Carolyn Hart is an American mystery author who specializes in traditional mysteries, also known as cozy mysteries. She was born in Oklahoma in 1936.
Biography
Hart was born Carolyn Gimpel and was raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where she still lives. She attended Cleveland Elementary School, Taft Junior High School, and Classen High School. At the age of 11, Hart decided that she wanted to be a newspaper reporter. She worked on school papers beginning in grade school, continuing all the way through her college years. Hart is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Oklahoma, where she majored in journalism. Hart met her husband Philip while traveling in Europe during her junior year in college. After graduation while her husband attended law school, Hart worked as a newspaper reporter for The Norman Transcript. She gave up journalism after the birth of her son, Philip Jr. In 1964, the year her daughter Sarah was born, Hart won a writing contest calling for a mystery novel that would appeal to adolescent girls, sponsored by Dodd, Mead and Calling All Girls. She went on to write several more young adult mysteries between 1965 and 1972. From 1972 to 1987, she wrote nine stand-alone suspense novels and mysteries, which had only modest success. Until the publication of mystery novels by Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton, publishers had little interest in mysteries written by contemporary American female writers; the success of these authors, however, opened the door for Hart's Death on Demand, which became the first in a long-running series of the same nam. Hart's stand-alone World War II novel Letter from Home was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers at Oklahoma State University–Tulsa. She has twice appeared as one of the featured mystery authors at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
Awards
Hart has won awards throughout her four-decade writing career.
Mystery Writers of America Grand Master 2014
Agatha Award – nine nominations and three wins
Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original – five nominations and two wins
Macavity Award for Best Paperback Original – two wins
Ridley Pearson Award for significant contribution to the mystery field
Hart's first commercially successful adult mystery series features Annie Laurance, proprietor of the Death on Demand bookstore, located in the fictional South Carolina island community of Broward's Rock. By using a mystery bookstore for her background, Hart has given her characters the opportunity to talk freely about other mystery authors and books. One of the ongoing themes of the series is a contest whereby the first customer who correctly identifies a series of five mysteries from the clues in a painting hanging in the shop wins his or her choice of a novel.
Hart's Henrie O mysteries feature 70-something retired newswoman, Henrie O'Dwyer Collins, as she travels the country and the world, solving crimes that seem to follow her as she travels. Henrie gets by on her grit, tenacity, and sensible shoes.
Hart's newest protagonist, the ghost of a woman killed at sea who returns to earth via the "Rescue Express" to help her fictional hometown of Adelaide, Oklahoma while trying not to violate the Precepts for Earthly Visitation and adjusting to her powers on earth.
