DDL Smith is a London-based novelist whose stories balance on the knife-edge between shadow and revelation. Beginning his creative journey in scriptwriting and short films, he discovered early a fascination with dialogue that strikes quick and lingers long; an instinct that has shaped his fiction since his teenage years. His time in film taught him how to frame a scene, build tension, and cut to the heart of character through a single exchange; tools that now define his prose.
Smith’s novels explore the crossroads where mystery, technology, and folklore collide. His acclaimed Detective Dionseries reimagines the noir tradition for the modern age: crimes without blood but riddled with secrets, conspiracies coded in data, and truths that resist the light. Each novel pushes the detective genre into new terrain, blending the atmosphere of classic whodunnits with the urgency of contemporary thrillers.
Beyond his flagship series, Smith also writes standalone works that expand his repertoire of shadows. Decay (forthcoming, 2025) transports readers to the forests of Jämtland, Sweden, where folklore and science twist into a toxic, terrifying mystery. Grey Knight (Detective Dion #3, 2026) promises to push his detective into the darkest investigation yet.
When he isn’t writing, Smith is a night-owl fuelled by coffee and the movement of cities. Travels from New York to Stockholm to Seoul often seed his next ideas, each place lending its atmospheres and secrets to his stories. Research is as much a part of his process as imagination: writing Decay led him deep into academic papers on acute radiation syndrome and, in Stockholm, into the Nobel Prize Museum to study artefacts from Marie Curie herself. His novels emerge from this fusion of lived experience and inquiry, each detail sharpened until fact and fiction blur.
A lifelong admirer of Sherlock Holmes, Smith is fascinated by the eternal puzzle of human curiosity; how the questions we ask reveal as much about us as the answers we find. He writes with the conviction that every story is a puzzle: some pieces fit neatly, others cut too deep, and a few are left for the reader to complete.
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