John Shannon (novelist)

Moreover, in the Jack Liffey novels, the city of Los Angeles itself maintains an ongoing starring role. Said Crime Time magazine in 2008: "Shannon's entertaining and well-written books, with their investigations of crime, corruption, shady deals, disaster capitalism and fundamentalist culture constitute nothing short of a social history of modern day Los Angeles. About City of Strangers, the Los Angeles Times pronounced: "Shannon dishes out L.A. local color dipped deep in moral sauce." Reviewing The Dark Streets, Publishers Weekly commented: "Shannon once again skillfully dissects the sociocultural landscape of Los Angeles." While the late James Crumley had this to say: “The landscape of Los Angeles, both actually and metaphorically, has been deconstructed by writers from West to Chandler to Didion, but never quite as artfully as John Shannon does it.”

John Shannon has also contributed short stories to the anthologies Murder on the Ropes, Ed. Otto Penzler, New Millennium Press, 2001 and Politics Noir, ed. Gary Phillips, Verso, 2008, and FourStory Magazine.

The hero of Shannon's highly praised mystery series is Jack Liffey, introduced in the first book, The Concrete River (1996), as a laid-off aerospace worker. Depressed by his situation and self-medicating, the introspective, sensitive and quirkily humored Liffey pays for his downward spiral when his wife leaves him, taking with her Maeve, the daughter he adores.

Over the next decades he worked at a newspaper, as a technical writer and video producer. He began his publishing career in 1972 with a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel called The Orphan set in the counterculture of the 1960s.

John Shannon (born 1943) is a contemporary American author, lately of detective fiction. He began his career with four well-reviewed novels in the 1970s and 1980s, then in 1996 launched the Jack Liffey mystery series. He cites as his literary influences Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Graham Greene, Robert Stone and Jim Harrison.