Jeremiah Healy

Jeremiah Healy was an American detective mystery author best known for the “John Francis Cuddy” series of thrillers. Healy was a former military police captain and sheriff’s officer. He went to Rutgers College and proceeded to Harvard, where he studied law and went on to practice and teach at the New England School of Law in Boston for nearly two decades. His debut novel was “Blunt Darts”, which first came out in 1984. The lead in the novel was one of detective fiction’s most favorite characters, John Francis Cuddy, a private investigator who plies his trade in Boston. Cuddy is violent though moral and honest man, who solves cases that the judicial system has failed to deal with. The character has made it into most of Healy’s novels and collections short stories, fifteen of which have won or made the shortlist for the Shamus Award. With Healy achieving so much success in the genre, he served as International Association of Crime Writers President during the eighties, and headed the Private Eye Writers of America at one time. He has also been a chair of the Edgar and Shamus Award committees and been on the Mystery Writers of America National Board of Directors. He has also given speeches on crime mystery writing at the Boston Globe Book Festival, the Literature Series at the Smithsonian Institute, and the Sorbonne in Paris among several other conferences and workshops. Several of his novels have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and French. He committed suicide in 2014 after a long battle with alcoholism and clinical depression.