(Here's the link to a recent magazine interview: http://www.goodlifemag.com/archives/2004/05-04/05-04_Lindsey.htm)

_________________________

I'm a native Texan and spent my early years just a few miles from the Mexican border in Starr County. Eventually my family moved to West Texas where I grew up in the oil fields and ranches of the Colorado River valley north of San Angelo. After graduating from North Texas State University and spending a year in graduate school, I moved to Austin in 1970 where my wife and I still live.

I began my writing career in 1983 with the publication of two mystery novels in the same year. One of those novels, A Cold Mind featuring Houston homicide detective, Stuart Haydon, has been called by reviewers "one of the greatest detective stories to come out of the Eighties"; "one of the best suspense novels of all time"; and "a classic of the genre." I've published five mystery novels featuring Stuart Haydon and six novels of suspense. The 12th, The Rules of Silence (2003), has been bought by Universal Studios who will produce it as a feature film.  Its in script development now.  My 13th novel, The Face of the Assassin, has just been published (20th April 2004).

My books have been variously published in twenty foreign languages.

Throughout the 1980s, I researched the Stuart Haydon novels by spending a great deal of time with the Houston Police Department's Homicide Division. The men and women I met there were immensely helpful to me and many became personal friends. During much of the late seventies and eighties Houston's homicide rate was the highest in the country, and my experiences with the Homicide Division deeply influenced all of the Haydon novels.

By the late 1980s I was getting restless with Stuart Haydon, feeling that maybe we knew each other a little too well after four novels. I wanted a break from writing novels featuring a series-based character.

So in 1988, I changed directions slightly by beginning an extensive regimen of research for a novel that would become Mercy (1990). Though the setting was still in Houston, it featured an Hispanic female homicide detective, Carmen Palma, instead of Stuart Haydon. Eventually ending up on the New York Times Bestsellers List in paperback, Mercy was an internationally popular novel. In 1992 the German television network Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), the largest television network in Europe, featured me and my novel Mercy in an hour-long special program in their "Literature and Culture" series. The network sent a television crew to Houston for four days during which they filmed scenes from the book and interviewed me in the Houston Police Department's Homicide Division.

In many ways this novel was a watershed book for me personally, and also for my career. Mercy has been filmed and was premiered on HBO in April 2000. It's now available in VHS and DVD video.

My next novel featured Stuart Haydon once again, although I hadn't anticipated that. For years I'd been active in a human rights organization that concentrated on monitoring the political assassinations that plagued the Central American country of Guatemala. Increasingly I had been feeling that I owed that country and that subject a novel. After a series of research trips into Guatemala, it seemed to me that Haydon was the perfect man for this novel. Body of Truth was published in 1992 and won Germany's Bochumer Krimi Archiv award for the best suspense novel of the year.

With An Absence of Light (1994) I changed directions yet again, leaving behind the life of the homicide detective and entering the world of criminal intelligence. Requiem for a Glass Heart (1996) also dealt with the subject of criminal intelligence (and assassination) but this time the setting was international, and the story followed the lives of two women on opposite sides of the law who were compelled to forge an improbable reationship as they struggled to stay alive. In the 1999 novel, The Color of Night, I continued with another story set in the world of international criminal intelligence, an examination of how difficult it is for an agent to escape the shadows of his former undercover career, even when he desperately tries to begin a new life.

With Animosity, 2001, I shifted the setting of the story to my native Central Texas (and Paris) and used a more mainstream storytelling style to write of a murder in a small artist colony.

The Face of the Assassin  is a thriller set in Austin and Mexico City. It's about a forensic artist who stumbles onto a terrorist plot developing in Mexico and targeting the US.

In addition to writing novels, I spend a lot of time with my book collection which consists of a little over 4,000 volumes, mostly in the fields of literature, art, religion, architecture, and ancient history. In 1995 we completed the construction of a building for these books--made of native Texas limestone--adjacent to our home. This library is where I spend most of my time, researching and writing my novels. It was featured in the book Home Offices, published in 1996.

Back to David's Home Page

Copyright © 2001 by David Lindsey