Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His newest book is The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes. His other recent novels include The Burglar Who Counted The Spoons, Hit Me, and A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, brilliantly embodied by Liam Neeson in the new film "A Walk Among The Tombstones."

He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write For Your Life, and he has recently published The Crime of Our Lives, a collection of his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners.

He has also written episodic television ("Tilt!") and the Wong Kar-wai film "My Blueberry Nights." His dozen previous anthologies include Manhattan Noir, Manhattan Noir 2, and Dark City Lights. He lives in New York.

Robert F. Dorr an air force veteran and a retired senior Foreign Service officer. He is the author of 70 books and thousands of magazine articles about the air force, aviation, and military affairs. He writes a weekly opinion column for Air Force Times, monthly columns for Combat Aircraft, Air International, and Aerospace America magazines, and a quarterly column for Air Power History, which he helped create. He is the author of Mission to Berlin, Mission to Tokyo, Hell Hawks!, Fighting Hitler's Jets, and Air Force One (all with Zenith Press).

Robert Silverberg has been a professional writer since 1955, widely known for his science fiction and fantasy stories. He is a many-time winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2004 was designated as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

His books and stories have been translated into forty languages. Among his best known titles are Nightwings, Dying Inside, The Book Of Skulls, and the three volumes of the Majipoor Cycle: Lord Valentine's Castle, Majipoor Chronicles and Valentine Pontifex.

His collected short stories, covering nearly sixty years of work, are being published in nine volumes by SF Gateway and Subterranean Press. His most recent book is Tales Of Majipoor (2013), a new collection of stories set on the giant world made famous in Lord Valentine's Castle.

He and his wife Karen and an assorted population of cats, live in the San Francisco Bay Area in a sprawling house surrounded by exotic plants.

Mario Puzo was born in New York and, following military service in World War II, attended New York's New School for Social Research and Columbia University.

His best-selling novel The Godfather was preceded by two critically acclaimed novels, The Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965). In 1978 he published Fools Die, followed by The Sicilian (1984), The Fourth K (1991), and the second instalment in his Mafia trilogy, The Last Don (1996), which became an international bestseller.

Mario Puzo also wrote many screenplays, including Earthquake, Superman, and all three Godfather films, for which he received two Academy Awards. He died in July 1999 at his home in Long Island, New York, at the age of seventy-eight.