Memorials Authors

Charlotte MacLeod, born in New Brunswick, Canada, and a naturalized U.S. citizen, is the multi-award-winning author of over thirty acclaimed novels. Her series featuring detective Professor Peter Shandy, America’s homegrown Hercule Poirot, delivers “generous dollops of… warmth, wit, and whimsy” (San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle). But fully a dozen novels star her popular husband-and-wife team of Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn. And her native Canada provides a backdrop for the amusing Grub-and-Stakers cozies written under the pseudonym Alisa Craig. A cofounder and past president of the American Crime Writers League, she has also edited the best-selling anthologies Mistletoe Mysteries and Christmas Stalkings.

Fritz Leiber is considered one of science fiction’s legends. The author of a remarkable number of stories and novels, many of which were made into films. He is best known as the creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series, and has won numerous awards including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died in 1992.

Richard Sapir wrote five novels: Bressio (1975), The Far Arena (1978), The Body (1983), Spies (1984), and Quest (1987), a modern day search for the Holy Grail.

Warren Murphy books and stories have sold fifty million copies worldwide and won a dozen national awards. He has created a number of book series, including the Trace series and the long-running satiric adventure, The Destroyer the basis for the film Remo Williams-The Adventure Begins. His film credits include, Lethal Weapon 2, Murphy’s Law, and The Eiger Sanction.

One of America’s greatest Western storytellers, Wayne D. Overholser was born September 4, 1906 in Pomeroy, Washington and died August 27, 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Overholser won the 1953 First Spur Award for best novel for Lawman using the pseudonym Lee Leighton. In 1955 he won the 1954 (second) Spur Award for The Violent Land. He also used the pseudonyms John S. Daniels, Dan J. Stevens and Joseph Wayne.

Roger Zelazny – HUGO & NEBULA AWARD-WINNING author
Roger burst onto the SF scene in the early 1960s with a series of dazzling and groundbreaking short stories. He won his first of six Hugo Awards for Lord of Light, and soon after produced the first book of his enormously popular Amber series, Nine Princes in Amber. In addition to his Hugos, he went on to win three Nebula Awards over the course of a long and distinguished career. He died on June 14, 1995.

MacKinlay Kantor was born in Webster City, Iowa, in 1904. He began to write seriously at sixteen, became a newspaper reporter at seventeen, and published his first book at twenty-three. Over the next half-century, he went on to produce more than forty works including novels, short story collections, novels in verse, novellas, histories and children’s books. His best-selling historical novel, Andersonville, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.

Upon retirement as a Civil Engineer, he began writing a historical novel about four generations of a mixed Cherokee family that migrates from Tennessee to New Mexico Territory in the nineteenth century. The results of this work were four books. The first book is Wild Ran the Rivers, which in 2015 won two Western Writers of America Spurs for best historical novel and best first novel.

Pauline Griffin (1947 – 2020) was born with an Irish love of storytelling. By combining that with her passion for research, she broke onto the science fiction scene in 1986 with the first of the Star Commandos series and later co-wrote three novels with Andre Norton.

Jerry Ahern (Axel Kilgore) is a science fiction and action author best known for his post-apocalyptic survivalist series The Survivalist. These pulp novels have sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide.