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Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Biography

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

A professional writer for more than 40 years, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has sold over 80 books, more than 70 works of short fiction, and more than three dozen essays, introductions and reviews. She also composes serious music. Her first professional writing --- in 1961-1962 --- was as a playwright for a now long-defunct children's theater company. By the mid-60s she had switched to writing stories and hasn't stopped yet.

After leaving college in 1963 and until she became a full-time writer in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and still often drafts maps for her books, and occasionally for the books of other writers.

She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly, searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder for stories.

In 1997 the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006 the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.

A skeptical occultist for 40 years, she has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.

She has two domestic accomplishments: she is a good cook and an experienced seamstress. The rest is catch-as-catch-can.

Divorced, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area --- with two cats: the irrepressible Butterscotch and Crumpet, the Gang of Two. When not busy writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Books by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery, Paranormal Mystery

It’s been three months since crime reporter Poppy Thornton was left to die in an abandoned warehouse by her cousin Stacy, chief suspect in a high society murder. Rescued by the quick thinking of Chesterton Holte and Police Inspector J.B. Loring, Poppy is determined to get the real story and see justice done. But Stacy has fled Philadelphia with the widow of the man he is accused of murdering, and now an international manhunt is on for the suspected conspirators. Meanwhile, Poppy, Holte and Loring have a new mystery: the disappearance of GAD Pearce, 18-year-old heir to the Pearce fortune, who has vanished while traveling through Eastern Europe. The suspects range from the young man’s jealous siblings to a mysterious cult of Armenian refugees.

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery, Paranormal Mystery

Poppy Thornton is determined to make a name for herself as a serious crime reporter, but is stuck reporting on garden parties and ladies' fashion. Then one day, her editor assigns her to collect background information on the suicide of a prominent businessman. She soon discovers it was actually a murder...but her surprising source for this information is the ghost of a man killed alongside her father during the Great War. As their investigation into a string of murders narrows in on an all-too-familiar suspect, Poppy becomes a target herself and wonders if her ghost of a partner will appear in time to keep her from joining him in the afterlife.

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Fiction, Historical Fantasy, Historical Thriller

The powerful House Un-American Activities Committee hunted communists both at home and abroad. In the late 1940s, the vampire Count Saint-Germain is caught up in intrigue surrounding a group of Americans who have fled to postwar Paris. He swears to do his best to protect his friends, but even his skills may not be able to stand against agents of the OSS and the brand-new CIA. And he has an unexpected weakness: his lover, Charis, who has returned to Paris under mysterious circumstances.