Michael Z. Lewin

Michael Zinn Lewin (born 1942, Springfield, Massachusetts) is an American writer of mystery fiction primarily known for his series about Albert Samson, a distinctly non-hardboiled private detective who plies his trade from a modest walk-up apartment in Indianapolis, Indiana. Lewin himself grew up in Indianapolis, but after graduating from Harvard and living for a few years in New York City, has lived in England for the last 40 years. Most of his fiction, however, continues to be set in Indianapolis, including a secondary series featuring Leroy Powers, a black policeman who frequently appears in the Samson novels, generally in a semi-confrontational manner. The Samson stories are told in the breezy first-person narrative form typical of private-eye novels and are witty, off-beat for both their plotting and their somewhat unusual setting, as well as for the somewhat off-beat personal life that Samson leads with his mother and a long-time but nameless occasional girlfriend whom he refers to as "my woman". Although the stories start off in modest, understated fashion about seemingly trivial domestic matters, they eventually escalate to scenes of startling violence. Of major importance in the stories is the locale itself, the city of Indianapolis and its surrounding countryside, and Samson is certainly one of the most important of the regional detectives in mystery fiction, as well as being one of the very first.