Smith, Michael Marshall 1965- (Michael Marshall, Michael Paul Marshall Smith)

PERSONAL:

Born May 3, 1965, in Knutsford, Cheshire, England; son of David M. (a professor) and Margaret Smith; married Paula Grainger; children: a son. Education: King's College, M.A.; studied philosophy, social, and political science at Cambridge University. Hobbies and other interests: Music, art and design, foreign travel, cats.

ADDRESSES:

Home—North London, England. Agent—Ralph M. Vicinanza, 111 8th St., Ste. 1501, New York, NY 10011; Nick Marston or Robert Bookman, Curtis Brown Group Ltd., Haymarket House, 28/29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4SP, England. E-mail—contact@michaelmarshallsmith.com.

CAREER:

Writer. Comedy writer and performer, BBC Radio, including And Now in Colour, BBC Radio 4, two series, and two Christmas specials; freelance short-story writer and novelist; Smith & Jones Film Production, partner. Cambridge Footlights, member, 1984-87, member of committee, 1987, performer/writer on national tour, 1987, and tour of United States, 1988.

MEMBER:

Soho House, Groucho.

AWARDS, HONORS:

British Fantasy Award, Icarus Award for Best Newcomer, 1990, for "The Man Who Drew Cats," 1991, for short story "The Dark Land," 1992, 1995, and 1996, for "More Tomorrow"; August Derleth Award, 1995, and Philip K. Dick Award, 2000, both for Only Forward; International Horror Guild Award, 2003, for More Tomorrow & Other Stories.

WRITINGS:

Only Forward (novel), HarperCollins (London, England), 1994, Subterranean (Burton, MI), 2001.

Spares (novel), Bantam (New York, NY), 1997.

One of Us (novel), Bantam Books (New York, NY), 1998.

The Vaccinator (bound with Andy Warhol's Dracula by Kim Newman), Millennium (London, England), 2000.

Also author of short story collections, including Cat Stories; What You Make It, Harper Collins, 1999, and More Tomorrow & Other Stories, Earthling Publications, 2003; the novella The Servants, Earthling Publications, August 2007; and introductions to science fiction classics. Author of unpublished screenplays, including Killgame, 1996, Celestial Dogs (an adaptation of the novel by Jay Russell), 1997, Nighthunter (an adaptation of the first novel in Robert Faulcon's "Nighthunter" series), 1997, Where the Children Went, 1998, and Solomon Kane (an adaptation of the short story series by Robert E. Howard), 1998-99; and Modesty Blaise—A Taste for Death. Contributor of short stories to British and American anthologies, including Dark Voices 2, Pan, 1990; Best New Horror 2, Raven, 1991, Best New Horror 6, 1995; Darklands, Edgerton Press, 1991; Giant Book of Terror, Magpie, 1994; The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: The Seventh Annual Collection, St. Martin's Press, 1994, Ninth Annual Collection, 1996, Twelfth Annual Collection, 1999, and Thirteen's Annual Collection, 2000; Dark Terrors, Gollancz, 1995, Dark Terrors 2, 1996, Dark Terrors 3, 1997, Dark Terrors 4, 1998, Dark Terrors 5, 2000; and Dark Terrors 6, edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton, Gollancz, 2002; Cemetery Dance, October Dreams, 2001; Embrace the Mutation, Subterranean Press, 2002; What Walks Alone, edited by Suzanne Donahue, Succubus Press, 2002; The Mammoth Book of Vampires, edited by Stephen Jones, Carroll & Graf, 2004; Summer Chills, edited by Stephen Jones, Carroll & Graf, 2007. Contributor of stories to periodicals, including Omni, Peeping Tom, and Chills.

Author's works have been published in numerous foreign languages, including French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Hebrew, German, and Japanese.

CRIME NOVELS AS MICHAEL MARSHALL

The Straw Men, Jove (New York, NY), 2002.

The Upright Men, Jove Books (New York, NY), 2004.

The Lonely Dead, HarperCollins (London, England), 2004.

Blood of Angels, Jove Books (New York, NY), 2005.

The Intruders, William Morrow (New York, NY), 2007.

ADAPTATIONS:

Spares has been optioned by Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks SKG for film production; One of Us has been optioned by Warner Bros. Books have been adapted for audio, including Blood of Angels, HarperCollins.

SIDELIGHTS:

British author Michael Marshall Smith began his writing career as an author of science fiction and thriller short stories; he won the British Fantasy Award for his first published piece, "The Man Who Drew Cats," in 1991. Three years later, he published his first novel-length work, Only Forward, and only a few years after that he made news in the publishing industry when he signed a two-book, six-figure contract that resulted in the release of his 1997 work, Spares. The novel also generated interest in the film industry and has been optioned for more than six figures to the film company Dreamworks SKG.

Smith's first novel, Only Forward, is a futuristic work that features Stark, a tough loner who is hired to find and retrieve a kidnap victim in his home metropolis. Just as Smith portrays Stark's neighborhood as a unique blend of racial, social, and cultural elements, the author also mixes a number of fiction genres in the book, utilizing characteristics of science fiction, thriller, adventure, and even sword and sorcery. Locus contributor Faren Miller maintained that Only Forward "is the work of an inventive newcomer with a good grasp on human psychology even when Stark's adventures spiral into dark surrealism."

Spares, Smith's second book, imagines a scenario in which wealthy individuals have themselves cloned in order to have a ready supply of spare body parts. In the novel, one such operation is run at a rural estate, where the clones, also known as "spares," are kept in secret. Upon discovering the spare-parts farm, the protagonist, a former cop named Jack Randall, frees several of the clones, only to have them abducted when he brings them to the city of New Richmond. A Kirkus Reviews contributor praised the novel, citing its "originality … and a wicked flow of philosophic twists." Writing in the Library Journal, Molly Gorman lauded the book as "visually fascinating."

"A reader could hardly pray for a more amusing adrenaline rush" than One of Us, People contributor J.D. Reed wrote of Smith's third, similarly futuristic mystery novel. By 2017, the premise of the story goes, it has become possible for people's dreams, thoughts, and memories to be transferred between people using machines. The hero of the novel, Hap Thompson, had been working as a "REMtemp"—someone who, for a price, will have your nightmares for you—until he decides to go for the bigger money in the illegal field of memory disposal. When he receives the memory of an unsolved murder, he must evade what seems like a conspiracy to frame him for it while he searches for the memory's rightful owner. "Smith's ear for the nuances of classic hard-boiled narrative is surpassed only by his skill at exceeding expectations for the conventional mystery/suspense tale," wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.

Smith is also the author of The Straw Men, which was released under the name Michael Marshall. At first, this was merely to avoid confusion with another book, Straw Men, by Martin J. Smith, but Smith now sees some benefits to having two literary identities. As he explained on his home page: "Some readers—and the people in the bookstores responsible for putting the books on the shelves—are thrown by apparent changes in genre. The establishment of the two names will enable me to write what I want without fear of confusing people. Michael Marshall will write the books that are modern-day, and Michael Marshall Smith will write the ‘more out there’ fiction." The Straw Men features Ward Hopkins, who discovers, after the death of his parents, that they were not who he thought they were. What ensues is a complicated plot involving a serial killer and "strange happenings," according to Independent Sunday writer Mark Timlin, who called the book "brilliantly plotted, stunningly written."

Another Michael Marshall crime novel, The Intruders, was published in 2007. The novel features Jack Whalen, who was an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department before writing a book in which he featured Los Angeles crime scenes. Now living in a small town near Seattle and working on another book, Jack gets a call from Gary Fisher, a Chicago lawyer and old acquaintance who recalled that Jack was friendly toward him when a girl he spurned committed suicide. Gary wants Jack to check out a double murder in Seattle. The victims are the wife and son of a client named Bill Anderson. In the meantime, Jack suspects that something is going on with his wife, Amy, an advertising executive who increasingly is not where she says she will be when Jack checks up on her. Jack is also having mysterious spells and visions similar to a nine-year-old girl who has gone missing. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that the author "outdoes his own high standards with this potent blend of suspense, paranoia and just plain creepiness." Lisa O'Hara, writing in the Library Journal, noted: "Readers will find it very hard to put down this well-written and somewhat spooky novel."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 1997, Thomas Gaughan, review of Spares, p. 1414.

Books, summer, 1998, review of One of Us, p. R5.

Independent Sunday (London, England), July 7, 2002, Mark Timlin, review of The Straw Men, p. 16.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1997, review of Spares; June 15, 1998, review of One of Us, p. 839; June 1, 2007, review of The Intruders.

Kliatt Young Adult Paperback Book Guide, November, 1999, review of One of Us, p. 28.

Library Journal, February, 1997, Molly Gorman, review of Spares; July 1, 2007, Lisa O'Hara, review of The Intruders, p. 81.

Locus, February, 1995, Faren Miller, review of Only Forward, p. 23.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January, 1998, review of Spares, p. 34.

New Scientist, May 9, 1998, review of One of Us, p. 52; August 8, 1998, review of One of Us, p. 46.

People, September 1, 1997, J.D. Reed, review of Spares, p. 35; September 7, 1998, J.D. Reed, review of One of Us, p. 46.

Publishers Weekly, June 24, 1996, Paul Nathan, "Spare Parts," p. 24; March 3, 1997, p. 63; October 27, 1997, Paul Nathan, "Dark Days Ahead," p. 25; June 29, 1998, review of One of Us, p. 37; November 26, 2001, review of Only Forward, p. 44; June 4, 2007, review of The Intruders, p. 28; June 18, 2007, Patrick Millikin, "PW Talks with Michael Marshall; The Unknowability of Other People: In British Author Michael Marshall's Latest Thriller, The Intruders, Jack Whalen, an Ex-LAPD Cop, Is Pursuing a New Career as a Writer in Oregon When Some Strange Happenings Start to Undermine His Pursuit of the American Dream," p. 32.

Voice of Youth Advocates, December, 1998, review of Spares, pp. 333-334.