Phil Bowie Books in Order

Phil Bowie was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, and went to high school in the Berkshire village of Williamsburg, in western Massachusetts. Writing was close at hand early. His mother, Edith, was a newspaper reporter who interviewed figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and Boris Karloff, and his father worked with wood. Between the two of them, Bowie grew up around craft, curiosity, and a respect for how things are made.

Words were in the house early.

He studied at the University of Massachusetts and Clemson University. At Clemson, a demanding creative writing professor known to students as Flunking Felder helped him place his first short story in the college literary magazine. Bowie kept writing, on and off, while doing the kind of practical jobs that keep life moving, including work as a draftsman, photographer, copywriter, graphic artist, magazine editor, community college teacher, and water quality researcher for the Neuse River Foundation.

For years, writing ran beside everything else. He built a long freelance career, selling hundreds of articles and short stories to magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, Harper's, Yankee, Grit, and AOPA Pilot. One good snapshot of his style came in the late 1970s, when he drove from New Bern to Bonneville on speculation to cover a land speed record attempt. There he interviewed stunt performer Kitty O'Neil, and the resulting piece ran in The Saturday Evening Post and was later reprinted in Reader's Digest.

Adventure kept finding him.

That background feeds straight into the fiction. Bowie has been a pilot, a Coast Guard-licensed boat captain, a motorcycle rider, a fiddler, an inventor, and an amateur astronomy buff, and his novels tend to favor people who do things with their hands and nerves. His debut thriller, Guns, introduced a pilot with a dangerous past and earned honorable mention at the London Book Festival. He followed it with Diamondback, KLLRS, and Deathsman, building the John Hardin books around the black market weapons trade, lost Cherokee gold, outlaw biker culture, and synthetic drugs.

Readers who click with Bowie usually like the same things. His books move through the Outer Banks, the Great Smoky Mountains, and other corners of North Carolina with a strong sense of place. They are full of pilots, back roads, weather, machines, and people under pressure. Even when the action is big, the characters are usually working stiffs, not untouchable superheroes, and that helps keep the danger grounded.

He has also stepped outside straight series suspense. Killing Ground sends pilot Zeke Blades into East Africa and into a violent fight against poachers and the people financing them. Dagger and Other Tales gathers 17 short stories, including Bowie's prizewinning version of a story idea begun by Stephen King. And Where is Heaven? turns inward, using a near-death experience as a starting point for a plainspoken book about faith, skepticism, religion, and the questions people keep circling back to.

These days Bowie lives in eastern North Carolina, in the New Bern area, with his partner Naomi and their tabby cat, McKenzie, in a cottage he restored near the Neuse River. He eventually sold his Cessna, Angel, when age made him feel less sharp in the cockpit, but he still flies from time to time with an instructor friend. He and Naomi like to travel and walk along the beach or through historic New Bern, and he still likes the pull of a lonely road in the Smokies. That mix of motion, place, and reflection is all over his work.