Featured Creator
PRO SE FEATURED CREATOR
Bob Randisi "J.R. Roberts" was born and raised in Brooklyn New York. He was an ardent reader from his earliest years, and decided to try his hand at writing when his older sister’s boyfriend happened to leave his typewriter at the Randisi household.
“I started with a Hardy Boys type story, moved on to a Mission: Impossible story, but finally write a Man From U.N.C.L.E. novel and a private eye novel. At 15 I saw the movie HARPER, with Paul Newman, based on a Ross Macdonald book, and I was hooked on the private eye genre as a reader and a writer. I began writing short stories, mostly P.I.”
Randisi’s love for the P.I. genre eventually led him to the Bouchercon 4 convention in 1973. There he met Ron Goulart, who convinced Randisi to submit his short stories to a mystery magazine. Several months later, at the age of 22, Randisi sold his first short story to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. “It took me 5 years to sell another, but then I sold 5 in succession to Mystery Monthly and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.”
Soon after, Randisi had the opportunity to collaborate with Warren Murphy on one of Murphy’s Destroyer novels, which was published in 1979. He then published his first solo novel, The Disappearance of Penny in 1980, and the renowned Gunsmith series debuted the year after that. Randisi began writing full-time in 1982 at the age of 30 and has written an average of 16 books a month since then, with a new Gunsmith book debuting every month.
“I’m a writer because that’s what I was born to be. There was never another option. It’s the only career I’ve ever had, never having been trained for anything else. What I hoped to achieve—no, what I INTENDED to achieve was to write full time, for a living, and I have done that for going on 34 years. I never had a back-up plan. That would have been an admission that failure was possible.”
In those 34 years, Randisi has written over 650 novels and edited over 30 anthologies, and he was awarded both the Life Achievement Award by the Private Eye Writers of America in 2009 and the President’s Award for Life Achievement by the American Crime Writer’s League in 2013.
Randisi is currently working on Gunsmith #414, the third book of his hit man trilogy, the second book staring his latest P.I. (which will be coming out this month), the 11th book in his Rat Pack series, and an anthology of crime stories set in the 1970s that he co-edited with Gary Philips called 44 Caliber Punk.
Clint Adams, a man whose name was known far and wide in the West. Men trembled and women quivered when he rode into town, for Adams was also the legendary figure known as The Gunsmith! Written by J. R. Roberts, The Gunsmith rides once more as he charges head on into danger and death seeking the stolen body of President Abraham Lincoln in THE LINCOLN RANSOM! Extremists loyal to the now dead Confederacy capture the corpse of Lincoln and the Government goes to The Gunsmith to get it back! With ransom in hand, Clint Adams sets out to discover who was behind the snatching of his friend, President Abraham Lincoln. With his friend, private detective Talbot Roper, The Gunsmith encounters soldiers not yet ready to give up the fight and ready to die for the Confederacy! Two men against a potential army… an army that doesn’t stand a chance when one of those men is The Gunsmith! THE GUNSMITH #400: THE LINCOLN RANSOM by J. R. Roberts. From Pro Se Productions!