Quick Facts
Biography
Michael Jecks (born 1960, Surrey) is an English writer of historical mystery novels.
Early life
The son of an actuary, and the fourth of four brothers, Jecks worked in the computer industry before becoming a novelist full-time in 1994 after he was fired from his last position. He, his wife, daughter and son live in northern Dartmoor.
Career
Jecks has written a series of novels featuring Sir Baldwin Furnshill, a former Knight Templar, and his friend Simon Puttock, Bailiff of Lydford Castle. He founded The Medieval Murderers, a speaking and entertainment group of historical writers including Bernard Knight, Ian Morson, Susanna Gregory, Phillip Gooden and CJ Sansom. The group has developed to collaborate on their books written as linked novellas, each book with a consistent theme, under the brand of The Medieval Murderers. More recently he helped create the Historical Writers' Association.
A member of the Society of Authors and Royal Literary Society, Jecks was the Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association in 2004–05. In 2005 he became a member of the Detection Club. From 1998 he organised the CWA Debut Dagger competition for two years, helping unpublished authors to win their first contracts. He was shortlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculiar Best Novel of the Year prize in 2007. He also judged the CWA/Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for three years.
Jecks speaks at literary festivals and historical meetings, at which he talks with Ian Mortimer, the historian, as well as Medieval Murderers. He helped create the Conway Stewart Detection Collection with a pen named for him. In 2014 he was the Grand Master of the Krewe of Little Rascals parade, the first paradeof the New Orleans Mardi Gras. In the same year he was invited to be the International Guest of Honour at the Toronto Bloody Words Festival.
Jecks has embarked on a trilogy of Hundred Years' War stories with Simon and Schuster UK. The first, Fields of Glory, was published in 2014. The second, Blood on the Sand, was published in June 2015. He also has a modern spy thriller published with Kindle, Act of Vengeance, and two short story collections: No One Can Hear You Scream and For The Love of Old Bones.