant of Crockett who suffered from the same condition. Three of those appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine: ‟Mr. Crockett and the Bear” (May 2012), ‟Mr. Crockett and the Longrifle,” (May 2014) and ‟Mr. Crockett and the Indians,” (July/Aug 2016). He wrote similar stories of Davy’s grandson in the Old West, published hither and yon. And he wrote the adventure novel CROCKETT'S DEVIL, published in November 2021 by Steeger Books. He hopes you like it.

Along the way, Lewis received the Mystery Writers of America’s 2011 Robert L. Fish Award for his story ‟Skyler Hobbs and the Rabbit Man” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Feb 2010), about a man who believes he’s the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes. Two more EQMM adventures followed: “Skyler Hobbs and the Garden Gnome Bandit” (Sept/Oct 2012) and “Skyler Hobbs and the Smarter Brother” (Feb 2014). His Alfred Hitchcock story ‟The Continental Opposite” (May 2015), an homage to Dashiell Hammett, was nominated for a Shamus Award and selected for THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES OF 2016.

Lewis has also written Introductions for several collections of vintage pulp fiction published by Altus Press, Steeger Books and Black Dog Books.

He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Irene and their five dogs, where he blogs about books, pulps, comics, films and other wonders of pop culture on Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West, at davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com. He’s now hard at work on BOWIE'S GOLD, an epic adventure of Crockett’s all-too-brief acquaintance Jim Bowie, soon to be published by Steeger Books. He hopes you’ll like that, too.