Steve McAvoy’s great grandfather operated a speakeasy called “Jeppy’s” in Perth Amboy, New Jersey during Prohibition. Rather than inform on his bootleg liquor suppliers, he did federal time for violating the Volstead act. His son, Steve’s grandfather, flipped sides and, as an attorney general, was one of the prosecutors of what was then called the “Trial of the Century,” the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. There are those who wondered if his son’s position with the New Jersey AG’s office was the Pro Quo for the Quid of not giving up any names. Steve’s family had an interesting relationship with the law.
Steve grew up in his grandfather’s New Jersey, reading Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” thinking all lawyers were like Atticus Finch, but later recognizing many, including his grandfather, had habits more closely akin to Paul Newman’s character in “The Verdict;” he resolved to exit the Garden State for sunnier pastures.
Following another relative, a retired California appellate justice, to Southern California, Steve practiced as a trial attorney for 25 years before turning to mediating disputes and now to writing novels. A lifelong lover of noir fiction and the works of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald as well as Robert B. Parker, Joseph Wambaugh, Walter Mosely and Michael Connelly, Steve always wanted to write a murder mystery. And now he has. By the way, there is a second novel in the works. Stay tuned for the return of Mack Traynor, in “Dead Husbands.”
