Harry Dolan

Background

Harry Dolan was born in Rome, New York.

Education

Dolan graduated from Colgate University, where he majored in philosophy and studied fiction-writing with the novelist Frederick Busch. He earned a master's degree in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Career

Dolan decided to get serious about becoming a writer in 1999 when he quit a full-time editing job that he held for eight years and decided to try his hand at writing a novel. But he had been interested in writing for a long time before that. He grew up in a family of readers and started writing at a young age. He can remember writing stories in spiral notebooks when he was seven. So as a child, he had the idea that he might become a writer, but it was one interest among many. He was also interested in science - especially astronomy - and in art and design. He wrote some stories as a teenager, and started writing a novel in college - I was majoring in philosophy at Colgate University, but I was also studying fiction writing with the novelist Frederick Busch. He saw something in his work and encouraged him to keep at it.

When he left his job in 1999, he set out to finish that first novel that he had started in college. It was a strange hybrid: part crime novel, part romance, part coming-of-age story; it was never published, probably because it wound up being 850 pages long. But he learned a lot from writing it, and those lessons helped him with the two books that came after it: Bad Things Happen and Very Bad Men.

After writing his manuscript for Bad Things Happen, he said he approached 50 agents to try to get the book published and was turned down by all of them. These days you must have an agent before you can even get to meet with a publisher. Finally, Amy Einhorn saw his manuscript when he entered and won a contest. After the signing, Dolan said that the book had a first printing of 20,000.

Achievements

• Dolan has become a highly successful and promising author who in 2007 participated in the writing contest announced by Amazon - the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. He entered with the manuscript of Bad Things Happen and the book was chosen one of the top three.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Good Killer

    (Sean Tennant and Molly Winter are living quietly and caut...)

    2020
  • The Last Dead Girl

    (On a rainy night in April, a chance encounter on a lonely...)

    2014
  • The Man in the Crooked Hat

    (There's a killer, and he wears a crooked hat. Private inv...)

    2017

Views

Dolan does a lot of plotting of the books in advance. He is thinking very deliberately about the plot twists. That’s sort of his business. It’s all about misdirection, of course, there are two things going on in the book - what the reader thinks is happening and is going to happen, and then what’s actually happening. You need to be thinking about that all the time, and that’s what he thinks about when he is planning these books. He focuses on trying to make it plausible, then creates mysteries that the reader would not even be expecting.

Quotations: "I like to read a lot of genre fiction, and when I was a kid, I was reading a lot of fantasy and science fiction. When I was younger and thinking about becoming a writer, I thought that’s what I was going to do. I loved J.R.R. Tolkien, I wanted to write books like that. I didn’t have the first idea on how anybody got to be a writer, though. In college, I really got into mystery novels. I was studying philosophy but reading a lot of crime novels, basically everything the college library had. I went to Colgate University and took a class on fiction writing with a novelist named Frederick Busch. He was very encouraging to me, and he was the one who told me to keep on writing, outside of the short stories I wrote for his class. As much as anything, that gave me the hope that I could make it as a writer; I’m indebted to him. Anyways, since then, I haven’t really been tempted to write anything else, the plan is to keep on doing this, albeit with some new differences."

"People sometimes ask me how much of David Loogan, my protagonist, is based on me, and my standard response is that we’re about the same age and we’ve both worked as editors, and there, fortunately, or unfortunately, the similarities end. But our sense of humor is definitely the same. Long stretches of the books are driven by dialogue, and I wanted to make it as entertaining as I could, and sarcastic humor is certainly part of that."

Personality

The authors Dolan admired and read were Robert Heinlein, J.R.R Tolkien, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. Some of his favorites also are Lawrence Block, Tana French, Dennis Lehane, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, Karin Slaughter, Peter Abrahams, Thomas Perry, and Donna Tartt.

Interests

• Writers

  Robert Heinlein, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Lawrence Block, Tana French, Dennis Lehane, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, Karin Slaughter, Peter Abrahams, Thomas Perry, Donna Tartt

Connections

Dolan now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his partner Linda Randolph.

life partner:

Linda Randolph

teacher:

Frederick Busch

August 1, 1941 – February 23, 2006, he was a professor of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York from 1966 to 2003. He won numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991.

References

• Author's Harry Dolan Official Website