Archer Mayor

Archer Mayor is an American mystery author of the Joe Gunther detective series.

Early life and education

Mayor was born on July 30, 1950 in Mt. Kisco, New York, and moved with his family to Canada at the age of one. From there, they moved to South America, and then to Europe, living in 30 different places before he was 30 years old.

Mayor graduated from Yale and studied U.S. History. After he graduated, he traveled throughout the U.S. before joining Time Inc., where he worked for their book division as a researcher. From there, he moved to Vermont and has worked in politics, as a theater photographer, a newspaper writer and editor, a lab technician for Paris-Match Magazine, and as a medical illustrator. While working as a special projects editor for the University of Texas Press in 1975, Mayor discovered the then-unpublished manuscript of T.H. White's The Book of Merlyn, the final part of his Once and Future King series, which was eventually published in 1977.

Career In 1988, Mayor published the first installment of his Joe Gunther mystery series, Open Season, which he explained was "written as three completely separate books," which he ended up throwing out each time to start over. "When I wrote the third and final version of Open Season, it damn near wrote itself. I'd found my musical voice. I found the place: Brattleboro. I found the greater context: Vermont.

In 2004, he was awarded the New England Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Fiction and in 2012, he received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.

In July 2022, Mayor announced that he was pausing his Joe Gunther series, saying in an interview that while writing mysteries has been useful to process his work as a death investigator, "if you do anything for 40-plus years, as I have been, a writer of both history and fiction, I think you do need a break every once in a while. Need to recharge your batteries, and maybe you just take the batteries out."