Mystery author Les Roberts has written around 35 novels — and still hasn’t stopped at 89 years old.
“When I sit down to write, I know the good guy. I know the bad guy,” says Roberts, who resides at Ohio Living Rockynol in Akron. “The rest of it comes to me as I’m going.”
His most popular series follows private eye Milan Jacovich in 19 fictional books set in Northeast Ohio.
In the 1960s, he moved to New York to pursue acting, and then moved to Los Angeles, where he spent 24 years writing TV shows, including The Andy Griffith Show, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Jackie Gleason Show and more. He was also the head writer and producer for Hollywood Squares.
“I knew movie stars. I would hang out with them,” recalls Roberts, who has also been a professional actor, singer, jazz musician, teacher and more.
In the 1960s, Roberts came to Cleveland to write for the Ohio Lottery’s TV show, Cash Explosion, and was enamored with the city after just two weeks of visiting it. Roberts left glitzy, sun-soaked LA for the gritty Rust Belt, moving to Cleveland Heights in the 1990s. He lived there for 19 years before living in apartments in Akron in the 2000s and then eventually moving into Rockynol in 2025.
Roberts came to writing mystery novels by chance. In the late 1980s, he was commissioned to write a movie — but changed directions after 30 pages.
“A little bug back here said, It’s a book, stupid. Do a book. So, I stopped and I wrote a book,” recalls Roberts, who has received many accolades, including the Sherwood Anderson Literary Award.
Called An Infinite Number of Monkeys, it follows an actor and private investigator looking into who killed a millionaire. It’s the first of six books in his Saxon series, based in LA.
Roberts was inspired to create Jacovich after talking with an airplane passenger. The two met up later, and she discussed her brother, Milan. Roberts created the character of Milan Jacovich, making him a Slovenian American ex-cop-turned-private eye who loved kielbasa and Stroh’s beer.
“He’s very brave. I think in almost every book there are several funny lines,” says Roberts, who published a memoir, We’ll Always Have Cleveland. “When I lived in Hollywood, I wrote for Paul Lynde, Buddy Hackett and Don Rickles. I know how to tell a joke.”
Roberts cultivated relationships with the police department and sheriff’s office, occasionally sitting down to ask questions and get in the mind of police officers and criminals. One of Roberts’ favorite Jacovich books is the fourth entry, The Cleveland Connection. It follows a granddaughter trying to track down her missing grandfather, who is Serbian. The plot revolves around the fictional rivalry between Cleveland’s Serbian and Slovenian communities. The Washington Post praised the book: “There’s an affection for Cleveland and an insistence on its ethnic, working-class life that gives vividness to the detection.”
Some links to Roberts can be found in that novel, among others — largely revolving around Jacovich’s character.
“It’s a lot about me and what’s going on in my life,” he recalls of Jacovich, who is divorced and has two kids who are seven years apart like Roberts. “I really did a hell of a job writing it.”
He’s also written a series on assassin Dominick Candiotti, which consists of two published books, including the first, The Strange Death of Father Candy, about the death of Candiotti’s brother. Gumshoe wrote that the novel is a “volatile piece of bloody noir that is extremely fast-paced and highly engaging.”
His recent works include Temporary Man, a standalone about the mob, Bellamy, a novel with a female protagonist, and the Akron-set Less Than Yesterday, in which an ex-cop discovers that his girlfriend was found dead in the Gorge.
As he approaches his ninth decade, Roberts hopes to continue writing as long as he can. It’s what keeps him going and gives him purpose each day.
“When I sit down at my desk, I’m not there any longer,” he says. “I’m in the book.”
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