John Spencer Yantiss was born in Louisville, KY to parents of Anglo-Scotch-Irish, and Lithuanian descent. A musician and singer, he started piano lessons at age 5, and began writing poems and songs when 8 years old. While still in high school he began playing guitar professionally. Over the years he shared the stage with such notable Southern Rock figures as Dickey Betts and Berry Oakley, and an evening of coffee and conversation with "Uncle Miltie." His love of writing poems and lyrics continued on over the years, branched out into fiction, beginning with not a few attempts at fantasy, in a style not unlike Tolkien and Lewis. In 1993 he began writing classic detective mysteries, based on the character Sherrod Reynard Colsne, in the transatlantic and cumulative tradition of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. Murder by Bequest, his inaugural effort, first appeared in publication in 2012 through and on Amazon.com as a Kindle e-book, and soon thereafter in paperback via Amazon's CreateSpace vehicle. There are several more in what is a growing casebook, with Code Name: Erelim, a nightmare novella threatening intelligence and national security agencies around the globe; The Weerwolf Problem (Dutch spelling) and The Golden Dart , both short stories filled with subtile horror and the grotesque, in Kindle and paperback, the latter two being in a combined volume under the collection name of Macabre2. Coming are Sa Kainitan, based in The Philippines, and The Seiðr Affair, a bone chiller about a doomsday computer weapon. Yantiss has also returned to classic, mythological fantasy, and Cyfaint 1 of Rylie Rabet Goes On An  Adventure -- A Tale of Magic and Wundorcræft Amongst the Wee Forest Fólc is out and available via Amazon.com in Kindle and paperback formats.