Gaylord Dold was born in Kansas and raised in southern California. He graduated from the University of Kansas, the University of California, and the London School of Economics.

Dold is the co-founder and managing editor of Watermark Press, which published regional authors like Thomas Fox Averill's Seeing Mona Naked, as well as writers from all over the world. Watermark book Leaving Las Vegas, by John O'Brien later became a film directed by Mike Leigh, starring Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Schue.

Dold has taken time off to travel and write books in the Caribbean, the South Pacific and the Western Rockies.

He currently lives in Wichita, Kansas.

Crime Novels:

• Jack's Boy: An Alcoholic Childhood (Amazon Digital Services, 2014)
• The Moon When Water Freezes (Amazon Digital Services, 2014)
• The Last Man in Berlin (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2003)
  
• Six White Horses (Minotaur Books, 2002)
  
• The Devil To Pay (Thomas Dunne Books, 1999)
  
• Schedule Two (St. Martins Press, 1996)
  
• Bay of Sorrows (St. Martins Press, 1995)
  

Travel Guides:

• The Rough Guide to The Bahamas (Rough Guides, 2007)
• Dominican Republic (Moon Handbooks, 2001)

The Mitch Roberts Series:

• Samedi's Knapsack (Minotaur Books, 2001)
• The World Beat (St. Martins Press, 1993/20013)
• Rude Boys (St Martins Press, 1992/2013)
  
• A Penny for the Old Guy (St. Martins Press, 1991/2013)
  
• Dishelved City (Ivy Books, 1990/2013)
  
• Muscle and Blood (Ivy Books, 1989/2013)
  
• Bonepile (Ivy Books, 1988/2013)
  
• Cold Cash (Ivy Books, 1987/2013)
  
• Snake Eyes (Ivy Books, 1987/2013)
  
• Hot Summer, Cold Murder (Avon Books, 1987/2013)

The Jack Kilgore Series
(Available through Premier Digital Publishing)

• The Swarming Stage (2014)
• Same Old Sun, Same Old Moon (2013)
  
• The Nickel Jolt (2013)
  

The body lay face up in a dark cul-de-sac, eight meters off the Hirrenstrasse. The area--near Alexanderplatz police headquarters--was a communist neightborhood of brick tenements and wooden slums. Barlach would never have noticed the corpse had he not stepped away from the street to piss.

It had been a blustery fall day, followed by an unseasonably cold night. A Baltic front had crossed Berlin, and the first star-shaped chesnut leaves began to scissor down from the trees along Prenzlauerstrasse where Oberwachtmeister Fritz Barlach was on patrol. Barlach had been a beat-cop for six years, most of them on the streets of Scheunenviertel, a tough working-class precinct dominated by Marxists and unemployed thugs.

He had waited out the rain under a tobacconist's awning on Prenzlauer. Wearing the blue woolen uniform of a Schupo, a faded blue lightweight raincoat, and black boots with heavy gum soles, he lit a cigarette and cursed himself for running low on tobacco. For the thousandth time in six years, he surveyed the grim street.
---from The Last Man in Berlin

Palmer surfed for a year, then joined the Marines. After basic he was lucky enough to be stationed at Pendelton, not far from home. He did duty as a shavetail rifleman, then got bumped to Shore Patrol, walking duty around ordnance and supply depots. Palmer marched his beat carrying a loaded weapon, spent weeknights watching TV with the guys, weekends wandering around Oceanside, surging when he could, hitting the bars but not drinking much. Palmer heard about the Gulf War at the same time he met Suzanne near Oceanside pier, at a place called, of all things, The Sugar Shack.

When it happened, Palmer was halfway out on the pier. It was a cool summer night, the kind of foggy damp weather Palmer loved. He was watching fishermen cast for bass and bonito, enjoying the play of colored light against a backdrop of town, his senses alive with the thought of Suzanne, even though she was at work. He had been on the pier about twenty minutes when he saw a Shore Patrol detail working its way up-pier: two men in blue uniforms, a staff sergeant named Wilde, another Palmer didn't know. When they got to Palmer, he nodded, but Harry Wilde said, "Turn around, Marine, that's an order."

Palmer had a moment of foreboding, then let it drop. He knew Harry Wilde. He turned and put his arms against the pier railing. A few breakers were crashing a jetty two hundred yards south, perhaps the makings of a Pacific storm, surfing material deluxe. Palmer felt his mouth go as dry as cotton.

"It's Corporal Palmer," he said.

"Just Relax, Palmer" Wilde told him. "Put your arms out wide, Corporal."
---from Six White Horses

• Gaylord's Website
• The Wichita Eagle (2013)
• The Thrilling Detective Web Site (Mitch Roberts)
• Vimeo (The Trail of Mitch Roberts)