Background
He was born in Wichita, Kansas, and after co-writing and directing the independent short film Walking Blues lived for several years in France, working as a translator and photographer.
( Cottonwood (2004) was a huge step forward for the burge...)
Cottonwood (2004) was a huge step forward for the burgeoning king of noir Scott Phillips, and his dark and gritty take on the western earned him starred reviews and praise from crime masters Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos. That novel featured the Kansas town beginning in 1872 when it was just a small community of run down farms, dusty roads, and two-bit crooks. Saloon owner and photographer Bill Ogden thought it could be more and allied with wealthy developer Marc Leval to capitalize on the advent of the railroad and the cattle trail that soon turned Cottonwood into a wild boomtown. But problems followed the money and soon Bill was confronting both the wicked family of serial killers known as the Bloody Benders as well as his one-time friend Marc, having fallen into an affair with his beautiful wife Maggie. Bill then turned up alone in San Francisco in 1890, having to face a past from which he could not run. But what happened to him in those missing years? What happened to Maggie, to Bill, and their escape from the murderous Bender family? Hop Alley answers all those questions as we return to the Wild West and discover Bill Ogden, now living as Bill Sadlaw, running a photo studio near the Chinese part of town know as Hop Alley in the frontier town of Denver in 1878. Left by Maggie, Bill enjoys an erotic affair with Priscilla, a fallen singer addicted to laudanum, who is also seeing his friend Ralph Banbury, the editor of the local Denver Bulletin (neither man minds sharing). Bill’s peaceful time away from Cottonwood turns anything but as he must confront the mysterious murder of his housekeeper’s brother-in-law, the increasing instability of Priscilla as both men try to ease out of her clutches, and an all out-riot across Hop Alley. And when the body count starts rising, Bill will soon start wishing he had never left Cottonwood at all. Hop Alley proves that no one does the Wild West like noir master Scott Phillips.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1619025477/?tag=2022091-20
(It's Christmas Eve, 1979, in Wichita, and Charlie Arglist...)
It's Christmas Eve, 1979, in Wichita, and Charlie Arglist, a crooked lawyer and strip-club owner, is drunkenly making the rounds before he blows town for good. Getting progressively drunker and deeper in trouble, Charlie needs to drop off a photograph of a local official in a compromising position and steal some drug money. Before it's all over, a lot of people are going to wind up dead.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786181990/?tag=2022091-20
(It is Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas and snowing steadi...)
It is Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas and snowing steadily. The streets are deserted, traffic is light and most people have returned home for the start of the festivities. But family get-togethers are the last thing on Charlie Arglist's mind, and home is the last place he needs to be. For Charlie has to get out of town. For good. In nine and a half hours, to be precise. But first there are just a few things he has to do..."The Ice Harvest" is a rollercoaster ride of double-cross, black humour and, very possibly, the last twenty-four hours in Charlie Arglist's life...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/033048138X/?tag=2022091-20
He was born in Wichita, Kansas, and after co-writing and directing the independent short film Walking Blues lived for several years in France, working as a translator and photographer.
University of North Carolina (Bachelor of Arts, 1983). Wake Forest University (Juris Doctor, 1986). Phi Delta Phi.
He returned to the United States living in California as a screenwriter, co-writing a 1996 thriller called Crosscut among many other projects, both credited and uncredited. He has sometimes been confused with another author of the same professional name. A black comic noir thriller set in the low-rent world of sleazy Wichita strip clubs on Christmas Eve 1979, The Ice Harvest was adapted into a film of the same title in 2005.
He followed this in 2002 with The Walkaway, a combined prequel/sequel and spin-off to The Ice Harvest set in Wichita during the 1940s and 1980s.
His third novel, Cottonwood, set in Kansas and California during the Western era, was published in 2004. Rut, a study of quirky characters in a post-apocalyptic Colorado followed six years later, but in the meantime Phillips had published several well-received short stories, later collected with some previously unpublished works in Rum, Sodomy, and False Eyelashes.
Many characters in these stories either turn up at other points in their lives in Phillips" novels, or are related to characters in those volumes, thereby making much of Phillips" output to date an evolving tapestry of cross-generational familial connections. Phillips returned to his ever-decadent Wichita as a setting for his next novel The Adjustment, exploring the snowballing petty corruption of a returning World World War II veteran.
Rake followed, originally published in the French language and telling the story of a minor television star from the United States who finds greater fame in Paris and pulls himself into a darkly comic tangle as he pursues women and a movie deal.
Most recently has been the publication of Hop Alley, a companion to Cottonwood.
( Cottonwood (2004) was a huge step forward for the burge...)
(It's Christmas Eve, 1979, in Wichita, and Charlie Arglist...)
(It is Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas and snowing steadi...)
(A novel by Scott Phillips. Published by Concord Free Pres...)
(New)
Moot Court Board; Jessup International Law Moot Court Team. Benton Moot Court Team. Member, Wake Forest University Law Review.