Wallace Stroby

Wallace Stroby (born 1960) is an American crime fiction author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven novels, four of which feature Crissa Stone, a female professional thief.

Stroby was born and raised in Monmouth County, New Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers University with a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Media, and while there wrote for both the Rutgers’ Daily Targum and the Livingston (College) Medium. In 1985, while still a student at Rutgers, he was hired by The Asbury Park (N.J.) Press as the paper’s overnight police reporter. He later became an editor on the paper’s Sunday edition, to which he also contributed book reviews. The Society of Professional Journalists honored him with First Place awards for review writing in 1988, 1990, 1991 and 1992. In 1995 he was hired as a Features editor at the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper. There he won two more First Place SPJ Awards for review writing in 1995 and 1996, as well as three Society of Newspaper Design awards in 2001 and 2002 for editing special sections. He left the paper in 2008.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Stroby contributed to a number of magazines, including Esquire Japan, Reader’s Digest, Writer’s Digest, Filmfax, Fangoria and Outre. For the 1991 issue of Writer’s Digest, he conducted an extensive interview with author Stephen King about his creative process, the first long-form interview King had done on the subject. The interview has been reprinted many times in at least three languages. King elaborated on many of the points he raised in the interview in his 2000 book ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT.

Stroby’s first novel, THE BARBED-WIRE KISS, published in 2003 by St. Martin’s Press, introduced his hero, an ex-N.J. state trooper named Harry Rane, who becomes entangled with a local mobster and his wife. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly termed the novel “a dazzling debut,” and the Chicago Tribune called it “our annual dose of proof that fresh, new writers can revitalize the mystery genre.” Writing in The New York Times, reviewer Marilyn Stasio said, “Stroby does wonders with his blue-collar characters,” and The Washington Post called the book “a scorching first novel ... full of attention to character and memory and, even more, to the neighborhoods of New Jersey.” The book was a finalist for the 2004 Barry Award for Best First Novel.

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