LidStevenKeyMeyers

I was born on a farm near Grand Junction, Colorado, raised in various Midwestern and Eastern locales, and now live in rural Indiana. I earned degrees in English literature at The City College of New York--a terrific school!--and at Columbia University.

My working career began at the age of 17 as underbutler at Caramoor, the famous estate in New York's Westchester County; my experience there, where the inventor of the Theremin throve in the 1930s, contributed to the title piece of my latest (2015) book, "My Mad Russian: Three Tales," whose narrator is the patron of a Theremin-like figure.

My novel "Good People," based on my experiences working for the owner of New York's hottest comedy club at the height of the great '80s boom, was published in 2010, followed by "All That Money" in 2011; "All That Money" was inspired by the second-most-famous kidnapping of the 1930s, that of heiress Alice Speed Stoll. 2012 saw publication of "New York/Siena," which includes the two short novels "The Man Who Owned New York," dramatizing the longest-running scam in America, the so-called Edwards Estate, and "Springtime in Siena." In 2013 my biographical study, "The Man in the Balloon: Harvey Joiner's Wondrous 1877," about the fascinating, once-famous painter, appeared, as did my novel "Queer's Progress," about two young men in New York City and their mentor. "The Wedding on Big Bone Hill," fruit of my years living in a motor home, came out in 2014. Next up will be the short novel "Gone Goose," about Indiana's current heroin epidemic. My work in progress is a long novel called "Family Romance."