True Crime and Horror

April 14, 2008 (San Dimas, CA) Police-Writers.com is a website that lists state and local police officers who have written books. The website added two law enforcement officials who have written in the true crime genre and a third who has written in the horror arena.

Chief Russell Smith’s law enforcement career began as a reserve deputy with the Tom Green County Sheriffs Department in 1977 and ended when he retired as the San Angelo Police Department (Texas) Police Chief in 1999. This experience spurred his professional writing career when he sold his first article to a police trade magazine in 1980. Russell Smith spent five years as an outdoor columnist for the San Angelo Standard-Times and several magazines. He received numerous awards for his writing and photography from the Texas Outdoor Writers Association. Chief Russell Smith is the author of The Gun That Wasn't There.

According to the book description of The Gun That Wasn't There, “meticulously outlines the true story of rural West Texas communities under attack by an armed criminal in the 1960s. At times graphic, this vivid true crime story is an unusually perceptive assessment of the criminal mind as told with the surprising empathetic voice of both survivors and victims of crime.”

While serving as Sheriff of Lincoln County (New Mexico), John William Poe became friends with Pat Garrett and John Chisum. His most famous experience occurred when he accompanied Garrett to Pete Maxwell's ranch near Fort Sumner. Garrett went inside. Waiting outside, Poe saw William Bonney (Billy the Kid) enter the ranch house, though he did not recognize him. He heard the gunfire when Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett. John William Poe’s originally authored Personal narrative or reminiscence which relates the main facts and circumstances which led up to the killing of Billy the Kid, which was most recently rereleased as The Death of Billy the Kid.

Joe McKinney is a homicide detective for the San Antonio Police Department. Joe McKinney has a Master's Degree in English Literature from The University of Texas at San Antonio. Before joining the Homicide Division as a detective, Joe McKinney worked on the San Antonio Police Department's Critical Incident Management Team, where he received training in dealing with a variety of natural and manmade disasters, such as floods, fires, and train wrecks, and that training figures prominently in his fiction. Joe McKinney is the author of Dead City and a coauthor of The Sound of Horror.

According to the book description of Dead City, “Battered by five cataclysmic hurricanes in three weeks, the Texas Gulf Coast and half of the Lone Star State is reeling from the worst devastation in history. Thousands are dead and dying--but the worst is only beginning. Amid the wreckage, something unimaginable is happening: a deadly virus has broken out, returning the dead to life – with an insatiable hunger for human flesh.”

Police-Writers.com now hosts 966 police officers (representing 407 police departments) and their 2054 law enforcement books in 35 categories, there are also listings of United States federal law enforcement employees turned authors, international police officers who have written books and civilian police personnel who have written books.