John Shannon (born 1943) is a contemporary American author, lately of detective fiction. He began his career with four well-reviewed novels in the 1970s and 1980s, then in 1996 launched the Jack Liffey mystery series. He cites as his literary influences Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Graham Greene, Robert Stone and Jim Harrison. Biography Born in Detroit, Michigan, Shannon moved with his family to San Pedro, the gritty harbor district of Los Angeles, California, when he was five. There he grew up among the children of longshoremen and commercial fishermen. He went to Pomona College where he received a B.A. in literature and then to UCLA where he received an MFA degree in film. After completing his film degree, Shannon wrote one episode of I Spy, a popular television series, then made the decision to leave Hollywood for the Peace Corps. Malawi, the African country to which he was assigned had been, earlier, the site for the Peace Corps service of writer Paul Theroux. When he returned to the United States following his two-year teaching stint in a remote town at the foot of Lake Malawi, he soon became active in the movement against the Vietnam War. Over the next decades he worked at a newspaper, as a technical writer and video producer. He began his publishing career in 1972 with a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel called The Orphan set in the counterculture of the 1960s. The Jack Liffey Novels The hero of Shannon's highly praised mystery series is Jack Liffey, introduced in the first book, The Concrete River (1996), as a laid-off aerospace worker. Depressed by his situation and self-medicating, the introspective, sensitive and quirkily humored Liffey pays for his downward spiral when his wife leaves him, taking with her Maeve, the daughter he adores. What pulls Jack Liffey back together is a startling discovery: called upon for a favor, he finds he possesses a talent for locating missing children. Thus he embarks on a new, if self-invented, profession. Not quite a private eye, he is instead a modern-day paladin exploring the dark corners of human nature while effecting his own version of damage control. Each of the eleven Jack Liffey novels involves a perilous quest to recover a client's son or daughter and remove them from harm's way; each plunges Liffey deep into a new ethnic community or subculture of Los Angeles where the familiar quickly morphs into the