Ray Ring is a novelist and journalist rooted in the American West. He studied in six universities and did a range of blue-collar work as a young man, which helps his writing appeal to a wide range of readers.
Ray’s four novels are unusual mysteries or hardboiled noir: the new Montana Blues (Writers Canyon Press 2023), and Arizona Kiss (Little, Brown and Company 1991, sample review, in the London Times Literary Supplement: “A well-crafted tale of sexual obsession, treachery and violence ... in its own distinctive shade of noir.”), and Peregrine Dream (St. Martin's Press 1990, sample review, in The San Francisco Chronicle: “A stylized detective mystery ... fast-paced and sensuous ... The intense heat of the desert, its brilliant light and color, radiate from every page.”) and Telluride Smile (Dodd, Mead & Company 1988, sample review, in The Denver Post: “A neat little detective thriller [and] a wonderfully bittersweet and entertaining satire of the state we all know and love.”)
Ray’s journalism has appeared in many publications devoted to accuracy, including the longtime nonprofit High Country News, Outside magazine, The Arizona Daily Star and The New York Times. He’s won twelve national journalism awards, including a George Polk Award for Political Reporting, a Mental Health America Media Award for an essay about his schizophrenic brother’s suicide, and an Investigative Reporters & Editors scroll for going undercover posing as a convict in a max-security prison.
Ray’s time away from his desk includes sand-infused river trips and honeymoon backpacking in the Grand Canyon, and work as a firefighter, taxi driver and head of maintenance at the University of Colorado Mountain Research Station — 9,500 feet above sea level. He knows a bit about how to drive an old bulldozer and over-the-snow machines, and how to fix some of the broken things using whatever is handy, and how to fell a tree and get unstuck from various cactuses.
Also among the experiences that influence his writing, Ray has survived two rollover car wrecks and a motorcycle wreck, and getting hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk, and getting clubbed by a cop during a melee protesting the Vietnam War, and getting roughed up by a prison gang while he did the undercover journalism posing as a convict — he knows how it feels to get knocked down and he brings that empathy to his writing.
Ray and his longtime wife, Linda Platts, live in Tucson, where they enjoy the borderland culture and hiking and glimpses of bobcats in the yard or on the roof.
