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John Dandola is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and historian who has also written extensively about his hometown of West Orange, New Jersey. He is a member of both the Mystery Writers of America and the Writers Guild of America. [1]

A descendent of two of the town’s oldest families, his maternal grandfather worked as a personal messenger boy to Thomas Edison in the 1910s. That unique perspective figures prominently in Dandola’s West Orange-based mystery novels which are set in the 1940s. [2] The first of those mystery novels, Dead at the Box Office, chronicles the actual World Premiere of M.G.M.’s Edison, the Man starring Spencer Tracy, which was held in West Orange during May of 1940. The novel’s motion picture rights have been repeatedly optioned along with Dandola’s script adaptation.

Dandola is also the biographer of millionaire inventor John Hays Hammond, Jr. (Living in the Past, Looking to the Future). Known as the “Father of Radio Control,” Hammond was a protégé of Thomas Edison and the builder of Hammond Castle Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. [3] That museum is not only featured in Dandola’s New England mystery novels [4] but he also authored the popular Ghosts of Hammond Castle which recounts paranormal goings-on within the castle walls.

Among his many screen adaptations is the English mystery novel, A Wisp of Smoke, intended as the pilot for a British television series based on the Arnold Landon Mysteries by Roy Lewis. The nineteen (and counting) novels feature an amateur historian in present-day Northumberland – England's northernmost county and also the locale for Dandola’s first sold screenplay (from the British supernatural thriller, Dragon Under the Hill).

In March of 2005, New Jersey's prestigious Celtic Theatre Company premiered Dandola’s play, TALES OF A PUBLIC HOUSE: An Evening of Ghosts, Murder, & Wild Imaginings based on the short stories of Irish writer William Carleton (1794–1869). Discussions are currently underway about a production of the play in Ireland.

May of 2006 saw the debut of his Greetings from West Orange, New Jersey, the first totally accurate and concise history of the town.