Tinker Lindsay Books in Order

Tinker Lindsay has built a writing life that moves easily between books, film, teaching, and collaboration. Born Dorothy Adams Lindsay, she picked up the nickname Tinker after her mother saw Peter Pan on Broadway, and it stayed with her. The name fits a career that has never stayed in just one lane.

She studied English and American Language and Literature at Harvard, graduated magna cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She also worked as an editor at The Harvard Crimson and later completed the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course. Around those college years, meditation became part of her life, and she went on to study and teach it for years before moving to Los Angeles to live and work.

Education mattered to her in a practical way, too. In 1986, she helped found The Oaks School in Hollywood and served as board chair in its early days. That detail says a lot about her work in general: she has often been interested not just in making things, but in helping build spaces where other people can grow.

She has said that when life got messy, she wrote.

That instinct led her into a long career in the entertainment world. Lindsay has worked in Hollywood for decades as a screenwriter, script consultant, and conceptual editor. Her film credits include Hector and the Search for Happiness, which she co-wrote with Peter Chelsom and Maria von Heland, as well as Security and A Sudden Case of Christmas, both written with Chelsom. Across those projects, you can see the mix she likes best: story with movement, feeling, and a little room for big questions.

She also writes books of her own, including The Last Great Place and My Hollywood Ending, and she has collaborated with other writers on memoirs and idea-driven nonfiction. On her own site, she jokes that she would even edit fortune cookies if asked. It is a funny line, but it also sounds true. She seems drawn to the work of shaping a story until it says exactly what it means.

Collaboration is one of her home territories.

For many readers, the clearest example is the Tenzing Norbu mystery series she wrote with Gay Hendricks. The books begin with The First Rule of Ten and follow an ex-monk, ex-LAPD officer, and private investigator navigating Los Angeles crime, spiritual tension, and his own restless inner life. The series continued with The Second Rule of Ten, The Third Rule Of Ten, The Fourth Rule of Ten, and Fifth Rule of Ten, with The Broken Rules of Ten stepping back to Ten's teenage years. The books mix suspense with reflection and keep Ten's inner life close to the action.

That blend is not an accident. Lindsay's long connection to meditation shows up again and again in the kinds of stories she helps tell. So does her interest in truth, which she has described as the central goal of her writing. Whether she is working on a novel, a screenplay, or someone else's manuscript, she tends to return to a few recurring concerns: how people fool themselves, how they wake up, how humor helps, and how a life can veer off course and still become something useful.

These days, Lindsay is married to Cameron Keys. She has two children, helped raise four, and describes herself as a proud grandmother many times over. She continues to write, develop film projects, and work with other writers, and she has been described as someone who can usually be found working under the Hollywood Sign.