Vining, Dan

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Vining, Dan

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

CAREER:

Novelist and screenwriter. Has worked as a newspaper reporter, a writer and editor at Rolling Stone, and an instructor at Stanford University.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Stegner fellowship in poetry, Stanford University.

WRITINGS:

The Quick, Berkley Publishing (New York, NY), 2004.

The Next, Berkley Prime Crime (New York, NY), 2006.

Screenwriter on various film and television projects, including Wild Horses, CBS Television, 1985; Plain Clothes, Paramount Pictures, 1988; Lighthouse, Erin Features, 1991; Her Deadly Rival, Rysher Entertainment, 1995; In My Sister's Shadow, CBS Production, 1997; Escape: Human Cargo, Showtime Networks, 1998; Black Dog, Universal Pictures, 1998; and Autobahn, 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dan Vining began his writing career as a screenwriter on various film and television projects, most between the years of 1985 and 1998. In 2004 his first book was published, a novel titled The Quick, that kicked off a series in the supernatural urban noir genre. Vining introduces a private detective by the name of Jimmy Miles who hides a secret identity—he is a "Sailor," a person who is not dead but not alive, who seems normal to those he meets but needs no food or sleep. In The Quick, Miles takes on a new case that brings him closer to other Sailors, both evil and benign, but does not seem to provide much-needed answers as to his fate. Kevin Lucia described the novel in Bookshelf Reviews as "the perfect blend of eerie, supernatural story-telling and big-city, hard blues detective fiction." Reviewer Harriet Klausner remarked: "Dan Vining has made a niche in the urban noir world that readers will love." A contributor to Publishers Weekly commented that the novel's "neonoir prose sports a refreshing 21st-century hipness."

The second novel in the series, The Next, follows Miles as he is assigned to follow a young woman at risk of killing herself, with the hope of staving off an epidemic of suicides. Klausner wrote that Vining is "one of the few authors who can consistently write great urban noir with a supernatural twist."