A writer with many more stories to tell

Biography

Rick Neumayer’s fourth book of fiction, Three Foggy Mornings (2025), is a collection of 33 short stories written from 1974-2020, plus two essays about writing. Inspired by travel, incidents, and current events, many of these stories are autobiographical, combining real life events with fictive elements for dramatic effect. Many were previously published in literary magazines. Three Foggy Mornings follows Rick’s third novel, The Little Green Men Murders (2024), the second in his Jim Guthrie PI series, which began with Hotwalker (2021). Rick’s debut novel, Journeyman (2020), is an epic hitchhiking journey set in 1971 from Louisville, Kentucky, to a Haight-Ashbury commune in San Francisco.

Three of Rick’s full-length Broadway-style musical collaborations have been produced. A career teacher, he has had a wide variety of experiences, including working as a newspaper reporter, book reviewer, literary magazine editor, singer in rock bands, and a traveler who has visited over 30 countries. The Louisville native and resident has degrees from Spalding University (MFA), University of Louisville (MA), and Western Kentucky University (BA). For 52 years Rick was married to the late visual artist and teacher Cora Rouse Neumayer (1943-2024).

  • “This honest, funny, and heartbreaking novel delivers everything a reader could wish for in the way of action, characters who are convincing and engaging and ideas worth pondering. Journeyman could well join the ranks of classic, always-need, must-have literature.”

    – Sena Jeter Naslund, Author of Ahab's Wife, Sherlock in Love, Four Spirits & six other titles.

  • “If you lived through the Vietnam War era, you will recognize the deep truth of this novel; if you were not alive then, you will fathom the chaos and hope and heartbreak of those years and how they laid the foundation for the world we’re living now. This is a timely, generous book that deftly captures a powerful, heady, mind-bending time.”

    — Eleanor Morse, author of Margreete’s Harbor and White Dog Fell From The Sky

  • “Two intrepid young men set out from Kentucky to retrace the westward peregrinations of Kerouac and Cassady. Rick Neumayer’s writing is direct and purposeful and it propels us through these misadventures as though we were along for the ride.”

    — Ed McClanahan, author of The Natural Man, Famous People I Have Known, and other books

Recent Work

  • Three Foggy Mornings

    Thirty-three stories inspired by travel, incidents, family anecdotes, and current events. Plus, two essays about mysteries and writing page-turners.

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  • The Little Green Men Murders

    Jim Guthrie is back. This time, Louisville’s contemporary Philip Marlowe must rescue a documentary filmmaker who has been kidnapped at the “Little Green Men Festival” in—wait for it—Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

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  • Hotwalker

    When police fail to solve the murder of a Guatemalan groom on the backside of Churchill Downs during the Kentucky Derby festival, the victim’s hotwalker son hires local private investigator Jim Guthrie to bring the killer to justice.

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  • Journeyman

    Pate Merwin both uses his head and longs for magic in resolving his questions about how-to-live meaningfully (and simply how to survive).

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Contact Rick

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