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James Phoenix (July 14th, 1947 -) is an American crime writer. Frame Up, the first novel in the Fenway Burke Mystery Series was released by Grey Swan Press to rave reviews. Amazon’s #1 Hall of Fame Reviewer, Harriet Klausner set the tone giving Frame Up FIVE STARS and was the first to pair James Phoenix’s name with his great hero and primary role model, the late Robert B. Parker. “Top rate investigation, fans of Parker’s Spencer series will enjoy Phoenix’s take on the mean streets of Boston.” 5 out of 5 STARS, Harriet Klausner There are twenty plus reviews in all reflecting Klauser’s point of view. Two reviewers, Sons of Spade from the Netherlands and The Black Mask Magazine, selected Frame Up as the Best Debut Novel of the Year. The reviewers have credited James Phoenix with the continuation of the feminist evolution of the genre generally credited to Robert B. Parker. In Parker’s early work, most notably his debut 1973 novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, we see his hero, Spencer, fitting nicely into the old noir PI pattern, where all women were nothing more than broads and dames. But over time we see Spencer’s evolution in his attitudes toward women. Though he never marries, the character becomes involved in a long term exclusive relationship with an intelligent, highly accomplished, woman, (Susan Silverman.) James Phoenix continues this evolution making his hero, Fenway Burke, the very first happily married man in the history of the genre. His wife, Megan Buckley- Burke is a Harvard Lawyer and they have a beautiful baby girl they dote over. To Fenway Burke, women are people too. In the Hard Boiled Detective Genre, that shift is considered nothing less than revolutionary.

Early Life

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, James Phoenix was married to his first wife in 1970 while still an undergrad at Suffolk University, with the plan of completing his BA and then going on to Law School. Just eleven months after his June wedding his then wife, Mary Tame, gave birth to his son, James Timothy. Exactly one year and two days later, she gave birth to identical twin girls, Melissa &Maryellen and immediately had a nervous breakdown, turning to alcohol and drugs. They divorced giving James Phoenix exclusive custody of the children, not even married two full years, with three children in diapers. Phoenix found himself a single male parent, a situation almost unheard of at the time, with no marketable skills beyond a strong back. He became a laborer at Capitol Tire & Rubber, a retread factory in Roxbury, had the children in day care and started going to night school. Two and a half years later, he was hired by the 3M Company as a sales trainee, remarried and was on his way in the corporate world.

Career

In 1986, James Phoenix founded HTD, an International software systems house with more than eighty-five stocking distributors worldwide. He was quoted as saying:

“I went from a Timex to a Rolex.”

But within six years, it was all gone; He was back to the Timex, the first major set back of the roller coaster entrepreneurial career that would mark his life throughout.

Millions were made, then promptly lost, for though he was highly creative, James Phoenix had never taken a business course in his life and was ill equipped to handle the day-to-day operations of the companies he founded.

He divorced his second wife when the children were in college and met the woman he describes as the great love of his life and his true inspiration, Susan Ring. They were marred in 1990.

In 1998, James Phoenix turned his back on he world of business to pursue a career in the arts, with the idea of becoming a novelists and getting his work on the New York Times Best Seller List. He thought it would take a year, two at the outside to be picked up by a publisher.

But there was just this one little problem, outside of letters and post cards to friends and family and the odd business brochure here and there, James Phoenix had never written anything in his life.

He contracted with free-lance editors to both critique his work and guide him in the right direction, attended writer’s workshops all over the country and wrote his brains out.

The two-year project turned into fourteen. Along the way, there were more than 508 rejections with over 8,000 pages written before he received his first of eight offers of publican.

To put that in some kind of prospective, the English translation of Tolstoy’s epic of western literature, War & Peace, comes in at 1220 pages...Using the standard 250 words per page, that means before Phoenix received a single offer of publication, he had effectively written War & Peace at least 6.5 times. And that he has said is an extremely conservative estimate.