Robert Mangeot is an award-winning writer, teacher, and sandwicher. No awards on the sandwiching. Yet. He’s a nerd, to be honest. He lives in Franklin, Tennessee with his wife and a ginger cat with plans all her own.
His work appears in various anthologies and journals, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine (forthcoming), The Forge Literary Magazine, Lowestoft Chronicle, Mystery Magazine, The Oddville Press, and in the print anthologies Die Laughing, Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War, Not So Fast, and the Anthony-winning Murder Under the Oaks. His work has won the Claymore Award and been named a finalist for the Derringer Awards three times. He’s also won contests sponsored by the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild, On The Premises, and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.
Outside the writing part of writing, he teaches short fiction and will happily debate the short form’s whethers and whatnots over beverages of choice. He proudly served as a chapter officer for both Sisters in Crime and Southeast Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. In 2023, he received the Magnolia Award for service to crime writing community.
When not doing any of that, he can be found counting things or wandering the snack food aisles of America or France.
Or I could tell you:
Skidding into our world half-Irish and half-Southern, clearly some brush with writing was inevitable. Also part-French, and this part was embraced Mais oui, the fiction brush would come with savoir vivre. In my college days I wrote a humor column and some this-and-thats, but not much thereafter. I was, you know, counting things and wandering snack food aisles. Eventually This Whole Writing Thing rediscovered me, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have work appear in some excellent places.
I’ve been a head of a fine dog pack, but lately I’ve been a cat valet. I’m fine with lap cats (or shoulder cats, pirate-style–seriously) that so long as they watch the claws. Maybe I’m cool with it because of the Bond villain parallels. Blofeld is over-the-top cool, that’s what I’m saying.
I dig the English Premier League (COYS), Predators hockey, University of Louisville athletics, Dashiell Hammett, poetry, most any kind of music. The “most any” part is minute-to-minute. I used to have mad song trivia skills–used to–but I can still quote some lyrics. In sports, I can name the starting nine for the 1970s Big Red Machine and many of the subs. Merv Rettenmund. Ed Armbrister. See? Mike Lum! I graduated from Bellarmine University–go, Knights–and they haven’t tried to retract that or anything. Everyone seems cool with it. Liberal arts. Veritas, yo.
Counting things. It’s not all spreadsheets. There are weights and measures. One time they asked me to count a colorless and odorless gas. And I counted it. Boxcars of it. Another time they had me counting mock turtlenecks in subzero warehouse conditions. Once for several weeks I was a regular on television auditing the nightly Lotto drawing. Such was my counting-related brush with stardom.
My other great joy is travel, which often seeps into my stories. Look for me in a Belgian friterie or a Caribbean market or in any international snack food aisle. Otherwise I’m at my writing desk dreaming of stories, or more likely, editing the dream to ashes.