Author Steve Hockensmith

To some readers, author Steve Hockensmith, 42, is best-known for his mystery series featuring cowboy detectives Otto "Big Red" Amlingmeyer and Gustav "Old Red" Amlingmeyer. Holmes on the Range, the first in the series, was a finalist for several major awards, including the Edgar and Shamus awards. Other readers know him as the author of the Dawn of the Dreadfuls, the prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Since 2007, Hockensmith and his family have called Alameda home. Tired of his beard and other body parts freezing in Chicago winters, Hockensmith and his wife Martha headed west, living first in Kentfield and Petaluma before settling in Alameda, which they chose for the schools and opportunities for family-friendly activities. They have two children, ages 7 and 4.

Growing up in Evansville, Indiana, Hockensmith recalls being a bit of the class clown. He studied Journalism at Indiana University in Bloomington. After college, he worked as a writer for a variety of companies in Chicago. Then, during a stint of unemployment, he wrote his first novel—which did not sell. Neither did the second one. His third was Holmes on the Range.

What were you like as a kid? I was a goofball. I was not the stoic individual I am today.

Tell me about your early glamorous life as an entertainment reporter. When I was in college studying journalism, I knew I was not destined to be Woodward and Bernstein. I didn't have a lot of interest in doing journalism with a lot of social value! I liked fun stuff like movies and TV and comic books. So I stayed at the Arts and Entertainment desk all four years of college. Thanks to that, I got an internship at People.

Who did you meet? Nobody famous because I was the intern!

When did you switch to short stories and novels? In the mid-1990s. I had a job in Chicago at YMCA communications. Very nice people, very boring job. I was not very satisfied by the sort of writing I was doing there. I had dabbled with writing fiction as a kid so I started experimenting with that again. I first started writing science fiction and it took me three years before I realized I really sucked at it. What I wrote was very bad.

How did you become the writer you are today? My plan was I would do short fiction, learn the craft and then build it into something. There were mystery magazines, Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, so I figured I could start writing short stories, they could be bad, and it'd be no big loss because it only takes a couple of weeks to write one. I wrote a few that were pretty bad and then I wrote one and it sold.

What was it called? Erie's Last Day. It was a great first step into the mystery world. After that, I started selling pretty regularly to both those magazines.

I get the impression that you're pretty disciplined as a writer from the picture of your writing schedule you have posted on your blog. Is that true? I need to see my progress every day. If I didn't have that, I'd feel lost. At the beginning [of writing a novel] you're excited and you go into with energy and hope. Then that is crushed at about the halfway mark. And then the excitement comes back when the end is in sight and you can see everything coming together.

Sort of like child birth? Yes, though I've been told many times that I'm not allowed to say 'I know what you mean!' I can imagine though that might be true.

Where did the idea for Holmes on the Range come from? When I was still writing for mystery magazines, I wrote a piece for Ellery Queen which does theme issues, one of which is a Sherlock Holmes tribute issue. My dad was a huge Sherlock Holmes fan so I had been exposed to the canon.

I had no interest in doing a story in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years, I've learned that my strength is writing in this very American, colloquial style which doesn't lend itself to a John Watson-style narrative.

The idea came when my wife Mar and I were out hiking in Marin around Mt. Tam. She was communing with nature and thinking about being one with the universe. And I was thinking about how to sell a story to Ellery Queen! There was something about being in the great outdoors in the West. It occurred to me that the Victorian Era which we associate with Sherlock Holmes and what we called the Wild West are the same era really. Chronologically, they overlap.

What's coming up? The fifth Holmes on the Range novel is coming out in January. It's called The World's Greatest Sleuth! In March, the sequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes out. It's called Dreadfully Ever After.

What do you do to refill that creative well? I find the thing that's important to me is to have some me time every day. I relax, get myself a nice drink, maybe read or watch a bit of a movie or little TV.