Elon Green Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Elon Green is a bestselling crime fiction and literary fiction author that is best known for his debut work “Last Call.” The work was published in 2021 and became his breakout novel, earning rave critical reviews and selling thousands of copies.

Aside from his fiction writing his works, he has been a columnist for several prestigious publications over the years. He has written columns for The Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

He has also written short stories for a true crime anthology. Lastly, he has spent more than ten years working at Longform as an editor.

Green first became obsessed with the killings that form the central tenet of his work, since he had been writing about it for newspapers and magazines for a while.

There was a lot of material to go through and he interviewed Mavis Staples several times to try to discover what was happening in 1962 at the height of the killings.

Part of it that was very exciting to Elon was that the victims and perpetrators in the killing were pretty much unknown in the public consciousness.
He believed that the huge amount of work that needed to be put in to flesh out their loves would be tremendously satisfying. He also believed that he could always find something interesting in anyone’s life if he looked hard enough.

For the victims in the killing, he found them very disparate and hence even more interesting.

There was an astonishing panorama of gay life in the victims who lost their lives to a deranged killer. This only meant that he had plenty to write about which he considered a real gift.

As for his sources, Elon Green has said that he was lucky enough to have an open field when he began his research. Most of the people that had been involved from the friends and family of the victims to the investigators happened to still be alive.

Moreover, hardly anyone had talked to them in more than two decades. As such, when he got into contact with them many of them were very willing to tell their story.

Once he developed a relationship with investigators and other sources, many people started volunteering the information that he needed. Still, nothing that he wrote in the novel came from any of the official sources out there.

His requests for information were rejected by everyone from New Jersey, Rockland Country, the NYPD, and New York.

Once Elon Green began writing his novel, he focused on the victims as that is all he wanted to do. It seemed that they would be the engine of his book that would get him published if it came to that.

He did not have any interest in the killer and in fact, the draft which he sold to the publisher Macmillan did not have a single chapter on the murderer. He would, later on, add a chapter on the killer out of necessity.

He did his research on the killer when he was doing his proposal but he did not think it was necessary. He had a lot of information including the binder that prosecutors used in the trial.

In the binder were the accused’s vacation slides, personal calendar, credit card records, work calendar, and what was essentially a timeline of his life.

Elon Green’s novel “Last Call” is a gripping true story that tells of a deranged killer and the New York City gay community that he targeted. The work is set in July 1992 at the midtown-based Townhouse Bar.

The exceptional piano player seems to be familiar with every song you could think of and the crowd has been singing along all night.

But here is a nondescript man next to the piano player drinking water and Scotch. He looks inconspicuous and bland and nothing like a serial killer but he happens to be one of the most dangerous around.

This night his target is a gray-haired man though this is not his first and most definitely will not be his last.

The Last Call Killer was one of the most dangerous killers that targetted New York’s gay men during the 90s and 80s which made him one of the most feared serial killers.

But given the AIDS epidemic, the soaring murder rates, and the sexuality of his targets his work and his victims were almost entirely forgotten.

It is a compelling crime story that tells the story of an interesting killer and how law enforcement spent several decades trying to find him.

At the same time, it also paints a picture of a vibrant community and his victims who navigated perilous times with much resilience.