Elizabeth Gunn always described herself as an innkeeper with a taste for adventure, enjoying wide-ranging experiences as a private pilot, sky diver, SCUBA diver, and live-aboard sailor. Extensive travel in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe led to a second career as a free-lance travel writer, during which she began writing the Jake Hines police procedural mysteries set in southeast Minnesota. She continued writing after moving to Tucson, with a southwestern series featuring detective Sarah Burke.
Elizabeth wrote fifteen mystery novels, short stories, critiques, and a novella. She was actively involved with the Arizona Mystery Writers from the club's earliest days, working as an enthusiastic volunteer, an inspiring speaker, and serving on the board. She passed away in August, 2022.
Longtime Arizona Mystery Writers' member Stan Lehman died November 3, 2019. Born in Abilene, Kansas, Stan entered law school and transferred to the University of Arizona where he was licensed in 1963. In Phoenix, he helped found the Maricopa County Young Lawyers Association and served as its president.
In 1993, Stan moved to Bisbee to work as a defense attorney and later represented children and parents in child dependency proceedings. He retired in 2008. He was a short story writer and made popular presentations to the Arizona Historical Society.
Anne Lehman, Stan's wife of sixteen years, was also an Arizona Mystery Writer. She died in June of 2017. Born in St. Louis, she attended Purdue University in Indiana. She became a real estate agent in Tucson and in the borderland of Douglas, AZ.
The Lehmans made the long drive from Douglas to Tucson every month just to enjoy our Mystery Writers meetings. They will be missed.
Mary Ann Hutchison grew up in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where she began her long career in legal administration, working in various capacities as a legal secretary, administrative aide, and courtroom clerk in Wisconsin and later in Tucson, including the Pima County Sherriff's Department and the Pima County Superior Court. After retiring, Mary Ann wrote many short stories, middle-grade, suspense stories, and memoirs, with her extensive experience in law-offices and courtrooms lending realism to her fiction. She was proudest of her more serious work, The Man Who Loved Peppermint Candy, published in 2015.
Mary Ann was also an active member of the Tucson writing community, though her work with Gecko Gals Ink, and the Arizona Mystery Writers. She loved talking to new people, and her energy and friendliness was contagious. Mary Ann encouraged young writers, working within AMW to start a youth writing contest. She is pictured here with the 2017 winner, Kate Anderson, and the contest was later re-named the Mary Ann Hutchison Story Contest for Youths in her honor. Mary Ann passed away in November, 2017.
