Steve Havill & Barbara Peters at Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale AZ 2022
Author Steven F. Havill, 81, passed away on Thursday, August 27, 2026. A private cremation has taken place, and no formal services will be held. The family requests a period of private mourning and respectfully asks that no flowers, gifts, or phone calls be sent or made at this time.
Steve Havill wrote his first book in the early 1980s. I’d have to look up the publish date, but I’m thinking it was 1981 or 1982. I heard him tell the story of how that went enough times that I could tell it to you here, but that was then and this is now. The publishing world has changed and Steve is gone.
I met him at a book event in the tiny Baldwin Cabin Library in Datil NM, a library outside a village that most people have never heard of. When I say the library is tiny, I mean the building might have a footprint of 1000 sq ft. I could look that up, but it’d just remind me that of course Steve would know but I can’t ask him questions anymore.
Anyway, I met him at this book event not long after he and Kathleen, his wife, moved to Catron County. He gave his talk, we (my friend Laura and I) bought some books, and he signed them. We chatted briefly. I thought that would be the end of that, except it wasn’t. Steve, ever the teacher, the sharer of information, gave a writing workshop an I went to it. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Steve became my writing mentor, especially helping me out with my first books in spite of not particularly liking what I was writing about. He became a friend. In time, Laura and I started going with him and Kathleen to his book signings. We laughingly called ourselves his roadies. We would lug boxes of books into the venues, arrange them on the tables, raise our hands to prime the Q&A part of the talk, then pack up the books and go home.
Steve Havill at Treasure House books, 2024
We got to go with him and Kathleen to fancy events that I would never have been invited to on my own. He got me talking to professionals in the publishing world that I wouldn’t have ever talked to otherwise. Steve’s idea of a good writing education was to expose me to as much as he could. I mean, he did that after he was sure I could actually write a book that had “The End” as the final words. I couldn’t cheat on that because he was reading and marking up my manuscripts.
Eventually Laura and I were reading and marking up his manuscripts (Laura is a former English teacher, among other things. Steve, too, was a schoolteacher. I hope his students know how lucky they were to have him). By the time we started marking up Reserve, the 34th book he wrote and the final book in his Posadas County Mystery series, we could tell Steve was tired. At lunch one day he revealed that he’d told his publisher it was his last book.
We didn’t know, then, about the cancer. All we knew was that there would be no more impatient waiting for the next manuscript. No more day trips or overnights to cool places where everybody knew his name. No more lunches with him talking about his research for the next book, or stories of the lengths he’d gone to learn how things worked, what the effects were, and what the people were like who did or used those things. His characters read as real people because they were part of who he was.
Steve taught me so much about writing and how to be a pro at it. But the mentor’s not who I’m mourning.
I’m missing that guy who delighted in describing how to drop the engine in a road grader, who became a gunsmith and made a rifle from scratch in his wood and metal workshops, and who had story after story after story about cool stuff he’d done in his life.
Steve laughed a lot. Nothing loud. Not at anyone’s expense. He just found the world to be a funny kind of place. That guy was my friend and that’s who I’m missing. RIP.
Steve at a workshop we did together at Bear Mountain Lodge in Silver City, NM in 2021
