Author to surround library with air of mystery Friday
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Marks was born in Georgetown, Ohio, the boyhood home of Ulysses S. Grant. Marks began his life-long love affair with the mystery early on when he was introduced to the works of one of the giants of the genre, Agatha Christie, at the age of 12. He started out with her short story collection, “The Underdog and Other Stories,” but finished all her books by the age of 16, when he widened his interest by becoming a collector of mystery first editions as well as an avid reader.
He launched his writing career, like many others, by working on high school and college newspapers, and then began to freelance, specializing to some extent on author profiles, eventually chronicling the short, but interesting, life of mystery writer Craig Rice in a book called “Who Was That Lady,” published in April 2001.
That success led him to try mystery fiction. “The Ambush of My Name” is Marks’ first mystery novel, though he has several mystery anthologies on the market and a new book titled “A Good Soldier.” He is an award-winning author with a Barnes and Noble Prize and a Maxwell Award nomination.
“The Ambush of My Name” features a fictional account of General Ulysses S. Grant, in a rather unorthodox bit of casting, in the unlikely role of a detective trying to solve a murder in his hometown of Georgetown. Marks makes use of all the stories he heard about Grant during his youth in Georgetown and from his family after they moved away, along with research on the locale and political climate at that time in history.