He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, International Thriller Writers, and the Society of Authors.
Mead's debut novel is Death and the Conjuror.
[My Book, The Movie: Death and the Conjuror; The Page 69 Test: Death and the Conjuror; Q&A with Tom Mead]
At Publishers Weekly Mead tagged ten of the best locked-room or impossible crime mysteries, including:
The Three Coffins/The Hollow Man by John Dickson CarrRead about the other entries on the list.
Whenever I am asked what is my favorite locked-room mystery or impossible crime story, this is always my answer. The murder of Professor Charles Grimaud by the mysterious “hollow man” who vanishes without trace is a perfect locked-room problem. Meanwhile, the killing of illusionist Pierre Fley in a street carpetedwith unmarked snow is an archetypal example of the popular impossible crime variant, the no-footprints puzzle.
As well as one of the most famous examples of the subgenre, this novel remains an indisputable masterpiece. Not only is it a tour-de-force of plotting, prose, and atmosphere, it also happens to contain within it one of the definitive critical overviews of the genre itself: the famous “locked-room lecture,” a perfect piece of meta-fiction in which Dr. Gideon Fell examines the very nature of the impossible crime. It’s a treatise which probes just about every category of impossible crime, providing numerous examples of methods by which they could be achieved. But is the solution to these two murders lurking somewhere in those scant few pages? Or is the locked-room lecture itself just a red herring?
When I first read this book, the brilliance of the solution left me giddy. Reading it again today, it has lost none of its impact. This book is one of the many reasons that John Dickson Carr remains (to borrow a phrase from Agatha Christie) the “supreme conjurer, the King of the Art of Misdirection.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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