About

Archer Mayor is the author of the highly acclaimed Vermont-based series featuring detective Joe Gunther, which the Chicago Tribune describes as “the best police procedurals being written in America.”  He is a past winner of the New England Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Fiction — the first time a writer of crime literature has been so honored. In 2011, Mayor’s 22nd Joe Gunther novel, TAG MAN, earned a place on The New York Times bestseller list for hardback fiction.

Before turning his hand to fiction, Mayor wrote history books, the most notable of which, Southern Timberman: The Legacy of William Buchanan, concerned the lumber and oil business in Louisiana from the 1870s to the 1970s.  This book was published in 1988 and very well received; it was republished as a trade paperback in 2009.

Archer Mayor is currently a death investigator for Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Over the past thirty years, he has also been a detective for the Windham County Sheriff’s Office, a volunteer firefighter/EMT, the publisher of his own backlist, and a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers.

Archer Mayor

Mayor was brought up in the US, Canada and France and had been employed as a scholarly editor, a researcher for TIME-LIFE Books, a political advance-man, a theater photographer, a newspaper writer/editor, a lab technician for Paris-Match Magazine in Paris, France, and a medical illustrator.  In addition to writing novels and occasional articles, Mayor gives talks all around the country, and has been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Young Writers conference in Middlebury, Vermont, and the Colby College seminar on forensic sciences in Waterville, Maine.

Mayor’s critically-acclaimed series of police novels feature Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police department.  The books, which have been appearing about once a year since 1988, have been published in five languages (if you count British), and routinely gather high praise from such sources as The New York TimesWashington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, and others, often appearing on their “ten best” yearly lists.

Whereas many writers base their books only on interviews and scholarly research, Mayor’s novels are loosely based on actual experience in the field. (He always respects privacy.) The result adds a depth, detail and veracity to his characters and their tribulations that has led The New York Times to call him “the boss man on procedures”.

About the Author’s Partner in Crime

Margot Zalkind (Director of Marketing, New Projects and Publicity) has worked in advertising, marketing and design in New York, Boston and Vermont. In New York she worked for an international agency creating print ads and broadcast. In Vermont she ran an advertising agency working on everything from national media planning to putting the bumper stickers on the cars. She writes, designs, and has produced television commercials and documentary films and has won several awards for her work. Margot has taught design and communication at the Cooper Union School for Art and Architecture, the School of Visual Arts in NY and at UVM.