Sandford, John (1944-…), is the pen name of John Camp, a popular American author of detective fiction. Sandford is best known for his series of detective novels featuring Lucas Davenport. Davenport is a Minneapolis police detective who eventually becomes an investigator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). The stories are set in Minnesota. They have been praised for their clever plots, realistic villains, and thrilling action, often enlivened with humor.
All the Lucas Davenport novels include the word “Prey” in their titles. Sandford introduced the detective in Rules of Prey (1989). He went on to publish about one Davenport novel a year. Sandford also created two other series. One series features the skilled computer criminal Jason Kidd. He first appeared in The Fool’s Run (1989). The other series concerns Virgil Flowers, a colleague of Davenport’s at the BCA. The first Flowers novel was Dark of the Moon (2007). Sandford and the American photographic artist Ctein coauthored a science fiction novel, Saturn Run (2015).
Sandford was born John Roswell Camp on Feb. 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He attended the University of Iowa, where he received a B.A. degree in 1966 and an M.A. degree in 1971. Camp began his writing career as a reporter for the Miami Herald in Florida from 1971 to 1978. He was a reporter and columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch from 1978 to 1990. Camp won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1986 for a series of articles on problems facing a Minnesota farm family. He began using the pen name “Sandford,” the name of his great-grandfather, with the publication of the first Davenport novel.
