Mark Coggins (born 1957) is the Choctaw and American author of a series of novels featuring San Francisco private eye August Riordan. He is also a photographer.
Biography Coggins was born in New Mexico in 1957 and attended Stanford University, where he earned an undergraduate degree in International Relations, a masters in Computer Science and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society.Official Bio, markcoggins.com.Noir Guy, stanfordmag.org, January 2008. He is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation.Artist Registry, choctawnation.com.
While at Stanford, Coggins took creative writing classes with Tobias Wolff and Ron Hansen and wrote the first short story featuring August Riordan in a class for Hansen. This was published in 1986 in The New Black Mask, a revival of the famous Black Mask pulp magazine that launched the careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.Back to Black, Part IV, therapsheet.blogspot.com, November 27, 2007.
Coggins has worked in the Silicon Valley for such companies as Hewlett Packard and NetscapeActuate Names Mark Coggins as New Senior Vice President of Engineering , actuate.com. and although Riordan as a character is something of a technophobe, Coggins' novels often explore high technology themes and Silicon Valley culture.How Greedy Was My Valley?, salon.com, September 18, 2002.
Career Coggins' first book, The Immortal Game, dealt with the theft of chess-playing software similar to that run on Deep Blue and was nominated for the Shamus AwardThe Shamus Awards, thrillingdetective.com. and the Barry Award.Barry Awards , deadlypleasures.com. Runoff described a fictional mayoral election in San Francisco where the results were altered by individuals who hacked the city's electronic voting machines. The Big Wake-Up envisioned an altered version of the bizarre history of the peripatetic remains of Argentina's most famous first lady, Eva Perón, and won the gold medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Mystery/Suspense/Thriller category.The Story Behind the Story: The Big Wake-Up by Mark Coggins, therapsheet.blogspot.com, November 03, 2009.Announcing the Results of the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards, independentpublisher.com, May 25, 2010.
Prom Night and Other Man-made Disasters was somewhat of a departure. A collection of humorous essays describing episodes in his life from school, career, and relationships, it features a number of anecdotes from his childhood in Phoenix, Arizona, including the title essay, "Prom Night," the improbable story of how shy and socially-awkward Coggins brought the homecoming queen of Central High School to the senior prom.Prom Night and Other Man-made Disasters by Mark Coggins, lesasbookcritiques.blogspot.com, May 31, 2012.
In 2025, when the Black Mask version of The Maltese Falcon entered the public domain, Coggins published two Sam Spade stories in Eclectica Magazine that continued the story from the novel's conclusion. These were later reprinted in a 2026 edition of the novel as a coda along with black and white photographs of Falcon locations in San Francisco taken by Coggins.That Darn Bird Again, With Bonuses, therapsheet.blogspot.com, November 6, 2025Hammett: It’s Raining Black Birds, donherron.com, January 1, 2026
Works
Novels The Immortal Game (1999). Vulture Capital (2002). Candy From Strangers (2006). Runoff (2007). The Big Wake-Up (2009). No Hard Feelings (2015). The Dead Beat Scroll (2019). Geisha Confidential (2024). The Maltese Falcon Illustrated, with a Coda by Mark Coggins (2026).
Non-fiction Prom Night and Other Man-made Disasters (2012).
Photography Monographs Street Stories (2021).
External links Official site Review of The Immortal Game in the San Francisco Chronicle Podcast of the first chapter of Candy from Strangers from KQED-FM
References