A native of Paterson, New Jersey, Edna Buchanan announced at age four that she planned to write books when she grew up. She couldn’t read yet, but her mother read to her and Edna was already hooked on stories. Edna’s first job was in a coat factory at age 12. Eventually she and her mother worked together in building switchboards at Western Electric. For their first vacation they went to Miami Beach, and for Edna it was love at first sight.
Her first job in Miami was at a small newspaper. Perfect, Edna thought. She would support herself by writing for the newspaper while working on the great American novel. She didn’t realize that the daily whirlwind of journalism can swallow up one’s entire life leaving no time to read a novel, much less write one. At the Miami Beach Daily Sun she covered local politics, courts, and police, interviewed celebrities, took pictures, picked the greyhound races for the sports department, wrote a column, obits, and -- the letters to the editor when the readers did not.
Five years and numerous awards later, she joined the Miami Herald, one of the nation’s great newspapers. After a year on general assignment and a year on the criminal court beat, Edna suggested that a reporter should visit the police departments, the jail and the morgue each day. Her editor thought she was volunteering, and to her shock, Edna found herself covering the cops. In her years on the police beat she reported more than 5,000 violent deaths… 3,000 of them homicides. She won the Society of Professional Journalists Green Eye Shade Award for deadline reporting.
Edna Buchanan won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for 10 unrelated police beat stories out of more than 200 that she wrote that year. She also won the Paul Hansell Award for Distinguished Journalism from the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, the Florida Bar Association Media Award, the American Bar Association Gavel Award, the David Brinkley Award from Barry University in 1988, the Miami Police Trailblazer Award, and has been honored by the Association of Police Planning and the Research, the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, and the Miami Police Department.
Her favorite cat, Flossie, beat out the competition and was featured on a cat calendar in 1986, an eventful year. Edna was the subject of a profile by Calvin Trillin in The New Yorker, won the Pulitzer, and signed a book contract with Random House. The Corpse Had A Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America’s Hottest Beat, followed. Touchstone’s first-ever made-for-TV movie, based on that book, starred Elizabeth Montgomery as Edna, and aired on CBS in 1984, followed by its sequel in 1985.
Edna took a one-year leave of absence from the Herald in 1988 to write her first novel, Nobody Lives Forever. Published in 1990, the thriller was nominated for an Edgar Award and later became a television movie of the week. The leave time stretched out with Never Let Them See You Cry, (1992) published by Random House.
Contents Under Pressure was named one of 1992’s best works of crime fiction by the Los Angeles Times Book Review and one of the year’s best mysteries by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Her other books include: Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, published by E. P. Dutton.
Her mystery novels, Contents Under Pressure, Miami It’s Murder (1994, also nominated for an Edgar) Suitable for Framing (1995), Act of Betrayal (1996) and Margin of Error (1997) were published by Disney’s Hyperion.
Pulse (1999) and Garden of Evil (2000) were published by Avon.
You Only Die Twice (2001) and The Ice Maiden, (2002) were published by Morrow.
Her fourteenth book, Cold Case Squad, was published by Simon & Schuster in June 2004, simultaneously with a new, updated version of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face. Her latest novel, Shadows, was published in June 2005.
Edna Buchanan is one of the authors of Naked Came the Manatee, a serial novel published by HarperCollins in 1995. Her short stories heave appeared in a number of anthologies including, Murder and Obsession, published by Delacorte in 1999, Irreconcilable Differences, published by HarperCollins in 1999, and The Plot Thickens, published by Simon & Schuster in 1997.
Her books have been published in England, Japan, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Poland and other countries.
Edna Buchanan has also written for Esquire, Time Magazine, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Family Circle, TV Guide, The Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, and USA Weekend among other publications.
In 2001, Edna Buchanan won the George Polk career award, one of “the most prized and meaningful in journalism,” according to Walter Cronkite, former anchor, CBS News.
A member of the external advisory board of the International Forensic Research Institute, she lives in Miami.
