Ferrigno, Robert 1948(?)-

PERSONAL:

Surname is pronounced "fur-reen-yo;" born c. 1948, in FL; married; wife's name Jody; children: Jake, Dani. Education: Holds B.A. degree; Bowling Green State University, M.F.A., 1971.

ADDRESSES:

Home and office—P.O. Box 934, Kirkland, WA 98083. Agent—Sandra Dijkstra, 1155 Camino del Mar, No. 515, Del Mar, CA 92014. E-mail—rcferrigno@comcast.net.

CAREER:

Writer, journalist, educator, and professional gambler. Instructor in English and literature in Seattle, WA, 1971-73; feature writer for Orange County Register, until 1988; instructor in journalism at California State University, Fullerton. Spent five years as a professional poker player.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Shamus Award nomination, Best P.I. Novel, Private Eye Writers of America, 2005, for The Wake-Up.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Horse Latitudes, Morrow (New York, NY), 1990.

The Cheshire Moon, Morrow (New York, NY), 1993.

Dead Man's Dance, Putnam (New York, NY), 1995.

Dead Silent, Putnam (New York, NY), 1996.

Heartbreaker, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1999.

Flinch, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2001.

Scavenger Hunt, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2003.

The Wake Up, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2004.

Prayers for the Assassin, Scribner (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including California and Women's Sports and Fitness.

The Rocket (a punk rock magazine), founder.

ADAPTATIONS:

All of Ferrigno's novels are under option by Hollywood studios.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author, educator, and journalist Robert Ferrigno drew critical attention with the 1990 publication of his first novel, The Horse Latitudes. The author began the book after his wife survived a difficult pregnancy and gave birth to their son, Jake. "Even though they both pulled out of it, and they're both fine, it gave me a very powerful sense that life is fleeting," Ferrigno told Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times. "It made me realize I had been talking and thinking about writing a book for a long time, but should probably not count on having the rest of my life to finish it." Ferrigno started The Horse Latitudes while working as a feature writer for the Orange County Register, rising at four each morning to write. But after about eighteen months, his heavy schedule began to take its toll, and with his wife's encouragement, Ferrigno quit his job at the newspaper to work on his novel full time.

Ferrigno's gamble proved to be a profitable one, as William Morrow and Company bought the rights to his unfinished novel for 150,000 dollars in 1988. Set in southern California, The Horse Latitudes concerns Danny DiMedici, a former marijuana dealer who lost his taste for the outlaw life after killing a man. DiMedici's amoral wife Lauren, a corporate motivational psychologist, left him after he reformed, explaining that "God hates a coward." As the novel opens, DiMedici is attempting to come to terms with his recent divorce: "There were nights when Danny missed Lauren so bad that he wanted to take a fat man and throw him through a plate-glass window." He is soon visited by the police, who inform him that Lauren has disappeared and that her current lover, a scientist who has discovered a way to use fetal tissue to preserve youth, has been murdered at her beach house. A suspect in the killing, DiMedici searches for Lauren and is pursued himself by a pair of police officers and several other eccentric characters.

Some reviewers of The Horse Latitudes compared Ferrigno to Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler. Chicago Tribune Books contributor Gary Dretzka commented that "the chases, kidnappings, beatings, blackmail and extortion attempts that result after this crazy California salad is tossed are imaginatively rendered and make for a quick, chilling, often humorous read." Though he found The Horse Latitudes to be unoriginal, Michael Dirda acknowledged in the Washington Post that "Ferrigno does possess some genuine storytelling skills. He can make you afraid, he can make you laugh … and he can make you keep turning his pages." Dirda also observed that The Horse Latitudes reads like a film script, "which may be fine if you were expecting a movie, but not so good if you were hoping for a novel." Time contributor Margaret Carlson was more enthusiastic, calling The Horse Latitudes "a work of noir literature that is the most memorable fiction debut of the season. With a magic all his own, [Ferrigno] has written an illuminating novel that never fails to entertain but also, surprisingly, makes us feel."

The seamy underworld Ferrigno depicts in The Horse Latitudes is similar to one the author experienced firsthand. Dissatisfied with the job of teaching English and literature he had landed after graduate school, Ferrigno quit and spent the next six years playing poker for a living. He resided in a high-crime area of downtown Seattle, where one of his neighbors was a heroin dealer. Ferrigno turned to writing after taking a freelance assignment for an alternative weekly newspaper. "There is an intensity in coming home at four in the morning and throwing a couple of thousand dollars on your bed and throwing it in the air [and saying], I won all of it!," he told McLellan. "But that wasn't even close to getting 10 dollars for an article with your name on it."

Ferrigno followed The Horse Latitudes with The Cheshire Moon, published in 1993. In this novel a reporter, Quinn, and his photographer sidekick, Jen Takamura, pursue the murderer of Quinn's best friend, Andy. Andy had witnessed a killing, and the murderer found it necessary to dispose of Andy as well, making his death appear a suicide. The killer is Emory Roy Liston, a "crazed rhinoceros of a former pro football player," according to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times. Liston, who attends night school, polishes his football trophies regularly, and is a frequent cable shopping-channel customer, "provides the spice" of the novel, wrote Michael Anderson in the New York Times Book Review. "Despite the conventionality of its plot, Mr. Ferrigno develops the qualities he showed off with such promise in his first novel," commented Lehmann-Haupt, who particularly noted Ferrigno's "black wit embellished with images of violence." The reviewer concluded that The Cheshire Moon is "a lot of fun to read, and Mr. Ferrigno certainly knows how to lay contrasting colors on his canvas."

Ferrigno continued to set his novels in rich-for-exploitation southern California. His 1995 novel, Dead Man's Dance, features investigative reporter Quinn attempting to uncover the brutal murder of his southern California judge stepfather and untangling a massive web of deceit in the process. "A slick, sleek story that races to a slam-bang ending" is how Booklist contributor Emily Melton described it. Dead Silent has at its lurid core the decadent world of the music business as independent music producer Nick Carbonne investigates how the naked, dead bodies of his wife and best friend ended up in his hot tub. As Joe Gores commented in the San Francisco Chronicle, "set in the glitter and grit of the southern California dreamtime, Dead Silent probes, with almost despairing violence, lives of such amorality that few of us can imagine them."

A Publisher Weekly contributor called Ferrigno's Heartbreaker "his best novel in years…. a cinematic thriller … populated by mean drug dealers, beautiful surfers, ‘trust fund babies,’ ‘thugs on commission’ and murderers for hire." Val Duran, an ex-undercover cop escaping his past, leaves Miami for a quiet life as a stuntman in Los Angeles only to find himself enmeshed in the psychodrama of his girlfriend's scheming family while attempting to avoid the vengeful drug dealer who killed his partner.

Featured in Ferrigno's next two thrillers is tabloid journalist Jimmy Gage. In Flinch, this cool and engaging antihero "stumbles on evidence which may link his absurdly competitive brother to a serial killer," explained Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly reviewer praised Flinch for its "expansive canvas, spot-on characterizations, excellent prose and incisive dialogue."

Gage reappears in Scavenger Hunt, Ferrigno's seventh novel. In this thriller, Gage is enlisted to write an article about the tell-all script of Hollywood director Garrett Walsh, recently released from prison for a murder he was falsely accused of committing. Soon Walsh is dead and Gage risks his life against a cast of crooked and powerful Hollywood characters in order to set the record straight about Walsh's innocence. J. Kingston Pierce of January Magazine reflected that Ferrigno's "tale of ambition and guilt is driven by what for him is particularly dense, circuitous plotting, buttressed by clever dialogue."

The Wake Up is "another hugely entertaining thriller from the underappreciated Ferrigno," remarked Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist. In the wake of a botched sting operation that left many dead, special operations agent Frank Thorpe has been fired by his longtime employer, a clandestine group that takes on cases the U.S. government could not or would not handle itself. Stunned by his current situation, depressed and unemployed, Thorpe spends most of his time aimlessly wandering around Los Angeles. During an interlude at the airport, Thorpe sees an arrogant businessman slap a ten-year-old Mexican vendor. His sense of justice outraged, he determines to track down the man and give him a wake-up, teaching him a valuable lesson in civility. Calling on some contacts, Thorpe identifies the man as Douglas Meacham, a dealer in antique art. Thorpe concocts a scheme to call into question the authenticity of a Mayan artifact recently sold by Meacham, which quickly escalates into a chaotic bloodbath that he has no hope of controlling. In the book, "characters are believable, the dialogue crackles, and the plot moves briskly. The author wastes not one word as he smoothly snaps the plot into place," commented Oline H. Cogdill in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Ferrigno takes a step away from his usual hardboiled adventures to tell a futuristic story of terrorism and revenge in Prayers for the Assassin. In the year 2040, civil war has devastated the United States and fractured the country into two antagonistic sections, the Islamic States of America, occupying the northern territories, and the Bible Belt, located in the southern areas. In the course of the story, historian and researcher Sarah Dougin, a young, moderate Muslim, discovers that the nuclear attacks that leveled Washington, DC, and New York were not the doing of Israel, as has been popularly believed. Instead, the attacks were orchestrated by a fanatical, remorseless Islamic billionaire intent on attacking the Christian South. Intent on confirming her findings, Sarah goes underground, accompanied by her ex-lover, Muslim fighter Rakkim Epps. Along the way, they risk constant discovery and must dodge the lethal intentions of a hired assassin named Darwin. Ferrigno "deserves props for his imaginative portrayal of a futuristic America, which is often highlighted through startling details," observed Wilkinson in another Booklist review.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 65, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991, pp. 47-50.

Ferrigno, Robert, The Horse Latitudes, Morrow (New York, NY), 1990.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 1995, Emily Melton, review of Dead Man's Dance, p. 1452; October 15, 2001, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Flinch, p. 386; May 1, 2002; August, 2004, Joanne Wilkinson, review of The Wake-Up, p. 1905; December 1, 2005, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Prayers for the Assassin, p. 6.

Guardian (London, England), March 19, 2006, James Flint, "Jihad Cola," review of Prayers for the Assassin.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2001, review of Flinch, p. 1166; July 1, 2004, review of The Wake-Up, p. 593; November 1, 2005, review of Prayers for the Assassin, p. 1157.

Library Journal, May 1, 1995, Stacie Browne Chandler, review of Dead Man's Dance, p. 130; October 1, 2001, Emily Doro, review of Flinch, p. 140; December, 2002, Susan Clifford Braun, review of Scavenger Hunt, p. 177; July, 2004, Bob Lunn, review of The Wake-Up, p. 69; August 1, 2005, Rex E. Klett, "2005 Shamus Award Nominees," p. 59.

Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1990, Dennis McLellan, "Author Gambles, Hits the Jackpot," profile of Robert Ferrigno, p. E1.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 13, 2001, Michael Harris, review of Flinch, p. E1.

New Yorker, February 22, 1993, review of The Cheshire Moon, p. 183.

New York Times, March 19, 1990, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Horse Latitudes, p. C20; February 25, 1993, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Cheshire Moon, p. B2.

New York Times Book Review, February 7, 1993, Michael P. Anderson, review of The Cheshire Moon, p. 22; July 15, 1995, Marilyn Stasio, review of Dead Man's Dance, p. 16; September 8, 1996, Marilyn Stasio, review of Dead Silent, p. 26.

Publishers Weekly, January 5, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, review of The Horse Latitudes, p. 62; August 2, 1993, review of Cheshire Moon, p. 30; June 17, 1996, review of Dead Silent, p. 45; March 15, 1999, review of Heartbreaker, p. 44; August 13, 2001, review of Flinch, p. 282; December 16, 2002, review of Scavenger Hunt, p. 47; November 14, 2005, review of Prayers for the Assassin, p. 42.

San Francisco Chronicle, August 27, 1996, Joe Gores, review of Dead Silent, p. B3.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Oline H. Cogdill, "The Best of Villains," review of The Wake-Up.

Time, March 26, 1990, Margaret Carlson, review of The Horse Latitudes, p. 78; March 15, 1993, review of The Cheshire Moon, p. 75.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 11, 1990, Gary Dretzka, review of The Horse Latitudes, p. 6.

Village Voice, April 3, 1990, review of The Horse Latitudes, p. 76.

Wall Street Journal, March 9, 1990, Tom Nolan, review of The Horse Latitudes, p. A11.

Washington Post, March 16, 1990, Michael Dirda, "Fast Ride of Familiar Turf," review of The Horse Latitudes, p. B3; February 18, 1993, Tom Nolan, review of The Cheshire Moon, p. A16.

ONLINE

January Magazine,http://www.januarymagazine.com/ (February 15, 2003), J. Kingston Pierce, review of Scavenger Hunt; (January 25, 2007), J. Kingston Pierce, interview with Robert Ferrigno.

Robert Ferrigno Home Page,http://www.robertferrigno.com (January 2, 2007).