Episode 2Crime fiction authors Naomi Hirahara and Gary Phillips in conversation with Les Klinger.

Naomi Hirahara is the Edgar Award-winning author of two mystery series set in Southern California. Her Mas Arai series, which features a Hiroshima survivor and Altadena gardener, ended with the publication of Hiroshima Boy in 2018. The first in her Officer Ellie Rush bicycle cop mystery series received the T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award. Her new mystery set in Hawai’i, Iced in Paradise, was released in September 2019. She is currently working on Clark and Division, a historical mystery set in 1944 Chicago which will be published by Soho Crime in 2021. A former editor of The Rafu Shimpo newspaper, she has also published noir short stories, middle-grade fiction and nonfiction history books. She born in Pasadena and currently lives there today.

Leslie S. Klinger is considered to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of crime writing. Klinger’s work has received numerous awards and nominations, including the Edgar® for Best Critical-Biographical Book in 2005 for The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories and the Edgar for Best Critical-Biographical Book in 2019 for Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s, and he is the editor of the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, and the Library of Congress.

Gary Phillips drew on his years as a community organizer to write Violent Spring, the first mystery novel set in the aftermath of the ’92 Rodney King riots. Since then he has written various other novels, novellas, short stories, comics, edited anthologies such as the Anthony award-winning the Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir, and was a staff writer on Snowfall, an FX show about crack and the CIA in 1980s South Central where he grew up. Currently he has a short story in Three Room Press’ anthology The Faking of the President: Nineteen Stories of White House Noir, “Y2 Effin’ K.”