John Sandford is the pseudonym of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist John Roswell Camp. David Burnett/Courtesy of Riverhead Hardcover.
School period
Gallery of John Sandford
John attended the public schools in Cedar Rapids, graduating from Washington High School in 1962. (photo by Jav Ducker)
College/University
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John Sandford received a Bachelor's in American History and a Master's in Journalism from the University of Iowa.
Career
Gallery of John Sandford
Author John Sandford, photo Evan Frost, MPR News.
Gallery of John Sandford
John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp.
Gallery of John Sandford
John Sandford
Gallery of John Sandford
John Sandford at the presentation of his new novel Golden Prey.
Gallery of John Sandford
John Sandford and Michele Cook at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, in front of a Singular Menace display and their new book, "Rampage." (photo is taken from the John Sandford`s facebook account).
Gallery of John Sandford
John Sandford, 2017, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (photo is taken from the John Sandford`s facebook account).
Gallery of John Sandford
John Sandford, April 28, Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore, Scottsdale, Arisona. Photo from Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore. (photo is taken from the John Sandford`s facebook account).
Gallery of John Sandford
John Sandford, the New York Times best-selling author, American novelist, a former journalist and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Pulitzer prize
Sandford was a Recipient Pulitzer prize in 1986 for a series entitled "Life on the Land: an American farm family", which followed a typical southwest Minnesota farm family through the course of a full year.
John Sandford and Michele Cook at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, in front of a Singular Menace display and their new book, "Rampage." (photo is taken from the John Sandford`s facebook account).
John Sandford, April 28, Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore, Scottsdale, Arisona. Photo from Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore. (photo is taken from the John Sandford`s facebook account).
Sandford was a Recipient Pulitzer prize in 1986 for a series entitled "Life on the Land: an American farm family", which followed a typical southwest Minnesota farm family through the course of a full year.
Connections
Spouse: Michele Cook
Undated courtesy photo of John Camp, who writes adult thrillers as John Sandford, and his wife Michele Cook, The two wrote "Uncaged," together, their first young adult thriller. Photo by David Burnett, courtesy of Michele Cook, 2014.
collaborator: Amihai Mazar
colleague: Edna Buchanan
Edna Buchanan (née Rydzik, born March 16, 1939) is an American journalist and writer best known for her crime mystery novels.
associate: Carl Hiaasen
Sandford went bone fishing with Carl Hiaasen, the famous novelist and newspaper columnist from Florida.
(A slumlord butchered in Minneapolis...A rising political ...)
A slumlord butchered in Minneapolis...A rising political star executed in Manhattan...A judge slashed to death in Oklahoma City... Each victim has a history of bad behavior, but the only thing the killings have in common is the murder weapon - a Native American ceremonial knife - and a trail of blood that leads to an embodiment of evil known only as Shadow Love. Recruited to be the lethal hand of a terrorist campaign, Shadow Love has his own bloody agenda, one he will do anything to achieve. Enlisted to find him are Minneapolis police lieutenant Lucas Davenport and New York City police officer Lily Rothenburg. But despite the countrywide carnage they needn’t look far. Because Shadow Love is right behind them.
((The Prey Series Book 3) Lucas Davenport, "one of the bes...)
(The Prey Series Book 3) Lucas Davenport, "one of the best hard-case cops on the crime scene today" (Houston Post) returns in John Sandford's #1 New York Times bestselling Prey series... Lieutenant Davenport’s sanity was nearly shattered by two murder investigations. Now he faces something worse…Two killers. One hideously scarred. The other strikingly handsome, a master manipulator fascinated with all aspects of death. The dark mirror of Davenport’s soul…This is the case that will bring Davenport back to life. Or push him over the edge. With a New Introduction by John Sandford
((The Prey Series Book 4) Make noise for a new Prey packag...)
(The Prey Series Book 4) Make noise for a new Prey package and new author introduction! Dr. Mike Bekker, a psychotic pathologist, is back on the streets, doing what he does best - murdering one helpless victim after another. Lucas Davenport knows he should have killed Bekker when he had the chance. Now he has a second opportunity - and the time to hesitate is through.
(John Sandford, the #1 New York Times bestselling author o...)
John Sandford, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Prey novels gives suspense an ingenious twist as he takes readers into the mind games of two irresistible con artists plotting the perfect sting… Kidd is a computer whiz, artist, and professional criminal. LuEllen is his lover, and his favorite partner in crime. Their playing field in on the cutting edge of high-tech corporate warfare. This time they’ve been hired by a defense industry corporation to destroy its business rival through computer sabotage. If Kidd and LuEllen can pull it off, they’ll reap millions. It’s the sting of a lifetime. One false move and it’s a lifetime sentence. As the takedown unfolds, everything goes according to plan. But their string of successes turns into a noose when the ultimate con artists find themselves on the wrong end of the ultimate con…
((The Prey Series Book 12) He seems like such a nice man. ...)
(The Prey Series Book 12) He seems like such a nice man. You’d never guess what was going on in his mind… Art history professor James Qatar has a hobby: he takes secret photographs of women to fuel more elaborate fantasies. When he’s alone. Behind locked doors. Then one day, he goes a step further and... well, one thing leads to another. Qatar has no choice. He has to kill her. And you know something? He likes it. When Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport takes the case, he assumes it’ll be straightforward police work. He couldn’t be more wrong. As the investigation trail takes some unexpected turns, it becomes clear that nothing is straightforward about this killer, his victims, or his motives. And to stop him Lucas has no choice but to walk right into his lair.
(Theories abound when a Russian gets himself killed on the...)
Theories abound when a Russian gets himself killed on the shore of Lake Superior - shot with fifty-year-old bullets. But when it turns out he had very high government connections, state troubleshooter Lucas Davenport gets the call. Well, Lucas and a mysterious Russian cop with secrets all her own. Together, they’ll follow a trail back to another place and another time, and battle the shadows they discover there - shadows that turn out to be both very real and very deadly.
(Former Sen. Lincoln Bowe, a Republican, has been missing ...)
Former Sen. Lincoln Bowe, a Republican, has been missing for several days, setting off alarms on both sides of the political aisle. Finally, he is discovered in the remote Virginia woods, barb-wired to a tree, burned almost beyond recognition and missing his head. Democratic ‘research assistant’ (read: fixer) Jacob Winter, ex-Army Intelligence, wounded in Afghanistan, is called in by the Democratic president to unravel an extremely messy situation and shield his office from any hint of scandal.
(Virgil Flowers hunts a killer responsible for a strange s...)
Virgil Flowers hunts a killer responsible for a strange string of murders in this thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford. On a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota, Virgil Flowers gets a call from Lucas Davenport. A body has been found near a veterans’ memorial in Stillwater with two shots to the head and a lemon in his mouth - exactly like the body, they found two weeks ago. Working the murders, Flowers becomes convinced that someone is keeping a list - with many more names on it. And when he discovers what connects them all, he’s almost sorry. Because if it’s true, then this whole thing leads down a lot more trails than he thought it did - and every one of them is booby-trapped.
(#1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford's “hau...)
#1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford's “haunting, unforgettable, ice-blooded thriller” that introduced Lucas Davenport... The killer was mad but brilliant. He left notes with every woman he killed. Rules of murder: Never have a motive. Never follow a discernible pattern. Never carry a weapon after it has been used...
(After one troubled college-age student disappears and two...)
After one troubled college-age student disappears and two are found slashed to death, Lucas Davenport finds himself hunting what appears to be a modern-day Jack the Ripper. Unfortunately, the clues aren’t adding up - and then there’s the young Goth girl who keeps appearing and disappearing. Where does she come from? Where does she go every night? And why does Lucas keep getting the sneaking suspicion that there is something else going on here? Something very bad, very dark, and as elusive as a phantom…
((The Prey Series Book 19) Danger stalks Lucas Davenport a...)
(The Prey Series Book 19) Danger stalks Lucas Davenport at work and all too close to home, in the superlative new thriller by the #1 New York Times' bestselling author. For twenty years, John Sandford's novels have been beloved for their "ingenious plots, vivid characters, crisp dialogue and endless surprises" (The Washington Post), and nowhere are those more in evidence than in the sudden twists and shocks of Wicked Prey. The Republicans are coming to St. Paul for their convention. Throwing a big party is supposed to be fun, but crashing the party are a few hard cases the police would rather stayed away.
(A wealthy banker is dead, shot once in the chest during a...)
A wealthy banker is dead, shot once in the chest during a hunting trip. There are many reasons for him to be killed, and many people who would do the deed. But who did? Lucas Davenport has an idea. But this routine murder investigation is about to turn into something different. A cat-and-mouse game with a killer who does not hesitate to take the fight to Lucas himself. And those he loves.
((A Virgil Flowers Novel, Book 6) They were average kids l...)
(A Virgil Flowers Novel, Book 6) They were average kids looking for something to do. Today they started killing people. A modern-day Bonnie and Clyde are on the run through rural Minnesota - victim by victim they’re having the time of their lives. But when Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers joins the hunt for the thrill-hungry kids, things take a shocking detour.
(The thrilling new novel in the #1 New York Times–bestsell...)
The thrilling new novel in the #1 New York Times–bestselling series. In Southeast Minnesota, down on the Mississippi, a school board meeting is coming to an end. The board chairman announces that the rest of the meeting will be closed, due to personnel issues. “Issues” is correct. The proposal up for a vote before them is whether to authorize the killing of a local reporter. The vote is four to one in favor. Meanwhile, not far away, Virgil Flowers is helping out a friend by looking into a dognapping, which seems to be turning into something much bigger and uglier - a team of dognappers supplying medical labs - when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport. A murdered body has been found - and the victim is a local reporter...
(After the events in Gathering Prey, Lucas Davenport finds...)
After the events in Gathering Prey, Lucas Davenport finds himself in a very unusual situation - no longer employed by the Minnesota BCA. His friend the governor is just cranking up a presidential campaign, though, and he invites Lucas to come along as part of his campaign staff. “Should be fun!” he says, and it kind of is - until they find they have a shadow: an armed man intent on killing the governor...and anyone who gets in the way.
(They call them Travelers. They move from city to city, pa...)
They call them Travelers. They move from city to city, panhandling, committing no crimes - they just like to stay on the move. And now somebody is killing them. Lucas Davenport’s adopted daughter, Letty, is home from college when she gets a phone call from a woman Traveler she’d befriended in San Francisco. The woman thinks somebody’s killing her friends, she’s afraid she knows who it is, and now her male companion has gone missing. She’s hiding out in North Dakota, and she doesn’t know what to do. Letty tells Lucas she’s going to get her, and, though he suspects Letty’s getting played, he volunteers to go with her. When he hears the woman’s story, though, he begins to think there’s something in it. Little does he know. In the days to come, he will embark upon an odyssey through a subculture unlike any he has ever seen, a trip that will not only put the two of them in danger - but just may change the course of his life. From the Hardcover edition.
(The first storm comes from, of all places, the Minnesota ...)
The first storm comes from, of all places, the Minnesota zoo. Two large, and very rare, Amur tigers have vanished from their cage, and authorities are worried sick that they’ve been stolen for their body parts. Traditional Chinese medicine prizes those parts for home remedies, and people will do extreme things to get what they need.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Lucas Davenport’s first cas...)
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Lucas Davenport’s first case as a U.S. Marshal sends him into uncharted territory in the thrilling new novel in the #1 New York Times-bestselling series. The man was smart and he didn’t mind killing people. Welcome to the big leagues, Davenport. Thanks to some very influential people whose lives he saved, Lucas is no longer working for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, but for the U.S. Marshals Service, and with unusual scope. He gets to pick his own cases, whatever they are, wherever they lead him. And where they’ve led him this time is into real trouble. A Biloxi, Mississippi, drug-cartel counting house gets robbed, and suitcases full of cash disappear, leaving behind five bodies, including that of a six-year-old girl.
(The thrice-divorced, affable member of the Minnesota Bure...)
The thrice-divorced, affable member of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), who reports to Prey series hero Lucas Davenport, operates pretty much on his own..” He’s been doing the hard stuff for three years, but he’s never seen anything like this. In the small rural town of Bluestem, an old man is bound in his basement, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Three weeks before, a doctor and his wife were murdered. Three homicides in Bluestem in just as many weeks is unheard of. It’s also no coincidence. And it’s far from over...
(Lucas Davenport confronts an old nemesis, now a powerful ...)
Lucas Davenport confronts an old nemesis, now a powerful U.S. senator, in this thrilling #1 New York Times-bestselling new novel in the Prey series. Lucas Davenport had crossed paths with her before. A rich psychopath, Taryn Grant had run successfully for the U.S. Senate, where Lucas had predicted she'd fit right in. He was also convinced that she'd been responsible for three murders, though he'd never been able to prove it. Once a psychopath had gotten that kind of rush, though, he or she often needed another fix, so he figured he might be seeing her again.
(Pinion, Minnesota: a metropolis of all of seven hundred s...)
Pinion, Minnesota: a metropolis of all of seven hundred souls, for which the word "moribund" might have been invented. Nothing ever happened there and nothing ever would - until the mayor of sorts (campaign slogan: "I'll Do What I Can") and a buddy come up with a scheme to put Pinion on the map. They'd heard of a place where a floating image of the Virgin Mary had turned the whole town into a shrine, attracting thousands of pilgrims. And all those pilgrims needed food, shelter, all kinds of crazy things, right? They'd all get rich! What could go wrong? When the dead body shows up, they find out, and that's only the beginning of their troubles - and Virgil Flowers' - as they are all about to discover all too soon.
(Class reunions: a time for memories - good, bad, and, as ...)
Class reunions: a time for memories - good, bad, and, as Virgil Flowers is about to find out, deadly - in this New York Times bestselling thriller from John Sandford. Virgil knows the town of Trippton, Minnesota, a little too well. A few years back, he investigated the corrupt - and as it turned out, homicidal - local school board, and now the town’s back in view with more alarming news: A woman’s been found dead, frozen in a block of ice.
(Lucas Davenport tracks a prolific serial killer in the ne...)
Lucas Davenport tracks a prolific serial killer in the newest nail-biter by #1 New York Times-bestselling author John Sandford. Clayton Deese looks like a small-time criminal, muscle for hire when his loan shark boss needs to teach someone a lesson. Now, seven months after a job that went south and landed him in jail, Deese has skipped out on bail, and the U.S. Marshals come looking for him.
(Virgil Flowers will have to watch his back - and his mout...)
Virgil Flowers will have to watch his back - and his mouth - as he investigates a college culture war turned deadly in the latest thriller from #1 New York Times-bestseller John Sandford. At the local state university, two feuding departments have faced off on the battleground of PC culture. Each carries their views to extremes that may seem absurd, but highly educated people of sound mind and good intentions can reasonably disagree, right? Then someone winds up dead, and Virgil Flowers is brought in to investigate ... and he soon comes to realize he's dealing with people who, on this one particular issue, are functionally crazy. Among this group of wildly impassioned, diametrically opposed zealots lurks a killer, and it will be up to Virgil to sort the murderer from the mere maniacs.
(Television superstar Mark Harmon stars as Lucas Davenport...)
Television superstar Mark Harmon stars as Lucas Davenport, hero/anti-hero of John Sandford's bestselling "Prey" series. When a cop is shot after witnessing the murder of the wife of a local real estate lawyer, Lucas Davenport is called to the scene. The police quickly zero in on the husband as the prime suspect until FBI agents discover evidence linking the crime to an elusive hit woman.
John Sandford is an American writer, journalist, novelist, and one of the #1 New York Times best-selling authors. He was a recipient of the Pulitzer prize for feature writing in 1986 for a series of stories about a midwestern farm crisis. He is also the author of the popular Prey novels, the Kidd novels, the Virgil Flowers novels, and six other books, including three YA novels co-authored with his wife Michele Cook.
Background
Ethnicity:
John`s mother was of German and Lithuanian ancestory.
John Sandford was born on February 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, United States. He is the son of Anne Agnes (Barron) and Roswell Sandford Camp. His maternal grandparents were immigrants from Lithuania and he spent many of his early years living on, or visiting, their rural acreage, with the traditional "three-holer," subsistence gardens, a variety of farm animals and fruit trees, and haying in the summers.
Education
John attended Cedar Rapids Catholic and public schools, graduating from Washington Senior High School in 1962. He received a bachelor's degree in American Studies in 1966, and a master's degree in journalism in 1971, both from the University of Iowa.
After his graduation with a master's degree in journalism in 1971, from the University of Iowa, John Sandford started a career in journalism as an Army reporter (he is included in the "Hall of Fame" at the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, Maryland).
Prior to starting his writing career, he took some writing courses at the well-known Iowa Writer's Workshops at the University of Iowa, but only as a minor elective. He also wrote articles for The Daily Iowan, the university newspaper, but didn't get seriously involved in journalism until he was in the army. His most intense training in journalism came at the United States Army's Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. After graduation from that school, he became a military journalist in Korea, running a base newspaper for the 4th United States Army Missile Command in Chunchon, Korea. In an odd coincidence, the command's information officer, Lt. Robert Keeler, who was the only other American involved in the tiny paper, later worked for Newsday newspaper on Long Island. After getting out of the Army, he then worked as a reporter for the Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Southeast Missourian for a year, covering such stories as the Cairo, Ilinois, race riots.
From 1971 to 1978, he worked as a general assignment reporter for the Miami Herald, covering killings and drug cases, among other beats, with his colleague, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edna Buchanan. In 1978, Camp joined the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a features reporter. He became a daily columnist at the newspaper in 1980.
In 1989 Camp wrote two novels that would become the first books of his two best-selling series. Both novels, The Fool's Run of the Kidd series and Rules of Prey of the Prey series, were accepted and due to be published three months apart. The Fool's Run was published under the name "John Camp", but the publisher asked Camp to provide a pseudonym for Rules of Prey so it was published under the name "John Sandford". After the Prey series proved to be more popular, with its charismatic protagonist Lucas Davenport, The Fool's Run and all of its subsequent sequels have been published under the "Sandford" name.
Camp was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, for a series of stories on Native American culture, and in 1986 he won the Pulitzer for Non-Deadline Feature Writing for a series of stories collectively titled Life on the Land: An American Farm Family. The series, written during the Midwest farm crisis, followed a typical southwest Minnesota farm family through the course of a full year. He stopped writing full-time for the Pioneer Press in 1989, although he didn't stop writing for the paper entirely until the next year.
In 1996 he wrote a ten-years-later follow-up to Life on the Land, and he's written occasional book reviews for the Fort Worth Star Telegram. More recently, he's written for MinnPost.com, a Minnesota-centered online newspaper. He also continues to do occasional journalism, and was embedded with the 2-147 Air Assault Battalion during the Iraq War, and covered the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul.
He wrote two novels that weren't accepted before he wrote The Fool's Run. The first, The Wheel Key Number, was a perhaps too-realistic detective story. The second, The Chippewa Zoo, was a near-future low-tech science fiction novel. They were never published by anyone, and they never will be. He also wrote an untitled ghost novel in 1993, but after some discussion, it was not published, the feeling being that it was too much of a divergence at that early point in his thriller writing career. In 2007 Sandford started a third series featuring Virgil Flowers, who previously was a supporting character in Invisible Prey.
Also, Camp has always been an avid reader of history - his bachelor's degree is in American studies, which was a combination of American history and literature. He continued reading history through his career, American history at first, then going to modern European history, and finally, early history. That inevitably led him to the history books of the Bible, and in the middle 1990s, he traveled to Israel to tour the major sites of Biblical history. While there, he met Amihai Mazar, then director of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Camp and Mazar got along well, and began discussing the possibility of a large new excavation that would attempt to clarify Biblical chronology during the Iron Age. The chronology was, and still is, a matter of some controversy, and directly deals with the question of the existence of, and extent of, the United Monarchy of David and Solomon. The dig began in 1997, and continues, and has involved the work of hundreds of volunteer diggers, including Camp. Aside from much work on the chronology, the dig uncovered the only known apiary (beehive complex) ever found from the period.
Until 2012 he lived in Lakeland Shores, east of Saint Paul, in Minnesota, spending the winters in Pasadena, California. He recently sold the Lakeland Shores home and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
(Television superstar Mark Harmon stars as Lucas Davenport...)
2011
Views
Camp is a Civil War buff, and chose the name Sandford after his paternal great-grandfather, Henry Sandford, who fought with the Belle City Rifles, part of the Union Army's Iron Brigade, in that war.
Quotations:
"There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting."
"I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers."
"Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing."
"Most people like a little sex in their novels."
"Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations."
"These characters are not spontaneous creations. They are engineered down to the last nut and bolt."
"When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?"
"With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop."
"You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life."
"They don't have a lot of crime in the countryside other than theft. But every once in a while, things turn ugly, and when they turn ugly, they turn very ugly."
"Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me."
Personality
John Sandford is interested in a number of outdoor sports, including fishing, canoeing, and skiing. He has, on occasion, both sailed and SCUBA-dived. He has skied in the American Birkebeiner, a 55-kilometer ski race held every February in Hayward, Wisconsin. He and a partner were the last winners of the Dan Jenkins' Goat Hills golf tournament in Fort Worth, Texas, sponsored by the renowned Texas sportswriter and novelist. He quit SCUBA diving after going down to sixty feet in the Caribbean, then wondering why he was doing that. He quit sailing when he realized that it was much like driving across Kansas in an RV at eight miles an hour, except without freeway exits or gas station stops. He still fishes (muskies) and once went bone fishing with Carl Hiaasen, the famous novelist and newspaper columnist from Florida, during which trip he learned that one should not go bone-fishing in thunderstorms.
John Sandford listens to a lot of Texas-based country music, and thinks the world would be a better place if everybody listened to Guy Clark, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Billy Joe Shaver, Terry Allen, Waylon and Willie, and those guys.
Camp has always been a visual arts enthusiast and is a serious painter and photographer; his photos have appeared in various newspapers, magazines, and on-line venues. He does not show his paintings.
Interests
photography, painting
Sport & Clubs
including fishing, canoeing, and skiing, sailing, diving
Music & Bands
Texas-based country music, Guy Clark, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Billy Joe Shaver, Terry Allen, Waylon and Willie
Connections
Camp was married to Susan Lee Jones in 1966, and has two children, Roswell Camp and Emily Curtis. His wife, Susan, died of metastasized breast cancer in May, 2007.
In October, 2013, he married Michele Cook, a journalist and screenwriter. They knew one another at the Pioneer Press in the 1980s but didn't reconnect until they both lived in Los Angeles five years ago. They currently have homes in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the countryside near Hayward, Wisconsin.