Ed Protzel

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, the product of a Jewish father and part-Cherokee mother. I lived for a time in an orphanage when my parents divorced and left home after high school to live in St. Louis’ bohemian Gaslight Square entertainment district. These experiences gave me a unique perspective, which is apparent in many of my fictional characters — outsiders and gamesters, male and female, on lonely, often deadly, quests, seeking justice, love, and fulfillment against society’s blindness.

I knew I had a knack for creating devious plot twists, complex characters with diverse points of view, often told by characters of color, and multi-layered structures. So that’s where I focused my efforts. I began writing novels and screenplays while in college and, over the years, worked on them in my spare time as I took job after job in securities management (that’s another story). Despite these obstacles, I kept my eye on becoming a professional writer, earning a master’s in English literature/creative writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. At one point, I pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles to see if I could make it in Hollywood. I did some freelance work for 20th Century Fox and received an option on an original screenplay. But I couldn’t abide Hollywood’s hyper-Darwinism.

So I pivoted from screenwriting to novels, which proved a good decision. To date, I’ve had four novels published and I am working on a fifth. I still live and write in St. Louis, where I follow Blues Hockey and Cardinals Baseball (which hopefully will resume play one day soon)