Bill Moody was born in Webb City, Missouri and grew up in Santa Monica, California. A professional jazz drummer, Bill played and/or recorded with Jr. Mance, Maynard Ferguson, Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, and Lou Rawls. He lived in Las Vegas for many years as a musician on the Las Vegas Strip, hosted a weekly radio show at KUNV-FM, and taught in the UNLV English Department.

He then moved to northern California, where he taught creative writing at Sonoma State University, and was active in the Bay Area jazz scene with the Terry Henry Trio and Dick Conte's trio and quartet. He was the author of five Evan Horne novels: Looking for Chet Baker, Bird Lives!, Sound of the Trumpet, Death of a Tenor Man, and Solo Hand.

Bill Moody died in January 2018.

"The connection between playing jazz and writing crime fiction is a strong one for me. A jazz musician begins with the framework or the song — the chords, the structure, the form — but during a solo, he doesn't know what he's going to play or how until he reaches that part of the song. Writing crime fiction for me is a similar process. Working from the basic structure of the crime novel, I then improvise on a premise or motif, if you will, and I'm a fervent advocate of the 'what if' game during the writing process."
-Bill Moody