After spending his formative years helping run a cottage resort and trailer park after his father died when he was 16, Linwood Barclay got his first newspaper job at the
Peterborough Examiner, a small Ontario daily. In 1981, he joined the
Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper. He held such positions as assistant city editor, chief copy editor, news editor, and Life section editor, before becoming the paper’s humour columnist in 1993. He was one of the paper’s most popular columnists before retiring from the position in 2008 to work exclusively on books.
Between 1996 and 2000 be published four non-fiction books, including a memoir about growing up in cottage country,
Last Resort, which was shortlisted for the
Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
In 2004, he launched his mystery series about an anxiety-ridden, know-it-all, pain-in-the-butt father by the name of Zack Walker.
Bad Move, the first book, was followed by three more Zack Walker thrillers:
Bad Guys,
Lone Wolf, and
Stone Rain.
His first standalone thriller,
No Time for Goodbye, was published in 2007 to critical acclaim and great international success. It was the single best selling novel in the UK in 2008, selling more than 600,000 copies. Before that, it topped bestseller lists in Germany. No Time for Goodbye has been sold around the world and is being translated into nearly three dozen languages. And Eric McCormack, who was Will in the television hit comedy Will & Grace, has optioned the book for film.
No Time for Goodbye has been followed by
Too Close to Home, a major bestseller in the UK,
Fear the Worst, and in 2010,
Never Look Away. Linwood is putting the finishing touches to Only Death is Real, the novel that will come out in 2011. Linwood was born in the United States but moved to Canada just before turning four years old when his father, a commercial artist whose illustrations of cars appeared in Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post (before photography took over), accepted a position with an advertising agency north of the border.
Linwood, who obtained an Honours B.A. in English at
Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, was fortunate to have some very fine mentors; in particular, the celebrated Canadian author Margaret Laurence, whom Linwood first met when she served as writer-in-residence at Trent, and Kenneth Millar, who, under the name Ross Macdonald, wrote the acclaimed series of mystery novels featuring detective Lew Archer.
It was at Trent that he met the woman who would become his wife. He and Neetha, who teaches kindergarten, have been married for more than 30 years. They have two children, Spencer and Paige.
