Dennis Lynds

Dennis Lynds writes:

My first non-college publication was a poem in 1948 in a literary journal Poetry Book Magazine. My first short story came out in Prairie Schooner in 1954, and was my first paid fiction. I continued to publish poetry and short fiction in the literary journals, men's magazines, or anywhere else I could place them.

Somewhere in the late Fifties I decided I didn't have whatever it took to be a significant poet, and abandoned the form, but I've never stopped writing short stories both literary and crime.

In 1954 I started my first novel, went to England to finish it. It was a lousy novel, I can't recall now if I ever tried to sell it or just knew it wasn't good and slid it into the drawer. I started my second novel, Combat Soldier in 1956, finished it and sold it to NAL in 1958. I immediately wrote the third novel, Uptown Downtown sold it to NAL in 1959.

All this time I held down a full time job as editor and managing editor of various chemical business journals in New York, except for that five month trip to England.

In 1962 I discovered I wanted to write detective stories and there followed a period of commercial short stories, novelettes and novels for hire, and in 1967 I published my first Dan Fortune novel Act of Fear.

Since then I've continued to write crime stories and novels, and literary stories and novels side-by-side.

Dennis Lynds, writing under the pen name Michael Collins, is the author of the Dan Fortune novels, one of the longest-running series in detective fiction.