ABOUT PATRICK KENDRICK

Patrick Kendrick has been a freelance writer for over 20 years. He has been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines, such as the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post, Broward County’s Sun Sentinel, and the Reader’s Digest among others. He has won the Opus Magnum Discovery Award from the Hollywood Film Festival for Papa’s Problem and an Honorable Mention for his short story The Bestseller.  He was knighted by the prestigious police organization, The Order of Michael the Archangel, for his articles on crime. He lives in West Palm Beach, with his wife and two sons.

In His Own Words:

            I was born in East St. Louis, Illinois but I have lived in South Florida from the time I was three weeks old.  My mother, a nurse, raised myself and three other siblings by herself after my wayward father, a blacksmith who followed the rodeo circuit throughout the U.S., never came home.  He was an itinerant gambler and drinker who once lost six hundred and forty acres of ranch land and their home in a card game. From early on my mother instilled in me a love of the arts, reading, and the ocean and I have never lived far from it. One of my life passions is scuba diving and I do it as often as time permits.

      I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of South Florida in 1979. I majored in visual art but minored in literature and became particularly enamored with early 20th century writers. The classical novelists inspired me: Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald but I always enjoyed good mystery writers as well.  John D. MacDonald lived on the west coast of Florida and visited the USF campus to lecture occasionally. I read all of his Travis MacGee novels and still highly recommend them to anyone who wants to read an ingeniously plotted book with a great protagonist.  I have read a lot of hard-boiled books by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson and Ross MacDonald. I worship contemporary writers like Elmore Leonard, Loren D. Estleman, James Lee Burke, and the genre-defying Harry Crews.  

            I attended New York University’s Master of Arts degree learning abroad program and lived in Venice, Italy for four months in 1982. While attending art classes there, I became disillusioned with the art world. It seemed to me it was not how talented you were that was the key to success as much as how much bullshit could you sling about why you did the art you did, even if it was an ugly abstract painting the color of mud.

At that time, I felt like artists were a bunch of flakes and very few of them made any significant difference in an increasingly jaded and self-centered world. My mother had also instilled in me a sense of medical knowledge and trying to help those who are less fortunate by tragedy or poverty.  I left art school and became a fire fighter and paramedic and have continued that career for over 25 years. I also began selling my writing at that time, mostly about my fire service experience but also covering crime stories, travel, and, occasionally, selling some short fiction about the fragility that is part and parcel of the human existence.

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Patrick Kendrick

  What I am reading and recommending:

Brad Meltzer, "The Book Of Lies"

John Hart, "Down River"

A new friend & very fun writer, Tim Dorsey.  Start with "Florida Roadkill" and go through his entire series. He is great. His web site: www.timdorsey.com

KEEP READING!

...when I ran from the bulls in Pamplona-
that's me next to a bust of Hemingway.