Michael Chandos Books in Order

Michael Chandos is the pen name of Steve Pease, a Colorado writer whose path to fiction took the long way around, through space engineering, intelligence work, stage acting, and private investigation. He writes mystery and science fiction, and his stories usually feel grounded in work, place, and the kinds of people who have seen a little too much.

He has said he was writing long before he was publishing.

Public details about his early life are fairly sparse, but he has written that junior high first nudged him toward storytelling. He gave book reviews over the school loudspeaker and read constantly. Then, in high school, reading and writing faded into the background as space and engineering took over. He was accepted at MIT and the University of Arizona, chose Arizona, and studied subjects that included aerospace engineering, astronomy, and later criminal justice.

After high school in Alexandria, Virginia, he headed west to fight fires in Sequoia National Park. A late night layover in Long Beach stayed with him: the hard light, the dusty bus station, the street sleepers, and the uneasy feeling of being young and out of place. Years later, he pointed to that memory as part of what fed the mood of his noir fiction and his interest in writing about old Los Angeles.

Before he wrote detectives, he worked around satellites and secrets.

Pease spent 34 and a half years as a US Air Force officer and then a senior civilian, doing intelligence analysis on foreign space technology. He has said that work gave him experience across several intelligence disciplines. At the same time, he kept another part of his imagination alive through live theater, especially Shakespeare and dramatic plays. That mix, technical precision on one side, human performance on the other, still seems to shape the way he builds stories.

When he retired the first time, he decided that if he wanted to write private eye fiction, he should understand the job from the inside. So he became a licensed private investigator in Colorado and New Mexico and ran Glass Key Investigations for more than seven years. That background gives his crime stories a practical feel. People lie, papers go missing, favors come with strings attached, and the job is rarely as tidy as outsiders imagine.

His best known piece is West Texas Barbecue, a Macavity-nominated story set in Odessa. Other published work includes The Happy Ending in The Dark City Crime and Mystery Magazine, Butterfly in Fresh Starts, and The Lady in the Polka Dot Dress in More Groovy Gumshoes. He has also published mystery and science fiction stories in anthologies and magazines in the US and England.

Across those stories, he keeps coming back to capable but fallible people, rough-edged settings, and the way a place can press on every choice. He has said he prefers characters who feel like actual people, not stock types, and that may be the cleanest way into his work. Whether the setting is West Texas, old Los Angeles, or something more speculative, he is drawn to grit, pressure, and the moment when duty meets impulse.

Now he lives in Black Forest, Colorado. By his own account, he shares home life with his wife, two dogs, and a vintage race car that does not run, which feels like exactly the sort of detail one of his characters would notice and remember. He has stayed active in the writing community, and he still sounds like someone with more stories lined up than time to get them all onto the page.