David Edgerley Gates
Storyteller
Photo credit: Justin Sachs
ABOUT
David Edgerley Gates grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's called Santa Fe, New Mexico, home for the past 25 years. Before he began publishing mystery and espionage fiction, he was a movie critic and features writer for the Phoenix, Boston’s alternative weekly.
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The author of the Placido Geist bounty hunter stories, a series of noir Westerns set on the eve of WWI, in a world on the edge of violent and unknowable historical change, his short fiction has been nominated for the Edgar, the Shamus, the Derringer, and the International Thriller Writers award. He is a regular contributor to the mystery magazines ALFRED HITCHCOCK and ELLERY QUEEN, and has appeared four times in the annual Best American Mystery Stories anthology.
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His novel The Bone Harvest, set in the early days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is a sequel to his Cold War spy thriller Black Traffic. He is completing a trilogy of novellas: Viper, about a KGB deception in Berlin, at the time of Baader-Meinhof; The Kingdom of Wolves, which takes place during the Battle of the Bulge; and The Misfortunes of Octavio Medina, a murder mystery set in 1917 New Mexico. His next book is Absolute Zero.
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He served as a Russian linguist in the U.S. Air Force, stationed in West Berlin at the height of the Cold War, targeting Soviet and Warsaw Pact military communications and command structure. It was a divided and occupied city, a geopolitical tripwire. He is a member of both the Berlin Island Association and the 6912th ESG Veterans, consisting of former intelligence personnel who worked in Berlin during an apprehensive time, when the nuclear powers were on hair-trigger alert.
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He currently writes two online columns. The first one alternates weeks on SleuthSayers, a mystery-writing blog where authors talk about the craft of storytelling - setting and voice, character, dumb luck, and coincidence. His second column, The Decoder's Notebook, is baggier and more shaggy dog; a framing device for any number of enthusiasms, history and literature, politics and the personal, spycraft and sleight of hand. It appears twice weekly on Substack.
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“Many of my characters seem to me to be accidental, or at least uncalculated. The old bounty hunter, for example, stepped into ‘The Undiscovered Country’ about fifteen pages in, without any warning. I had no idea he was waiting in the wings."
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​On The Decoder's Notebook
"I wanted to make it more elastic and unruly, to rattle around inside my own
head, and listen for other voices, the madwoman in the mind's attic. A little mystery, some small confidences, the architecture of desire, the thickening of loss."
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