From there, he moved to Vermont and has worked in politics, as a theater photographer, a newspaper writer and editor, a lab technician for Paris-Match Magazine, and as a medical illustrator.

[2] While working as a special projects editor for the University of Texas Press in 1975, Mayor discovered the then-unpublished manuscript of T.H.

[3] In 1988, Mayor published the first installment of his Joe Gunther mystery series, Open Season, which he explained was "written as three completely separate books," which he ended up throwing out each time to start over.

He has used his experience in law enforcement to inform his novels and has noted that he doesn't plot out his books, preferring to let the story play out as he writes.

[5] In July 2022, Mayor announced that he was pausing his Joe Gunther series, saying in an interview that while writing mysteries has been useful to process his work as a death investigator, "if you do anything for 40-plus years, as I have been, a writer of both history and fiction, I think you do need a break every once in a while.