Max Allan Collins is the author of Road to Perdition; the acclaimed graphic novel that inspired the movie, and of the multiple-award-winning Nathan Heller series of historical hardboiled mysteries.

Max Allan Collins is one of most prolific and popular authors working in the field today. He is also the literary executor of Mickey Spillane.

Richard Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908. As a child he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, then in an orphanage, and with various relatives. He left home at fifteen and returned to Memphis for two years to work, and in 1934 went to Chicago, where in 1935 he began to work on the Federal Writers' Project.

He published Uncle Tom's Children in 1938 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the following year. His other titles include his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), and The Outsider (1953). After the war Richard Wright went to live in Paris with his wife and daughters, remaining there until his death in 1960.

Nelson Algren was born in 1909 in Detroit and lived mostly in Chicago. His life was a succession of compulsive gambling, disastrous marriages and wild extremes - ranging from Texas prisons and skid-row soup-kitchens to Hollywood parties. He also had a passionate love affair with French feminist Simone de Beauvoir while she was living with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Algren received the inaugural National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm. He died in 1981, shortly after being appointed as a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to New York when she was six, where she attended the Julia Richman High School and Barnard College. In her senior year she edited the college magazine, having decided at the age of sixteen to become a writer.

Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented Mr Ripley, published in 1955, introduced the fascinating anti-hero Tom Ripley, and was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1999 by Anthony Minghella.

Graham Greene called Patricia Highsmith 'the poet of apprehension', saying that she 'created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger' and The Times named her no.1 in their list of the greatest ever crime writers. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was published posthumously, the same year.

Barry Gifford is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into thirty languages. His most recent books include The Cuban Club, The Up-Down, Writers, Sailor & Lula- The Complete Novels, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, Imagining Paradise- New and Selected Poems, The Roy Stories, and Landscape with Traveler.

He co-wrote with David Lynch the screenplays for the two movies they made together, Wild at Heart, based on the Gifford's 1990 novel, which is one of the eight novels in Sailor & Lula, and Lost Highway. Wild at Heart, directed by David Lynch, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1990, the same year in which the novel was published. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Sara Paretsky was named 2011 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. She is the winner of many awards, including the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement from the British Crime Writers' Association and the CWA Gold Dagger for Blacklist.

In 2015 she received the Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. She lives on Chicago's south side with her husband.