Reggie Nadelson is a New Yorker who also makes her home in London. Born and raised in Greenwich Village. She was educated the local City and Country school and Elisabeth Irwin High School, majored in English at Vassar, and attended Stanford for her graduate degree in journalism.
After college, she travelled a lot and did all kinds of jobs in publishing and journalism. She always wanted to write but never came to it and ended up in London writing a column first for The Guardian, and then The Independent. Then she began writing and sometimes narrating and producing documentaries for the BBC. The first of these was the acclaimed Comrade Rockstar, about Dean Reed – ‘The Red Elvis’ -which also became a book the rights for which have since been bought by Tom Hanks who is planning to film it.
As a journalist, she regularly writes for on travel, fashion and culture for Travel + Leisure, Conde Nast Traveller, Departures and the Financial Times, and contributes radio pieces to the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent
Nadelson’s most beloved creation, however, is the detective Artie Cohen, a New York Cit cop, as wounded and damaged as the city itself. A man the Guardian dubbed “‘the detective every woman would like to find in her bed”.
Artie first appeared in 1995 in Red Mercury Blues, and has appeared in five novels since then… Nadelson’s bittersweet modern New York noir is peopled by emigrés and immigrants, Russian oligarchs and Italian garbage moguls moving effortlessly from the high life, lived in glass condos on the Hudson River to the rotten docks in Brooklyn and out beyond Manhattan in desolate suburbs. In the New York of Nadelson’s post 9/11 “Archipelago Trilogy”, the streets are darker and meaner than ever Raymond Chandler imaged them, and in her electrifying books, come alive with as disparate, damaged and yet deeply human as the city they haunt..
“Anyone afraid that American culture is turning homogenized and denatured need only visit the vital, layered immigrant neighborhoods in the ‘archipelago’—Reggie Nadelson’s word—of New York City…the amazing Nadelson…can’t write a character who doesn’t charge off the page.”
Richard Lipez, Washington Post