Richard Brewer and Gary Phillips

A California native Richard J. Brewer has been a lover of words and reading from the moment he figured out that if you put words together they would form a sentence and enough sentences would, at some point, tell a story. After that, he was hooked for life. Over the years he worked as a bookseller and bookstore manager for B. Dalton Bookseller, Waldenbooks, the wonderful Mysterious Bookshop and its later incarnation The Mystery Bookstore. In addition to selling peoples stories, he has become a storyteller in his own right, as both an actor and a writer. As an actor he’s been seen in numerous plays and on such TV shows as HOUSE, M.D., 24 and DAYBREAK, as well as narrating several audiobooks. In the Hollywood arena he has worked as a creative executive/story editor/script analyst for Interscope Communications, The Hallmark Hall of Fame, Signboard Hills Productions, NBC TV and Silver Pictures helping to develop and evaluate a wide variety of scripts for both television and feature films. He is the co-creator, co-editor and story contributor to the critically acclaimed Bruce Springsteen inspired anthology, MEETING ACROSS THE RIVER (Bloomsbury USA) and his latest short story, LAST TO DIE, will be published in another Springsteen inspired anthology, TROUBLE IN THE HEARTLAND (Gutter Books), in 2014, and was noted as one of the Distinguished Mystery Stories of the year in The Best American Mystery Stories 2015.

Weaned on the images of Kirby and Steranko in comic books, and Hammett and Himes in prose, Gary Phillips also draws on his experiences ranging from community organizer, teaching incarcerated youth, to delivering dog cages in writing his tales of chicanery and malfeasance. He co-edited and contributed to the acclaimed Black Pulp, has short stories in the upcoming Asian Pulp and Jewish Noir, and wrote Big Water, a graphic novel about the fight for that most precious of resources. A reviewer said of his novella The Extractors, about a one percenter who steals from the one percent -- "Gary never disappoints. Great plots and complex and interesting characters, McBleak being one of them."