Ed Wright grew up in Arkansas, where his father sold hardware and his mother raised three children and taught arts and crafts. He has degrees from Vanderbilt University (honors, English literature) and Northwestern University (master’s, journalism). He was an officer in the U.S. Navy aboard destroyers for three years. His first major career was journalism, and he worked as an editor at the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.
At the Times, he specialized for several years in Middle East affairs and later was one of the senior editors on the foreign desk, helping supervise the work of three dozen foreign correspondents around the world and plan coverage of events ranging from the fall of the Soviet Union to the first Persian Gulf War. He later wrote the Times’ Travel Advisory column.
Eds second career, fiction writing, led to the John Ray Horn mysteries, set in Los Angeles during the 1940s. The series has won four awards, including the Shamus Award and Britain’s Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award. He departed from the series with his next book, “Damnation Falls,” a contemporary mystery set in small-town Tennessee, which won the Barry Award. His most recent, the thriller From Blood, was named one of the best mysteries of 2010 by the Financial Times of London.
Ed and his wife, Cathy, a psychotherapist, live in the Los Angeles area with Magic, an irrepressible female Belgian shepherd mix. At least once a year the three of them head off to the lakes and trails of the eastern Sierra Nevada.


Photo by Jennifer Leshnick