William R. (Bill)Trotter (July 15, 1943 – February 28, 2018) was an Americanauthor andhistorian.^[1][2]

Trotter's work covered a variety of genres and markets. His first published work was "Sibelius and the Tides of Taste" forHigh Fidelity in 1965. Lawyer Rob Newsom III invited him to writeDeadly Kin, atrue crime book, which was published in 1989. A research project Trotter started while atDavidson College about theWinter War eventually became the history bookA Frozen Hell, published in 1991.^[3] It was awarded the Arts and Letters Prize of the Finlandia Foundation. A trilogy of books on theAmerican Civil War inNorth Carolina was published in 1991 and 1992.Winter Fire, his first novel, was published in 1993.^[4][5] A horrornovelette, "Siren of Swanquarter", published inDeathrealm magazine, was nominated for aBram Stoker Award in 1994. His biography of conductorDmitri Mitropoulos was published in 1995. He wrote two guides for theClose Combat series of computer games in 1999. A pair ofhistorical novels set in North Carolina during the Civil War,Sands of Pride andFires of Pride, were published in 2002 and 2003, and his most recent novel,Warrener's Beastie, was published in 2006. He has also written "The Desktop General" column forPC Gamer magazine since 1988. Trotter also has spent time in Filmography as an Assistant Director forGhost Recon 2 in 2004 and as the musical consultant for one episode ofLive from Lincoln Center in 1976.

Trotter was also a classical music expert and collector, owning one of the largest collections of vinyl and CD recordings in the Southeast. He wrote on classical music for theCharlotte Observer, theHigh Point Enterprise, and theGreensboro News & Record, among others, and served as program annotator for Greensboro's prestigious Eastern Music Festival. He was an acknowledged expert on the works ofJean Sibelius, the subject of his novelWinter Fire, andLeopold Stokowski, whose Trotter-penned biography has gone as yet unpublished but has made the rounds of the Leopold Stokowski Society for many years.

Trotter was born inCharlotte, North Carolina. At the age of fourteen he wrote his first novel,Glorious October (unpublished) about the Hungarian revolution of 1956. He married his second wife, pianist Elizabeth Lustig, in 1983. They had one son together and one son each from previous marriages. Trotter and Lustig publishedThe Northstate Reader monthly tabloid from 1981 to 1984. Trotter died on February 28, 2018, inGreensboro, North Carolina, of pancreatic cancer.

• Winter Fire (1993)ISBN 978-0-525-93581-0
• Sands of Pride (2002)ISBN 978-0-7867-1013-3
• Fires of Pride (2003)ISBN 978-0-7867-1448-3
• Warrener's Beastie (2006)ISBN 978-0-7867-1328-8

• Deadly Kin: A True Story of a Mass Family Murder (1988)ISBN 978-0-929307-00-8
• Silk Flags and Cold Steel (1988)ISBN 978-0-929307-01-5
• Bushwhackers!: The Mountains (1991)ISBN 978-0-89587-087-2
• Ironclads and Columbiads: The Coast (1991)ISBN 978-0-89587-088-9
• Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939/40 (1991)ISBN 978-0-945575-22-1
  • Republished in 2002 asThe Winter War: The Russo-Finnish War of 1939-1940
• Priest of Music: The Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos (1995)ISBN 978-0-931340-81-9

• Word Processing by Anderson and Trotter (1974)ISBN 978-0-8144-5356-8
• Ascendancy: The Official Strategy Guide (1995)ISBN 978-0-7615-0358-3
• Close Combat: Inside Moves (1996)ISBN 978-1-57231-308-8
• Close Combat - A Bridge Too Far: Inside Moves (1998)ISBN 978-1-57231-634-8

• "The Running Back from Yuggoth" -Fantasy Book June 1985
• "Bagman" -Night Cry Fall 1985
• "A Pinch of Snuff" -Deathrealm Fall/Win 1990
• "The Boss of the Seventh Level" -Deathrealm Spr 1992
• "A Graveside chat with Diedra Cox" -Deathrealm Win 1993
• "The Siren of Swanquarter" -Deathrealm Win 1993
• "Big Game" -Deathrealm Fall 1996
• "The Bleeding of Hauptmann Gehlen" -The Darkest Thirst, Anon, Design Image Group 1998

• American male novelists
• Writers from Charlotte, North Carolina
• Writers from Greensboro, North Carolina
• 1943 births
• 2018 deaths
• American male short story writers
• 20th-century American novelists
• 21st-century American novelists
• American columnists
• Davidson College alumni
• 20th-century American short story writers
• 21st-century American short story writers
• 20th-century American male writers
• 21st-century American male writers
• Novelists from North Carolina
• 20th-century American non-fiction writers
• 21st-century American non-fiction writers
• American male non-fiction writers

• Articles with short description
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