Welcome to the large and exciting literary world of Dennis Lynds. Over some five decades, he’s published more than 80 novels and won many mystery and literary awards, both nationally and internationally, including the Edgar, awarded by the Mystery Writers of America, the Marlowe Lifetime Achievement Award from MWA, SoCal Chapter, and the Eye Lifetime Achievement Award of the Private Eye Writers of America.

Under the pen name Michael Collins, his Dan Fortune stories constitute one of the longest-running private detective series ever written, covering nearly four decades beginning in 1967 with Act of Fear and continuing on with publishing contracts into the year 2005.

To learn more about his work and where it fits into the panoply of books published each year, let’s start with his most popular pseudonym, Michael Collins, and the detective that "Collins" created — Dan Fortune.

Collins is largely credited with being the writer who brought the detective novel into the modern age: "Many critics believe Dan Fortune to be the culmination of a maturing process that transformed the private eye from the naturalistic Spade (Dashiell Hammett) through the romantic Marlowe (Raymond Chandler) and the psychological Archer (Ross Macdonald) to the sociological Fortune (Michael Collins)," according to Private Eyes: 101 Knights by Robert Baker and Michael Nietzel.

Baker and Nietzel point out a popular phenomenon that began with Collins’s first book: the by-now monotonous chant by critics about each new hard-boiled author being 'the successor to Hammett,' 'the new Chandler,' and 'the heir to Ross Macdonald.'" John Conquest, in Trouble Is Their Business, says of this critical mantra, "But the only realistic way to look at this is to identify those writers who have clearly redefined the genre as Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald did. To the qualities of naturalism, romanticism and psychology with which, respectively, they moved the genre forward . . . can be added at least two other major contributions; Michael Collins (Dennis Lynds) made his books vehicles for sociological observation, while James Crumley introduced empathy and poetry."

"After naming Lynds the Best Suspense writer of the 1970s," Baker and Nietzel continue, "the Crime Literature Association of West Germany praised him as follows: ‘The break in private eye novels started with Michael Collins. At the end of the 1960s, he gave it something new, a human touch needed for years. The novels are much more than entertainment. There is a philosophy behind the detective, and in each book we take a look at a special section of American society.’ "

Explaining that he had more ideas than he knew what to do with, and stories that did not fit Dan Fortune, he created additional series under the pseudonyms Mark Sadler, John Crowe, William Arden, and Carl Dekker, all of which you can read about on this website. For a few years, he published under three of these pseudonyms at the same time at three different publishing houses — Dodd-Mead, Random House, and Bobbs-Merrill. For many years, the New York Times listed his books annually as among the nation’s top mysteries. One year, two appeared, listed under two of his pseudonyms.

As he was writing detective novels, he also published literary books and short stories. Four of his short stories were honored in Best American Short Stories. He was twice short-listed for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short stories. Altogether, he's written more than 200 short stories, and his mystery and detective short stories have appeared in Best Crime & Mystery Stories of the Year many times. Twice he’s been the guest of honor at literary festivals in France honoring the American detective novel.

Among his other contributions to the suspense field that show his wide and interesting creative range are thirteen juvenile mysteries under the name William Arden as well as eight "The Shadow" novels.

In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Lynds's work took another turn. He began lacing his detective novels with short stories, biographies, and symbolic vignettes expanding the theme and characters of each novel, a technique that recent mystery writers have copied.

Critic Richard C. Carpenter discussed these literary innovations in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers: "The style is more varied, more often breathless and jagged, using italic passages to change tone.... Powerful and memorable, [these new techniques] indicate that Collins has embarked on a new course after some 80 books. Truly he is a writer to be reckoned with."

There are now 20 Dan Fortune books, the most recent being Fortune's World, published in August 2000. Since then he has published eight short stories in EQMM and various anthologies, the most recent appearing in the anthology Murder In Vegas in March 2005. Also in 2002, a collection of non-Fortune short stories — Spies and Thieves, Cops and Killers, Etc. — was published.

Readers can look forward to other new works: Lynds's latest literary novel, Pictures on a Bedroom Wall, is with his agent now, he has completed a thriller, The CEO, and he is writing his nineteenth Dan Fortune novel as well as a new literary novel. A collection of short stories featuring Slot-Machine Kelly, the precursor to Dan Fortune,is scheduled to be published in June.

In Ellery Queen magazine, critic Jon Breen has written that Lynds is "a master of crime fiction." In the Los Angeles Times, when critic Dick Lochte reviewed the recent Fortune's World, he commented:

"To spin tales as intriguing and thought provoking as these for three decades is a remarkable enough achievement. Even more remarkable is the sustained quality.... In ‘Family Values’ . . . Fortune not only uncovers a tricky murder motive while calling attention to a heinous criminal practice, but he also manages to offend both sides in one of today’s most controversial topics. It takes style to bring that off. Bravery, too, of course."