Scott Phillips is the author of eight novels and a collection of short stories. His first novel, the Ice Harvest, won the California Book Award silver medal for Best First Fiction, and was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, for the John Creasey and the Maccallan Daggers, for the Hammett Prize, and for the Anthony Award. It was made into a movie in 2006 starring John Cusack, , Connie Nielsen, Billy Bob Thornton and Oliver Platt, directed by Harold Ramis and adapted by Richard Russo and Robert Benton. He has wrought havoc at such staid publishing houses as Ballantine/Random House, Picador (UK), Gallimard, Concord Free Press, Counterpoint Press, les éditions la Branche and others. His current home is with the wonderful people at Soho Press.
Born in Wichita, Kansas, he attended Wichita State University as a French Lit major, and also studied creative writing under James Lee Burke, whose English Comp 101 class he had randomly selected as a freshman. In Wichita he worked as a bookstore and record store clerk, photographic equipment salesman, portrait photographer, real estate photographer, and translator. Over the years in France he worked as a translator/interpreter, French teacher, residential advisor, tour guide, cafeteria manager and television writer. In California he made the mistake of getting involved with the screenwriting trade. Most of his work was unproduced or uncredited, but if you made a habit of watching Cinemax in the dead of night back in the ’90s––right about 2 or 3 AM, when the womens’ prison movie ended––you may have seen his name on Crosscut (1996)https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115981/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0, co-written with David Masiel and director Paul Raimondi. He now lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter.
About the masthead photo—This is a picture I took in Wichita about 1985. As one of the only 24-hr. places in town in the 1950s and 1960s, the Fairland Cafe was a natural hangout for small-time hoods, newspapermen, and drunks of all persuasions, and I’m sure most of the characters in my first two books were on a first-name basis with the waitstaff. —Scott