Phyllis Gobbell Books in Order

Phyllis Gobbell is a Tennessee writer who has spent decades moving between fiction and nonfiction. She grew up in a small Southern town and later made Nashville home, which helps explain why her books feel both rooted in place and alert to the secrets people carry around.

She has said she started writing in sixth grade, when she tried to write a novel. Years later, after her first publications arrived around age thirty, writing stopped feeling like a private habit and became the work she meant to keep doing.

The habit stuck.

Gobbell studied in Tennessee too. She earned a degree in education from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master's in English from Austin Peay State University. Her graduate thesis, Listen to Me, was a collection of stories, and many of those stories later found homes in journals and magazines.

Short stories, essays, and creative nonfiction came first. Over the years she published more than thirty stories and articles, and her work picked up fiction and nonfiction prizes along the way. One story, "Primates," received a Pushcart nomination, and she also received Tennessee's Individual Artist Award in Literature.

Before she launched her mystery series, Gobbell turned to true crime. She co-wrote An Unfinished Canvas, about the Janet March case, and A Season of Darkness, about the murder of Marcia Trimble and the decades-long investigation that followed. She has said that the success of that first true crime book was the moment she really began taking herself seriously as a writer.

That book-length turn changed things.

Then came Jordan Mayfair, her most familiar fictional creation. Beginning with Pursuit in Provence and continuing through Secrets and Shamrocks, Treachery in Tuscany, and Notorious in Nashville, the series follows a Savannah architect who keeps finding murder while traveling with her uncle. Readers who like these books usually come for the mix of mystery, travel, architecture, art, music, and a heroine who is capable without pretending to be fearless.

Treachery in Tuscany won the Silver Falchion Award for Best Cozy Mystery. Gobbell also wrote Lost Innocence, a shorter true crime narrative drawn from the Marcia Trimble case. Across her books, a few interests keep returning: families under pressure, the pull of a strong setting, secrets that refuse to stay buried, and ordinary people who have to find more courage than they expected.

Teaching has been a big part of her life too. For twenty years she taught English at Nashville State Community College, where she worked with students in composition, literature, and creative writing, and she spent eight years editing the college's literary journal, Tetrahedra. She still lives in Nashville, stays active in the writing community, and has spoken about the steady place that family, tennis, piano, and a long-running Tuesday night writers group have in her life.