VJ Books Features Ace Atkins!

By the time he had turned 30, Ace had published two critically acclaimed crime novels, Crossroad Blues and Leavin’ Trunk Blues with St. Martin’s Press. At 34, he added two more books, Dark End of the Street and Dirty South, published by William Morrow, to complete his highly popular Nick Travers’ stories.

 

Before turning to writing full time, Atkins worked as a crime reporter in the newsroom of The Tampa Tribune for several years. Here he earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination and Livingston Award nomination for his seven-part series about an unsolved murder of a Tampa socialite in 1956, “Tampa Confidential,” which had the whole city buzzing for weeks. 
 

The core of those stories provide the basis for his forthcoming epic, White Shadow. The novel is the culmination of more than five years of research that focused on sealed court and police records, countless interviews with players of that period, and even an extended research trip to Havana to complete the final leg of a story that started in 1955.

 

The lyrical prose and classic noir style of the young Alabama native have earned him accolades from journalism’s elite and fellow authors. The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Interview, Entertainment Weekly, and James W. Hall, Robert B. Parker an Kinky Friedman all glowed praise for his first novel, published when Atkins was just 28 years old. “If Raymond Chandler came from the South,” Friedman said, “his name would be Ace Atkins.” Atkins, now 35, lives on a century-old farm outside Oxford, MS, with his wife and their faithful mutt, Elvis who reigns over eight members of the canine Memphis Mafia.