John Dunning Books in Order

If you want the bookish mysteries: Booked to Die → The Bookman's Wake → The Bookman's Promise
If you want stand-alone suspense: The Holland Suggestions → Looking For Ginger North → Deadline
If you want historical mystery and radio atmosphere: Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime
If you're curious about his radio reference books: Tune in Yesterday → On the Air

John Dunning was born in Brooklyn on January 9, 1942, but he mostly grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, after his family moved there when he was three. That mix of city grit and Southern memory stayed with him. So did an ear for the way working people talk, argue, brag, and hide things, which later became one of the quiet strengths of his fiction.

He did not come to books by way of a neat, carefully planned career.

Before readers knew him as a novelist, Dunning did a little of everything. He left South Carolina for Denver in 1964, worked at a racetrack, cut glass, and eventually found his way to The Denver Post, where he worked in the library and later as a reporter. Newspaper work taught him pace, detail, and how to keep digging when a story looks simple on the surface and turns out not to be.

He began publishing in the 1970s. His first novel, The Holland Suggestions, arrived in 1975, and a year later he published Tune in Yesterday, a big, affectionate encyclopedia of old-time radio. That second book says a lot about him. Dunning was not just interested in plots. He loved whole vanished worlds, especially the people and machinery behind them.

That same curiosity runs through his early fiction. Looking For Ginger North takes a wounded ex-cop into the world of California racing stables and an old family mystery. Deadline follows a veteran reporter into a story that grows stranger the longer he chases it. And Denver steps back into the 1920s to show a city pulled between booster optimism, corruption, and the threat of the Ku Klux Klan. Readers who like Dunning usually like this mix of hardboiled tension, professional detail, and places that feel lived in.

Then he did something that sounds like a John Dunning plot twist. He stopped writing and opened a bookstore.

In 1984, after trouble with publishers, he and his wife Helen opened the Old Algonquin Bookstore in east Denver, specializing in used, rare, and offbeat books. Later the business continued as an online and mail-order operation. That stretch of his life did more than give him a livelihood. It gave him a deep working knowledge of collectors, scouts, dealers, pricing, provenance, and the odd human dramas that gather around valuable books.

When he returned to fiction, that knowledge powered the novels he is best known for. Booked to Die introduced Cliff Janeway, a Denver homicide detective and serious bookman whose cases lead straight into the rare book trade. Readers took to the series because it felt specific and true. The follow-ups, The Bookman's Wake, The Bookman's Promise, The Sign of the Book, and The Bookwoman's Last Fling, mix murder, bookselling, and dry humor in a way that is hard to fake unless you have spent real time in that world. Booked to Die won the Nero Award, and Looking For Ginger North, Deadline, and The Bookman's Wake all earned major mystery award attention.

Radio never left him, either. Dunning hosted a long-running Sunday radio show built around old broadcasts, and in 1998 he returned to that subject with On the Air, an expanded reference work that became a go-to source for old-time radio fans.

A brain tumor in 2006 made writing harder and eventually brought his book production to an end. He died on May 22, 2023, after years of declining health. What remains is a body of work that feels built by hand, reporter-sharp, book-dusty, curious, and deeply attached to the odd corners of American life that most writers pass right by.