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Howard Denson III says he is a small-town guy. He was born in Jasper, Alabama, and moved from there to Florence, Tuscumbia, and Mobile, then to Vidalia in Georgia, and Key West and Marianna in Florida. A shy kid, as he moved from Key West to Pensacola to Norfolk, he observed the human comedy.
He writes satire, humor, and even serious pieces for newspapers and newsletters and publishes them in paperback in Shoot-Out with a Wild-Eyed Moderate, Gunfight with a Wild-Eyed Moderate, Duel with a Wild-Eyed Moderate, and Wild Bill Rides Again. Several of the pieces discuss his difficulty with learning Latin, German, Italian, and French.
He loved ghost stories of Charles Dickens, Thorne Smith, Oscar Wilde, and others and tips his hat to them in a series about Martin Mowbray. Mowbray & the Sharks features ghosts, a butler/foster father, gangsters, and Nazis. Sharks is the first of five Mowbray books whose narratives rotate from the United Kingdom, to New York City and state, to Tennessee, and to Italy, Switzerland, and Germany.
Three novellas grew out of a collection of "fibbles" (part-fables, part-fibs). In The Princess and Sir Jonathan d'Klutz, a princess struggles to hook up with Sir Jonathan d'Klutz, a clumsy suitor with a heart of gold. Horrible things happen to the lovers, proving that it's easier to live ever after happily than to live happily ever after. Various sections feature the Talking Heads of the Kingdom of Quandarica (later the Talking Mugs), the randy Princess Ethel the Ready but Remember She's the King's Daughter, and the Stompasaurus, the dreaded dinosaur skeleton in the National Hysterical Museum. Also, he has published Fibble-Fabbles and Parables for Our Vexing Times.
His historical fiction includes the McGregor series (McGregor and the Lost Tribe and McGregor and the Patriots), both about a Scottish rogue fleeing British authorities and finding refuge among a remote tribe in Alabama; a Western about the Rainbow Ranch (Wolfram and the Rainbow Ranch and Destination: Rainbow Ranch).
He also has a modern series set in Waldentown, Ala.
He attended (or graduated from) what is now Pensacola State College, Florida State University, the University of Alabama in Birmingham, the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Florida, and the University of North Florida. He has worked as a "flunky journalist" for The Escambia Press, The Escambia Sun-Press, The Pensacola News-Journal, The Tallahassee Democrat, The Bessemer News, and The Birmingham News.
At Florida State College at Jacksonville, he taught English composition, literature courses, creative writing, the humanities (of the ancient world, Middle Ages, Renaissance, etc., plus American humanities).
For a couple of decades, he worked with the Florida First Coast Writers' Festival and acted as a moderator or panelist for Much Ado About Books, the Amelia Island Book Festival, and other groups. He was a charter member of the North Florida Writers. He was an editor of The State Street Review and helped to coordinate novel, short fiction, and poetry contests of the Writers' Festival.
For 46 years, he has been married to Michele Boyette (a.k.a. She Who Knows All), and they are servants to eight indoor and one feral meowers,and a wary possum who steals food that the feral cat leaves.
.With 25 books to his credit, he describes himself as a Literary Meerkat, not a Literary Lion.
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While on the run in Scotland after stabbing a drunken British soldier, the youth Levi Phillip McGregor is impressed onto a ship going to America, where he again is escaping the British and is chased across Georgia until he finds an uneasy refuge among a t
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Martin Mowbray tries not to make a big deal out of the fact that he can see ghosts, but the skill is handy when he confronts gangsters and Nazis in 1936-37, not to mention other ghosts.
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Martin Mowbray hopes to find peace, quiet, and distraction when he becomes the butler for an Italian nobleman, Baron Culdraca, in Gallifray, New York, but finds the town has suffered strange deaths that turn out to be murders.
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Horatio Burdette, a slave, becomes the property of a Jewish senator from Louisiana and inadvertently acts as a "Dr. Watson" while Senator Benjamin solves several crimes.
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Sir Bull dispatches the star-crossed lovers, Princess Esmeralda of Quandarica, and Sir Jonathan d'Klutz, but their spirits nearly come together over the centuries until he's Johnny the Junkman and she's trapped in a pot-bellied stove.
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When Waldentown is under siege from an escaped psycho, a flood, and the chaos of moving two houses through a destroyed railroad trestle, the town is saved by the town's four "fools": a talkative drug store manager, the town drunks, and an African American
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