Anne Wingate was a mystery writer and crime-scene investigator whose books shaped how a generation of mystery authors handled forensic detail. Born Martha Anne Guice in Savannah, Georgia, in 1943, she lived most of her later life in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she also ran two small publishing houses with her husband. She died in 2021 at the age of 77.
She published under three names. As Anne Wingate she wrote the five-book Mark Shigata mystery series, set in small-town Texas around a Japanese-American police chief. As Lee Martin she wrote the long-running Deb Ralston police-procedural series, starting with Too Sane a Murder (1984) and running through The Thursday Club (1997), thirteen books in which a Texas detective juggles homicide casework and a houseful of kids. As Martha G. Webb she wrote the Tommy Inman mysteries and the standalone Darling Corey's Dead.
Her best-known nonfiction book is Scene of the Crime: A Writer's Guide to Crime-Scene Investigations, part of the Writer's Digest Howdunit series. Drawing on her own work as a crime-scene investigator, the book walks fiction writers through evidence collection, contamination, and the actual procedures used at a crime scene, with the eye of someone who has worked them rather than imagined them. She co-wrote Amateur Detectives in the same series with Elaine Raco Chase.
Wingate was a member of the Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. She published other writers through her e-publishing imprint Live Oak House. Her short stories appeared in anthologies including Once Upon a Crime and Women of Mystery 2, and one of her later stories ran in The Best American Mystery Stories 2015.
Anne Wingate
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