About Max

Max has always been a storyteller, a spinner of yarns, an embellisher. He loves to entertain. His family and friends joke that it’s better to have him retell and act out his version of a movie than to see the movie for yourself.

He was born outside of Boston and grew up in Philadelphia, somehow managing to move fluidly between the worlds of Ivy league intellectuals and dark alley classrooms where his heroes and teachers were the shadiest of characters. Well, shady is a bit kind. Treacherous is fair.

Max managed to stay out of jail (for the most part), avoided a second run at Rehab (which he attributes to blind stubbornness), and somehow, miraculously, never got a DUI—which can ONLY be explained by dumb luck.

His lifestyle would have surely irked a few of his ancestors—like his great-grandfather, William M. Calder 1st, former U.S. Senator from New York who turned down the Vice Presidency nomination to run with Harding. When Harding died in office, Coolidge was sworn in as the 30th president because Calder had pushed aside the crown. But such extremes in personal and family history are so much the better for the palette of a fiction writer…

From a hard street life, Max did a 180 into a career in fitness spanning 30 plus years as a Master Trainer and gym owner/operator. During that time Max managed to write and debut his first novel, Brotherly Love, and has just completed the revised 2nd edition. When the fitness chapter of his life came to a close he turned 180 degrees a second time, arriving at fiction novelist as a full time endeavor. He published his second novel, Nathan’s Nickel, in 2021. Max sets his books in Philly where his past turmoil and colliding cultures form the grist for his writing mill. It wasn’t all bad. There was a lot of essential learning and fun mixed with the mayhem.

Max plans to release his next novel, the Guillotine Squad, this year while hanging out with his best buddy, Roscoe, who while roaming the desert, starving and alone, was shot five times and still has the slugs in him to prove it. “Not to worry, Roscoe is now an upstanding citizen. No, he’s not a reformed thug, he’s my dog.”