Steve Hockensmith

Though the town elders of Louisville, Ky., have yet to acknowledge it with so much as a single commemorative plaque, Steve Hockensmith was born in the Derby City on August 17, 1968. The first two decades of his life passed uneventfully, the only notable highlight being a short stint as an intern at People magazine, an experience that allowed Hockensmith to realize his lifelong dream -- crank calling Crispin Glover.

Despite (or perhaps because of) such lapses in his professionalism, Hockensmith eventually found work as an entertainment journalist: He's covered pop culture and the film industry for The Hollywood Reporter, The Chicago Tribune, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Newsday, Total Movie and other publications. He spent a year as editor of The X-Files Official Magazine (thus explaining his morbid fear of David Duchovny) and more than three years as editor of Cinescape, a nationally distributed bimonthly magazine devoted to movies in which things explode (i.e., science Fiction or action films or anything produced by Jerry Bruckheimer).

In 1999, traumatized by multiple viewings of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Hockensmith set out to write something that would under no circumstances require the use of the phrase "Jar Jar Binks." He settled on mysteries, soon becoming a regular contributor to both Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

His first published mystery story, "Erie's Last Day," won the Short Mystery Fiction Society's Derringer Award and appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2001. More recently, Hockensmith's story "Tricks" (a sequel to "Erie's Last Day") was nominated for a Shamus award, while his story "The Big Road" (yet another "Erie" follow-up) was nominated for a Shamus, a Macavity and a Barry.

Hockensmith is also the creator of mystery-solving cowboys Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer. The Amlingmeyer brothers first appeared in Ellery Queen in the story "Dear Mr. Holmes," which was voted the fifth most-popular story of 2003 by the magazine's readers. The Sherlock Holmes-worshipping drovers have returned to Ellery Queen's pages three times since then. In addition, Hockensmith has completed two novels about their adventures.