"John Floyd is one of the top voices not just in Mississippi mystery fiction, but in American mystery fiction.--Tom Franklin, author of Poachers and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
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BIOGRAPHY

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John Madison Floyd was raised in Sallis, Mississippi, and attended Kosciusko High School and Mississippi State University. After graduating in Electrical Engineering, he joined IBM Corporation, spent four years in the U.S. Air Force on a military leave-of-absence, and then returned to IBM, where he worked as a systems engineer, marketing representative, and finance industry specialist. He and his wife Carolyn live in Mississippi. 

Since 1994 John's work has appeared in more than 250 different publications. Four of his stories have been named in the "Distinguished Mysteries" list in Otto Penzler's annual Best American Mystery Stories anthologies, and one of his stories, "Molly's Plan," was selected by guest editor James Patterson for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2015. Here's the Kirkus Review and the Publishers Weekly review. Another of his stories, "High Places," appeared in the anthology After Death, which won the 2013 Bram Stoker Award; his story "The Blue Wolf" (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine) earned an Honorable Mention in The World's Best Mystery and Crime Stories 2; and his story "200 Feet" (The Strand Magazine) was nominated for the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Here's a link. John's work has also been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize.

For the past fourteen years John has taught fiction-writing courses in the Continuing Education Department at Millsaps College. He was also a regular (weekly) columnist for four years at the Criminal Brief mystery blog; after it completed its run in 2011 he and several fellow CBers formed SleuthSayers, where he now writes a column every first, third, and fifth Saturday.  

In addition to his hundreds of standalone short stories, John has written four different "series" of mystery shorts. One features bossy retired schoolteacher Angela Potts and her former fifth-grade student Charles "Chunky" Jones, who is now the sheriff of their small southern town. Another series stars amateur crimefighter Frances Valentine and her single daughter Lucy, also a local sheriff. The Angela/Chunky mysteries have appeared regularly in Woman's World magazine for the past fifteen years, and the Fran and Lucy stories (better known as the "Law and Daughter" series) have been featured primarily in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Mysterical-E, and Flash Bang Mysteries.

The first two stories in a mystery series about Pine County sheriff Ray Douglas have been accepted for future issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and the second story in a series starring Old West private detective Will Parker is included in the anthology Coast to Coast: Private Eyes.

In 2006 John signed on with Dogwood Press, which has now published six collections of his short stories: Rainbow's End (2006), Midnight (2008), Clockwork (2010), Deception (2013), Fifty Mysteries: The Angela Files (2014), and  Dreamland (2016).

John's books and stories have been praised by James Patterson, Jan Burke, Douglas Preston, Marcus Sakey, Bill Fitzhugh, Nevada Barr, Steve Hamilton, Carolyn Haines, Bill Crider, Tom Franklin, Jon Breen, and many others.