David Edgerley Gates
Author and Mystery Novelist
Photo credit: Justin Sachs
ABOUT
David Edgerley Gates grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Hancock, Maine, and has called Santa Fe home for the past 20 years. Before launching his career as a mystery novelist, he honed his storytelling skills as a critic and features writer covering movies 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, a world on the edge of historical change, violent and unknowable, 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 high-stakes mission in 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. Benny Salvador, on the other hand, was more deliberate, because he’s modeled
in part on stories my friend David Salazar told me about his grandfather,
who was a peace officer up in Rio Arriba county for many years.”
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