Julie Smith books

Akashic Noir Reading Order

Anthologies

Deadly Allies Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Paul MacDonald Reading Order

Rebecca Schwartz Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Skip Langdon Reading Order

Standalone Novels

Talba Wallis Reading Order

Talba Wallis Short Stories/Novellas

Julie Smith is an American mystery writer who won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1991 for New Orleans Mourning, the first book in her Skip Langdon series. Set in New Orleans, the Skip Langdon books follow a female police detective navigating the city’s complex social layers while solving crimes. Smith began her career with the Rebecca Schwartz series, featuring a San Francisco defense attorney who keeps stumbling into murder cases, and also wrote the Paul MacDonald series about a mystery writer turned amateur sleuth.

Her later work includes the Talba Wallis series, which pairs a young Black female PI and poet with a cantankerous older white detective named Eddie Valentino. The mismatched duo works cases across New Orleans, and the series ran from 2001 to 2005. Smith has also written standalone fiction, short stories, and a book on the craft of writing.

Beyond her own fiction, Smith is the founding series editor of the Akashic Noir anthology series, one of the longest-running anthology projects in publishing. Each volume focuses on a specific city or region and collects original noir short stories by local writers. Starting with Brooklyn Noir in 2004, the series has grown to over 120 volumes covering locations from Lagos to Tokyo, Havana to Helsinki. The Akashic Noir books have been praised for bringing international voices to the crime fiction genre and giving readers a dark, street-level tour of cities worldwide.