C.W. Gortner

C.W. Gortner (Christopher Willis Gortner, 1964-2025) was an American historical novelist, half-Spanish by birth and raised in a fishing village near Malaga, Spain, before settling in California. He held an MFA in writing with an emphasis on historical studies from the New College of California and taught university courses on women of power in the Renaissance -- research that fed directly into a long run of bestselling novels centered on real historical women, among them Mademoiselle Chanel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, The Last Queen and The Vatican Princess. Before writing full time from 2012 onward, he spent years as a fashion executive and then worked twelve years in public health. His novels have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he was named one of the top ten historical novelists by the Washington Independent Review of Books. In this catalogue he appears as M.J. Rose's co-author on the To Catch a Leopard trilogy (The Steal, The Bait, The Heist; 2021-2022), a late-1950s romantic caper about jewelry designer Ania Throne and a jewel thief known as the Leopard -- a departure in tone from his solo Renaissance- and World War II-era novels, but consistent with his long-standing interest in jewelry, craft history and glamour, shared with Rose and drawn on for that collaboration. Gortner died on 25 October 2025.