DOMENIC STANSBERRY

Crime novelist, editor and essayist known for his innovative noir fiction that skirts the edges of the genre while exploring the intricacies of criminal consciousness.  The Lizard, forthcoming in 2025, is the latest of his award-winning novels.  His other recent books include The White Devil, a sultry, decadent thriller that received the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers. An earlier novel, The Confession,  received the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and is regarded as a neo-noir classic.  Other work includes the North Beach Mystery Series—featuring investigator Dante Mancuso — which received wide praise for its portrayal of the ethnic and political subcultures of San Francisco. Books from that series include The Ancient Rain, named several years after its original publication as one of the best crime novels of the decade by Booklist. Stansberry’s novels have been translated into numerous languages, with editions in Japanese, Italian, French, Spanish and Polish among others. He lives with his wife, poet Gillian Conoley, and their daughter, Gillis, in a small town north of San Francisco.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

 Domenic Stansberry was born in Washington, DC, in 1952, and raised in California: the eldest of six children, son of Chadwick Leroy Stansberry, an aerospace engineer, and Avincenza Rose Musolino, daughter of Italian immigrants. The family migrated to California in 1966. Stansberry attended UC Santa Cruz for two years, before heading north to Portland, Oregon, then eventually receiving a graduate degree from the University of Massachusetts.

Early in his career, Stansberry worked as an itinerant reporter, writing for a number of newspapers, large and small, as well as for UPI, for whom he covered sports and politics.  It was at this time he wrote his first novel, The Spoiler, published in 1987 and nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for its portrayal of a reporter covering a minor league baseball team in a Massachusetts mill town plagued by arson.

In 1989, after stints in New Orleans and Spokane, Stansberry returned to California, where he worked in the multimedia industry, writing for documentary film, video games, and avatar-based computer training. He also worked for several years as a ghostwriter and communications specialist.

A collection of his early stories, Exit Paradise, appeared in 1992.

PUBLISHING HISTORY

After The Spoiler, it was ten years before the publication of his next crime novel, The Last Days of Il Duce, (1997) told from the point of view of Niccolo Jones, an ex-lawyer obsessed with his brother’s wife.  The  book was nominated for  both an Edgar Award and the Hammett Prize. Stansberry followed this with Manifesto for the Dead (1999), a fictional retelling of the last days of pulp novelist Jim Thompson.

Stansberry then wrote The Confession, a novel which sat unpublished for several years before being picked up by editor Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime and winning the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original in 2005.  

 Stansberry's later work  includes  the popular North Beach Mystery Series, otherwise known as The Pelican Novels.   These books  feature  Dante Mancuso, AKA The Pelican, a melancholy investigator who cannot escape his questionable past, and so roams the gritty edge of the old Italian and Chinese neighborhoods in San Francisco.   Books in the series include, in order of publication, Chasing the Dragon (2004), The Big Boom (2006), The Ancient Rain (2008), and Naked Moon (2010).  The latter two were  finalists for The Shamus Award, and The Ancient Rain was included on a list of Booklist’s Best Crime Novels of the last decade.

In 2016, Stansberry published The White Devil,  a stand alone noir that has received numerous honors, including the Hammett Prize.

His latest, The Lizard, will be released in 2025.