About Michael Amedeo

Is it possible to get somewhere—to get anywhere—from Nowheresville? 

My early experience suggested a dark answer. At age sixteen, I dropped out of high school and spent the next two years trapped in a succession of low-pay, no-challenge jobs.

Only boredom saved me. For the first time in my life, I started filling the long, empty hours with reading. I discovered I liked it and soon even loved it. I regularly read The New Yorker and The New York Times. Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. The New Republic and National Review. Newsweek and Film Comment. And piles and piles of novels, biographies, and histories. The reading served as a passport to new worlds and new ambitions. I soon earned my GED and went off to college.

I shocked myself by then graduating with a BA in Political Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in only three years (just 41 percent of all college graduates finish in as few as four years).

I performed so well academically that I managed to get accepted for graduate study at the intellectually demanding University of Chicago. But what I couldn’t understand was this: How in the world did this high-school dropout end up in that rarefied place? I guessed it had something to do with my newly discovered penchant for hard work and talent for writing.  

After earning my MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago, I took on the Pentagon—I joined the Defense Intelligence Agency as an Intelligence Research Specialist. I soon realized that bureaucracy, even the high-end kind, wasn’t where I wanted to be. I was a creative wordsmith—and there wasn’t anything Top Secret about that.

I closed the file on intelligence work and took on copywriting, first for the storied publisher Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation and then for a series of young and aggressive ad agencies. I conceived and wrote campaigns that attracted attention and moved readers and viewers to swift action. Five of my campaigns won awards. Some of my campaigns boosted and branded name clients such as Homewood Suites, Bank One, and JPMorgan Chase.

Now what? I decided to spend some quality time in journalism. I wrote articles for several different magazines and newspapers. Film and sometimes theatre critic became my role at the dynamic Chicago newspaper New City. I also wrote features for the Chicago Daily Southtown and the Chicago-Sun-Times, the latter focusing on film, including several articles on my favorite genre, the hardboiled film noir.

My background in journalism gave me insight into writing effective public relations content, including press releases, speeches, and op-eds. I wrote about—and pitched—financial services, residential real estate, healthcare, charity fundraising, and, again, film noir (for Questar, the producer of “5 Film Noir Killer Classics,” a collection of great noirs in the public domain).

When Covid invaded our shores, I feared that we all might soon reach the end, what great novelist Raymond Chandler called “The Big Sleep” or “The Long Goodbye.” It seemed a good time to once more court new challenges and go places I’d never been before. And so I wrote fiction, penning two mysteries—“Fade to Black” and “Past Tense”—about a 1940’s and 50’s private dick named Matt Moulton, whose work takes him to the dirty and violent underside of that era’s America. You know, the America we like to wax nostalgic about. But forget about that: My stories don’t reminisce. They reimagine the classic hardboiled noir genre, offering a modern flash into the postwar darkness. 

Of course, unlike me, my stoic and antiheroic Moulton isn’t necessarily trying to get anywhere in life. To this cynical dick, everywhere is Nowheresville. But there’s one part of his hardboiled philosophy I totally agree with: If you’re going to do something, do it well and—above all—do it with style. That’s how I approach writing. Indeed, it’s that approach that gives my work an edge. But beware: The edge is razor-sharp effective.