Ellen Mansoor Collier Books in Order

Ellen Mansoor Collier grew up in Houston, with Galveston close enough to feel like a second home. Family trips, summers on the Island, and later visits with her husband gave her an early feel for the place, its hotels, seawall glamour, and old stories. Years later, that mix of elegance and danger would become the heart of her fiction.

She came to novels by way of journalism.

Her mother taught world history and also wrote part-time, and that seems to have mattered. Collier has said she was nudged into taking journalism in high school, worked on the school paper, and won a few writing awards. In college she studied magazine journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote for the campus magazine UTmost, and served as president of Women in Communications.

Before fiction took over, she built a long career as a writer and editor. She worked in magazines, advertising, and public relations, spent time as a community newspaper reporter, and even had a brief stretch as a cocktail waitress, which is exactly the kind of life detail that later slips neatly into period crime fiction. She also managed an antiques shop for a time, which helped feed her interest in Art Deco style and the look of the 1920s.

Her nonfiction work came first. She wrote articles, essays, and interviews for national magazines, and she has spoken about how reviewing mysteries for the Houston Chronicle in the 1990s became a practical education in how novels are built. At the same time, she published short stories, both mystery and romance, and slowly moved toward longer fiction of her own.

Then Galveston’s underworld history grabbed her.

A trip to Chicago, where she visited old mob haunts, helped sharpen her interest in Prohibition crime closer to home. Collier began digging into Galveston’s past, reading widely, studying old maps, and learning about the rival gangs, shady clubs, and quiet bargains that helped make the city a boomtown again after the 1900 storm. Out of that research came Jazz Cross, a young society reporter trying to be taken seriously while navigating gangsters, bootleggers, and the city’s polished upper crust.

That setup drives her A Jazz Age Mystery series. Flappers, Flasks and Foul Play introduces Jazz in 1920s Galveston, where a suspicious death at her half-brother’s speakeasy pulls her into a murder case. Bathing Beauties, Booze and Bullets moves into the world of beauty contests and citywide spectacle. Gold Diggers, Gamblers and Guns leans into the gambling clubs and turf wars. Vamps, Villains and Vaudeville heads backstage into the fading world of live performance, and Deco Dames, Demon Rum and Death adds grave robbers, fortune tellers, and whispers of the supernatural.

What readers tend to like is the balance. The books have gangland trouble, romance, and murder, but they also make room for newsroom ambition, family loyalty, and the everyday calculations of a woman trying to build a career in a world that keeps underestimating her. Galveston matters just as much as the crimes do. The hotels, beaches, clubs, cemeteries, and back rooms give the series its shape.

Collier lives in Houston with her engineer husband and dogs, and she still returns to Galveston whenever she can. That long familiarity with the city helps explain why the setting feels lived in instead of just researched.