Craig McDonald is a novelist/journalist and the author of the Hector Lassiter series, the Chris Lyon Series, the novel El Gavilan, and two collections of interviews with fiction writers, Art in the Blood and Rogue Males. He also edited the anthology, Borderland Noir. Born in Columbus, Ohio, he grew up in Grove City, Ohio, a fictionalized version of which serves as the setting for his 2011 work of fiction, El Gavilan. McDonald’s debut novel, Head Games, was nominated for the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award and the Gumshoe Award in the U.S. for best first novel, as well as the 2011 Sélection du prix polar Saint-Maur en Poche in France.
Writing
In 2006, Craig McDonald published a collection of interviews with crime and thriller writers, Art In the Blood, featuring Q&A-style conversations with genre novelists discussing the craft of writing. A sequel interview collection, Rogue Males, followed in 2009, from Bleak House Books. That collection was a finalist for a Macavity Award for nonfiction. In 2007, McDonald published his debut novel, Head Games. The novel received American and European awards attention, including Edgar Award and Anthony Award nominations for Best First Novel by an American Author in 2008. Head Games features fictional novelist/screenwriter Hector Lassiter, a character McDonald introduced in a 2005 short story that was selected for an online Mississippi Review anthology of “High Pulp.” The novel launched a series of further books featuring the Lassiter character. The Lassiter novels have been translated into German, Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Mongolian and Korean, among other languages. A graphic novel adaptation of Head Games scripted by McDonald was announced for release in fall, 2017 by First Second Books.
Writing style/major themes
McDonald's Lassiter series uses historical crimes and personages, including several appearances by Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles. The voice and style of the Lassiter novels have drawn comparisons to James Crumley and James Ellroy, both of whom McDonald interviewed as a journalist and whom he has confirmed in interviews and essays as significant influences. McDonald's works have also been compared to those of James Carlos Blake and Jack Kerouac, among others. In 2010, crime fiction critic and scholar Woody Haut described McDonald as "one of the few writers who can move comfortably within a post-Ellroy framework of crime fiction." In her study, The Noir Thriller, in a chapter examining "Literary Noir in the Twenty-First Century," Lee Horsley identified McDonald as one of several "neo-noir" authors who embody "a recurrent motif of men in pursuit of a lost, treacherously illusive notion of masculinity …" Picking up a similar theme, Woody Haut, critiquing McDonald's second-published novel, Toros & Torsos, commented, " critiques the effect of masculine values on the culture, and examines the relationship between reality and fiction." Hector Lassiter, known to readers and critics as the man who writes what he lives and lives what he writes, eventually comes to use himself as a character in his own novels as the series unfolds.
Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations about the Writing Life : A follow-up to the 2006 Art in the Blood, Rogue Males is a collection of sixteen interviews with male authors and songwriters. Rogue Males includes conversations with Elmore Leonard and James Crumley, James Sallis, Daniel Woodrell, James Ellroy, Ken Bruen, Lee Child and Randy Wayne White. The book was a Finalist for a 2010 Macavity Award for “Best Mystery Nonfiction” category.
Other
Borderland Noir, Editor : Featured short stories and essays by a range of writers on U.S. and Mexico border tensions, including Tom Russell, Ken Bruen, James Sallis, Manuel Ramos and Martín Solares.
El Gavilan : Received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. The standalone novel is set in New Austin, Ohio—a fictionalized version of Grove City, Ohio—and deals with the impact of illegal immigration from Mexico into the United States on the smalltown Midwest. The novel also ties into the Chris Lyon series, featuring Chris' cousin, Tell.
