Scott Pratt

The Man Behind Joe Dillard

Arthur Scott Pratt was born in Fennville, Michigan on December 16, 1956 and moved to Tennessee at thirteen. He served in the United States Air Force, earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from East Tennessee State University (where he won the McClellan Award for a screenplay about Blackbeard the pirate), and eventually earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Tennessee College of Law.

He was a former criminal defense attorney who left law to become a writer, a self-taught novelist who learned his craft by reading legal thrillers, studying story structure, and writing in the margins of his own life. He was a husband who built his novels around a marriage that anchored him. He lived in rural Tennessee for decades before writing about rural Tennessee as if the place itself had moral weight. And he was determined to keep writing when his publishers kicked him to the curb, and smart enough to publish himself when gatekeepers slammed the door in his face.

Joe Dillard, his most famous creation, is a fictional version of Scott Pratt. Dillard's integrity, his loyalty to damaged people, his refusal to play the game, his dark humor, his love of his wife Caroline: these qualities come from Scott. The pages of his Dillard novels are filled with events from Scott's real life.

Publishers Weekly called his first novel a work of "richly developed characters" and "strong Southern women." They were reading the work of a writer who understood the people he wrote about because he lived among them. East Tennessee is not a backdrop in Scott Pratt's work. It is a character. The mountains, the people, the moral complexity of small towns: all of it lives and breathes in his pages.

How Joe Dillard Was Born

In January 2006, Scott Pratt was riding shotgun in his Jaguar while his son Dylan drove them to a baseball camp at Vanderbilt University. His law license had been suspended. His wife Kristy was fighting breast cancer. The family was in financial freefall. He brought along a copy of Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer to pass the time.

He devoured it. Not just as a reader, but as a man looking for a way out. He studied how Connelly built Mickey Haller, how the courtroom scenes worked, how the tension held page after page. By the time they got home to Johnson City, Scott had a plan.

He burst in the door, held the book up to Kristy, and said: "This is how I'm going to save us."

He had no formal fiction training. He worked with editor Renni Browne, studied James Scott Bell's Plot and Structure, and taught himself the craft by doing the work. He sat down at a kitchen table in Johnson City, Tennessee, with no publisher, no agent, no marketing budget, and no guarantee that anyone would ever read what he wrote, and he wrote An Innocent Client.

Scott was eventually represented by the Philip Spitzer Literary Agency, the same agency that represented Michael Connelly. Penguin's New American Library imprint published An Innocent Client in November 2008. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review. It was a finalist for the Macavity Award for Best Debut Mystery, losing to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Scott signed a deal for two more novels and received a $50,000 advance. But when Penguin rejected Reasonable Fear, the fourth Joe Dillard novel, Scott took the series independent.

He published the rest of the books himself.

The Self-Publishing Revolution

When Scott Pratt started self-publishing, the stigma was real. Self-published meant vanity. It meant you couldn't get a real publisher. It meant your book probably wasn't good enough.

Scott proved that wrong. By 2015, he had sold hundreds of thousands of copies across multiple books, most of them published without a major publisher touching them. His books were being translated into ten languages. Readers in Germany and France and the UK were discovering Joe Dillard without marketing departments or bookstore placement.

He proved you don't need permission from a publisher to be a real author. You don't need a gatekeeper's approval to build an audience. You need a great story, the discipline to finish it, and the courage to put it out into the world when your doubts are loudest.

Personal Life & Family

Kristy is the center of every Scott Pratt novel. In the books, she is Caroline Dillard. In real life, she was Kristy Pratt, the woman who read every manuscript, believed in Joe Dillard before anyone else did, and kept Scott writing when the doubts crept in late at night.

Their marriage was the ballast. Caroline goes through hell in the novels. She fights cancer. She struggles with grief. She loves a man who can't fix her problems. But Joe stands beside her. That's not a plot point. That's a marriage.

In In Good Faith, Caroline loses her hair to chemotherapy. Joe takes his razor and shaves her head. She cries. He holds her. The scene is devastating because it's true to what happens when you love someone and can't help them. Scott wrote that scene because he understood it. Not every detail of his life became fiction, but his understanding of loyalty and love did.

Scott and Kristy lived in Johnson City, Tennessee. Kristy ran a dance studio, teaching jazz and tap. They raised three children: their sons Dylan and Jeremiah and their daughter Kody. Scott's brother Kevin, a U.S. Army medic, was present at the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, the real-life event depicted in Black Hawk Down. The Pratt family understood service, sacrifice, and what it costs.

Dylan is now the publisher of Phoenix Flying and carries forward his father's legacy. They built a life that was ordinary and extraordinary at the same time: a life built on work, family, loyalty, and the belief that excellence matters.

Legacy

Scott Pratt died in November 2018 in Bonaire. He was 61 years old. By then, his novels had sold over 6 million copies worldwide. They were translated into more than ten languages. New readers were discovering Joe Dillard every day.

What he left behind was more than a catalogue of books. He left a proof that excellence and persistence and authenticity matter. That you don't need permission to be an author. That the people you love should appear in your work, not as background decoration but as the thing the work is really about. That place and specificity are not limitations: they are the door to universality.

Casey Sears, former colleague of Scott's, called his story "the great American redemption story." Not because Scott Pratt had fallen from grace and climbed back up. But because he saw who he could be and became it. From a kitchen table to 7 million copies. From unknown to beloved. From doubt to certainty that the work was worth doing.

His son Dylan now carries forward the Dillard series and the Phoenix Flying legacy. Last Resort, co-authored by J.D. Pratt, was released in 2023. Vindicate, the first Jack Dillard novel, came out in 2025. The work continues. The standards Scott set remain.

The Continuation: J.D. Pratt & Phoenix Flying

Scott's son Dylan took over Phoenix Flying Publishing after Scott's death. Operating under the pen name J.D. Pratt, Dylan has continued his father's work with the same commitment to excellence that defined Scott's career.

The standards are clear: excellence in craft, authenticity in character, specificity in place, and loyalty to readers who have made Joe Dillard a household name. Dylan operates the business with the same high standards that Scott brought to his writing. The work comes first. Everything else follows.

Key Facts

Complete Bibliography

The Joe Dillard Series (10 novels)

Jack Dillard Series (1 published, in continuation)

Darren Street Series (3 novels; published by Thomas & Mercer)

Other Works

Frequently Asked Questions