David H. Fears Books In Order

Publication Order of Mike Angel Mystery Books

Publication Order of Quentin Romance Books

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

David H. Fears sounds like he probably writes horror. But, in truth, the historian’s career is grounded in mystery. It is there that he is able to explore his love for time periods from previous generations.

+Biography

A native of Portland in Oregon, David H. Fears is an American author with a penchant for stories that take place in the 1960s.

The author first took to writing as a child. By the time he was in first grade, Fears was starting to show some of the symptoms of a potential writer. However, it was until he was in his fifties that Fears began to write fiction.

As an author, David started down the path to publishing when he encountered Mark Twain in 1971. It wasn’t that David H. Fears had never heard of Mark Twain before that point. Rather, he didn’t know that the figure had passed through his hometown in the 1890s.

This was during the earlier days of Mark’s global tour. This piece of knowledge fascinated Fears for reasons even he doesn’t completely understand, and he began to obsess over Mark Twain. This obsession came to a head in the early 2000s when the author began working on a chronological exploration of Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ life.

The result of the undertaking was a four-volume tome that gained enough renown for universities and libraries, not to mention enthusiasts of Mark Twain to begin buying it for quite the hefty price. In fact, you shouldn’t be surprised to find David H. Fears’ volumes in the majority of Ivy League institutions in the United States.

David was initially known for the myriad of short stories he had written over the years. The Mark Twain volumes changed all that, allowing the author to gain notoriety for his historical works. But David eventually returned to his short stories and, in the process of pursuing them, created the Mike Angel books, a series of hard-boiled novels about a Private Investigator in the 1960s.

David started out simply reading and loving Raymond Chandler and his ilk. After a while, Fears began to study the detective novels of his childhood, trying to understand the craft of producing grimy and seemingly artistic mystery thrillers. Eventually, the author graduated to actually writing his own hard boiled novels.

David didn’t plan to extend the series through so many novels. The first four books in the Mike Angel series were just an experiment. But it wasn’t long before he realized just how much fun he had writing Mike Angel’s story.

Fears’ characters completely engrossed him, from the somewhat inept private investigator looking to follow in his father’s footsteps to the former cop helping him learn the ropes and the good woman that is willing to wait until Mike Angel meanders his way back to her.

The author was as interested in seeing the progression of his characters as his readers were. So it comes as no surprise that he has been unable to stop producing the Mike Angel series.

Despite the enthusiasm, writing the Mike Angel series was no picnic for David H. Fears. He had to shed the academic style he had nurtured over the years in order to produce fiction that reads more like a story and less like a lecture.

The author’s earliest novels in the Mike Angel Mystery series clearly suffered from his transition and were criticized for telling rather than showing. Not that the negative reviews swayed Fears who was determined to keep writing and to keep improving his style as he went.

David H. Fears landed on the 1960s as an opportune period within which to set his books because it was such a transformational time; an era where social change was unfolding and corruption was more or less at a peak.

The 1960s were also a simpler less stressful time. The fact that David grew up in the 1960s probably swayed him to the setting. Even though his books are fiction, David does a lot of research for his mysteries.

This is because he prefers basing his stories around real historical events and figures. It is his goal to be as historically accurate as possible. The author will not make things up that do not fit the time period.

And David is never short of ideas for stories. The 1960s were so rife with crime and corruption that every stone the author turns over seems to reveal potential plot elements.

When David H. Fears isn’t writing, there’s always a teaching gig seeking his attention. The author is a father, grandfather and great grandfather.

+Dark Quarry

Mike Angel is a thirty-year old private investigator that is bored with his insurance fraud work. His interest is piqued by a rich friend from college who hires him to follow Joe Ambler, a man that deals in petty blackmail.

Tailing Ambler gets complicated when Mike meets and falls for Kimbra, Ambler’s woman. When Kimbra commits murder, Mike’s infatuation is such that he agrees to help her hide the body. If breaking the law wasn’t bad enough, Mike learns that the man Kimbra killed is related to a feared mob leader, a revelation that is more than a little shocking for Mike.

Things go from bad to worse when Kimbra runs away with Mike’s employer, leaving him to deal with a rapidly evolving situation involving the Cubans and the Russians.

The first book in the Mike Angel series finds David H. Fears writing about murders, seductions, and shootouts. Mike allows the love of a woman to completely upend his life, this while he is still dealing with his father’s unsolved murder.

+Dark Lake

At 32-years of age, Mike is still struggling to learn the ropes of private eye work. Even with the assistance of his father’s former partner, Mike still stumbles. This time, however, it is Molly that gets involved with the wrong sort of people.

And once she is abducted and taken to New Orleans, Mike Angel has no choice but to follow her. With his partner in toe, Mike plunges headlong into a world of prostitution and white slavery as he attempts to rescue his love interest before she is dragged beyond his reach.

The second David H. Fears novels improves upon the first by delving further into Mike Angel’s backstory and putting the people he loves in danger.