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I've read several of his books but never knew he was from Iowa. FWIW, I live next to the city of Davenport.

https://www.desmoinesregister....-flowers/3820030002/

Iowan John Sandford read 126 books from the Cedar Rapids library one summer. Now he's a best-selling author of more than 50 thrillers

Courtney Crowder, Des Moines Register
Published 6:06 p.m. CT Sept. 30, 2019 | Updated 6:44 p.m. CT Sept. 30, 2019

Before author and Iowan John Sandford could write, he so marveled at his father’s book of Grimm’s Fairytales and its intricate markings — a secret language known only to adults — that he would scribble backwards, disjointed letters in the blank back pages, hoping his mimicry could be the key to understanding the mysteries that lay between its covers.

Now a New York Times best-selling author of more than 50 books and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Sandford has since mastered the riddles of the English language, but he’s never lost the reverence or wonder for words he discovered that day in the shadow of his dad’s book collection.

“It was the great discovery of my life,” Sandford said, taking a break from fishing in New Mexico, where he currently lives. “My life has taken some unusual turns, but reading has always been a steady passion, as have libraries.”

The Des Moines Public Library Foundation will honor Sandford’s zeal and his oeuvre, which includes four series and a handful of fiction and nonfiction one-offs, with the Iowa Author Award during a gala Tuesday.

In a live interview with me, Sandford will discuss some of those “unusual turns” — like how he won a Pulitzer after less than two decades in newspapers — as well as those passions — like how he built a special library to hold his more than 1000-tome art and photography book collection. He'll also detail how he became the principal financial backer of the Beth-Shean Valley Archaeological Project in the Jordan River Valley and where he is in his unending search for the perfect keyboard. (The keys have to have the right “clickiness,” he tells me.)

For Sandford, whose given surname is Camp, this award was particularly meaningful because of the monumental role that libraries — whether personal ones like his father’s selection or the Cedar Rapids public branches — played in guiding him through life's vicissitudes.

On his first day of kindergarten, the nuns at Sandford’s Cedar Rapids Catholic school trotted him and his classroom of nascent learners out to a brightly colored but odd-looking bus he’d soon learn was called a bookmobile.

“They issued all of us kindergarteners library cards, and that meant that we could get books,” Sandford said. That moment “was absolutely critical. I'm serious about that; that's not bull----. I'd be a lawyer if there hadn't been libraries.”

His love of reading was cemented during the summer before high school when the Cedar Rapids library issued young readers a challenge: Get a figurine for every 10 books you finish. Sandford, an over-achiever in the most classic of senses, plowed through 126 books that season.

“I still remember that I was reading two or three books a day sometimes,” he said. “And that's really what made me into a writer.”

Sandford became a University of Iowa Hawkeye twice, separating the time between his bachelor’s and master’s by a stint in the U.S. Army and a year at a small paper in Missouri.

If the bookmobile was the source of his love of reading, his deployment to Korea was the moment he became forever ink-stained. Before getting his number called, his plan was to go to law school, but the army sent him to journalism school and “it was like a perfect fit.”

“I loved reporting,” he said. “I wanted to be the best possible reporter I could be.”

After graduate school, he joined the Miami Herald as a crime and government reporter. Despite a nose for hard news, he always felt the pull of lyrical writing.

“I wanted to be a feature writer, but unfortunately the feature writer, the guy who really kind of had a feature writer slot there nailed down was Carl Hiaasen,” Sandford said. “So that was kind of tough competition.”

He also felt pulled back to the Middle West, so after about seven years he started looking for a staff writer job up north.

He applied at the Des Moines Register, but “those a—holes” would not hire me, he said with a hearty laugh. Where the Register misstepped, the St. Paul Pioneer Press didn’t, hiring him as a feature writer and a columnist.

In 1980, two years into his assignment in Minnesota, Sandford was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a series on Native American life in the North Star State. Six years later, Sandford won the highest award in journalism for his yearlong dive into the life of an American farm family facing the '80s farm crisis, then the worst agricultural recession since the Depression.

But after the fete was over and the metaphorical ticker-tape cleaned up, Sandford found himself right back in the grind of daily newspapers.

“I'm still doing tornadoes and I'm still driving like a maniac out wherever and covering stories,” he said. “I mean, two years after the Pulitzer, I was standing out in Yellowstone as the place burned down, and I was away from my family a lot doing stuff like that.”

Thinking back on it, the Pulitzer “was sort of like a period for the whole sequence.” He had seen that mountaintop and now knew he needed to try a different adventure.

He hadn’t ever written personal work on the side, but he readied himself for the long haul that penning a book would be by starting in nonfiction. He wrote a series on plastic surgery for the Pioneer Press that he turned into a book, and he picked up a commission from an Illinois museum for a volume of John Stuart Ingle.

Finally, as the decade switched from the '80s to the '90s, Sandford made the jump, leaving the newspaper world to become a full-time author. He set-up a little office in his home and trained himself to write every day without the pressures of a deadline, and, most importantly, to revise.

“With writing fiction, it helps to be a little bit OCD, because you keep going back and you keep adding stuff and you keep working it,” he said, offering that he will revisit the first chapter of a book 30 or 40 times before he feels content with the flow.

The first book he wrote was — wait for it — a feminist science-fiction novel about fur trappers. Upon receiving the manuscript, his agent pointed out that the readers who like sci-fi are probably not going to be interested in the survival storylines of the fur trappers, and readers of outdoor books aren’t going to like the satellite operators’ science talk, and the feminists aren’t going to like the macho culture of either group.

“’Everybody’s going to hate your book. Who’s going to read it, John?’” he remembered his agent saying.

Needless to say, that book did not get published. But he did learn the cardinal rule of fiction writing: The first book you pen probably sucks.

“It’s a very valuable experience going through and writing it, but when it’s done, you have to get rid of it and do a completely different book,” he said. “Those were your training wheels. You want to learn how to ride the bike, you've got to go through that.”

So Sandford went back to the drawing board, and, this time, he leaned on his previous career and started working in the thriller/mystery genre.

As a crime reporter, Sandford had been to his share of gruesome scenes, written about criminal investigations and sat through the tedium of trials.

“When you write a thriller and somebody gets shot, I know what that looks like, and I know what it smells like, and I know what the hospital guys do, and I know what the hospital routine is,” he said. “I know what cops talk like; I’ve been in any number of police stations.”

Although he regularly wields old lessons from the newsroom, Sandford, ever the reporter, also puts in good old-fashioned shoe leather when stories call for it. In his newest book, “Bloody Genius,” which comes out Tuesday, Sandford visited the real Minneapolis homicide unit to be able to best describe the imitation one he creates in his book.

“I talked to the cops in the homicide unit and so the description that you get there of the Minneapolis City Hall and the Minneapolis Homicide Unit is accurate,” he said. “You could go there, and you would see what I wrote.”

As with nearly everything in this world, a lot has changed in the crime writing universe since 1990. Cell phones, laptops and the internet have irrevocably altered how crimes are committed and investigated, and DNA advances have made killers less slippery.

“It used to be three (guys) standing around staring at a body with the newspaper reporters standing right behind them,” Sandford said. “And now it's guys in white Tyvek suits and booties going into the place because they don't want to disturb the DNA.”

But even as the world changes, Sandford’s passion remains the same. He’s a reader first, a writer very close second and third a lover of studying art, music, history, fishing and the joys of life.

To be as prolific as he is, Sandford doesn’t do a lot of book touring or award accepting. But when Iowa came calling, he had to say yes, if only to honor the teen who read 126 books and the nascent gradeschooler amazed by the bookmobile.

And, of course, the tot who wanted so badly to understand the secrets inside Grimm’s Fairytales, that he wrote his own in its margins — blissfully unaware those childish markings would set Sandford down a path that has finally led him back home.


To learn more about the Iowa Author Award or your local library, visit DMPL.org. To learn more about John Sandford, visit johnsandford.org
 
Posts: 15898 | Location: Eastern Iowa | Registered: May 21, 2000Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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I enjoy Sanford's work quite a bit. I just downloaded Bloody Genius from Audible this morning. I tend to like the Virgil Flowers novels a little better, and my wife leans toward the Lucas Davenport ones.

It's funny that he was on staff at the Miami Herald with Carl Hiaasen. I enjoy his novels, also.

Thanks for posting the article Smile
 
Posts: 4524 | Location: Mississippi | Registered: December 08, 1999Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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I keep hoping for a decent Davenport / Flowers movie.
The Mark Harmon one stunk.


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Posts: 16005 | Location: Marquette MI | Registered: July 08, 2014Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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I've read quite a few of his books, the whole Flowers series. Really enjoy them, they move right along, never boring.


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Posts: 3388 | Location: Utah's Dixie | Registered: January 29, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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I'm listening to Twisted Prey currently on the Overdrive App.

Good books. I do prefer the Flowers series a little bit over the Lucas Davenport ones.


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Posts: 727 | Location: Raleigh, NC | Registered: May 15, 2015Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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