Melodie Johnson Howe Books in Order

If you want the first Claire and Maggie case: The Mother Shadow → Beauty Dies
If you want Hollywood mysteries in story form: Shooting Hollywood
If you want a full Diana Poole novel: City of Mirrors → Hold a Scorpion
If you want the best quick tour of her work: The Mother Shadow → Shooting Hollywood → City of Mirrors

Melodie Johnson Howe was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and grew up there under the palm trees, already sure she wanted to write. That plan took a detour when Hollywood stepped in first.

At twenty-one she did a screen test for Universal Studios and landed a seven-year contract, even though she had not acted professionally before. In that same month she married record producer Bones Howe, and suddenly her life was full of movie sets, studio lots, and a very busy new family.

For about a decade she worked as an actress in film and television, with parts in movies like Coogan's Bluff, Gaily, Gaily, Rabbit, Run, and The Moonshine War. She has written with a nice, dry sense of humor about those years, including the fact that her first acting job had her shot dead in the opening titles.

Writing never went away.

While acting and raising children, she took night classes in creative writing at UCLA Extension. In 1980 her play The Lady of the House was produced by the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Not long after that, she walked into an audition for a dog food commercial, looked around the room, and realized she wanted a different creative life. She left acting behind and put her energy into fiction.

That change led to The Mother Shadow in 1989. After several rejections, the novel found a home at Viking and introduced Maggie Hill and private investigator Claire Conrad, an odd, sharp, funny detective pair built in part as a female spin on the classic genius-and-assistant mystery team. The book was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Agatha awards, and Howe followed it with Beauty Dies.

Later she moved into short fiction and created Diana Poole, a former actress trying to make a comeback while murder keeps cutting across her plans. Those stories were published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and collected in Shooting Hollywood. Diana then carried over into the novels City of Mirrors and Hold a Scorpion, both set against the bright, uneasy surface of Southern California.

What readers tend to like about Howe is easy to spot. She knows Hollywood from the inside, so the glamour in her books never feels fake, and neither does the weariness underneath it. Her women are smart, funny, bruised, stubborn, and very good at noticing what other people would rather hide. She returns again and again to money, ego, performance, and the gap between public image and private fear.

She knows how to make a bright room feel dangerous.

In recent years she has remained active in Santa Barbara's writing community, teaching workshops and talking about craft, revision, and persistence. That feels right for a writer whose own career turned on starting over. Her books may be mysteries, but the deeper subject is often reinvention.