Scott Phillips is an American writer primarily of crime fiction in the noir tradition. He was born in Wichita, Kansas, and after co-writing and directing the independent short film Walking Blues lived for several years in France, working as a translator and photographer. He returned to the United States living in California as a screenwriter, co-writing a 1996 thriller called Crosscut among many other projects, both credited and uncredited. He has sometimes been confused with another author of the same professional name. His first novel, The Ice Harvest, was published in 2000, and won the California Book Award, as well as being nominated for the Edgar Award and Hammett Prize, and shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. A black comic noir thriller set in the low-rent world of sleazy Wichita strip clubs on Christmas Eve 1979, The Ice Harvest was adapted into a film of the same title in 2005. He followed this in 2002 with The Walkaway, a combined prequel/sequel and spin-off to The Ice Harvest set in Wichita during the 1940s and 1980s. His third novel, Cottonwood, set in Kansas and California during the Western era, was published in 2004. [More at Wikipedia]

January 1st, 1961 in (Age 63)