Rex Miller Books in Order

Rex Miller was born Rex Miller Spangberg in St. Joseph, Missouri, on April 25, 1939. He grew up in Missouri and was already working at a local radio station while he was still a teenager. That early start shows up in his fiction, which often moves with the speed and snap of somebody used to going live.

After high school he spent a short time in junior college, then left to study radio announcing and engineering at the Elkins Institute in Dallas. He earned a first-class license and moved into broadcasting in the late 1950s.

Radio came first.

Over the next decade he worked as an announcer and engineer in several cities, including Knoxville and Pittsburgh, and built a reputation as funny, sharp, and a little unpredictable. It was the sort of career that sounds half myth now, overnight shifts, big personality, quick exits, and a real feel for how voices land on people.

Then he started over.

In 1971 he left radio and opened a mail-order collectibles business. He dealt in comic, film, stage, and superhero memorabilia, and he became especially well known for his knowledge of children's collectibles and old-time radio premiums. That collector's brain, full of pop culture scraps and odd details, seems to have fed the books too.

Fiction arrived later, but it did not arrive quietly. One editor who worked with him remembered a rough, powerful pile of Vietnam writing that was shaped into Profane Men, with help from Miller's friend Harlan Ellison. Around the same stretch, he began writing the brutal crime and horror novels that made his name, stories that mix murder investigation with grotesque violence and a very dark sense of humor.

Slob is where most readers begin. It introduces homicide detective Jack Eichord and Daniel Bunkowski, better known as Chaingang, the huge and deeply repellent killer who became Miller's signature creation. Readers who connect with Miller usually respond to the same things, fast pacing, black humor, ugly imagery, and a voice that feels rough-edged on purpose.

He kept building on that run with Frenzy, Stone Shadow, Slice, Iceman, Savant, and Butcher. Even when the plots got wild, Miller kept circling the same territory, damaged cops, obsessive killers, war scars, and the grubby corners of Midwestern and urban life. He also wrote outside that lane. Profane Men takes him into Vietnam, and Saint Louis Blues shows a leaner crime-fiction side. His debut Slob later earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination for Best First Novel.

Illness slowed him down in his later years, and he eventually had to leave the collectibles business. He died in Sikeston, Missouri, on May 21, 2004. The set of books he left behind is small, strange, and very much its own thing. If you come to Rex Miller now, you usually come for Jack Eichord or Chaingang. Many readers stay because no one else sounds quite like him.