Talty attended Bishop Timon High School in New York and Amherst College in Massachusetts, before finding employment as a journalist with the Miami Herald. During the 1990s, he went freelance in Dublin and New York, and contributed articles for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Playboy, the Irish Times, and the Chicago Review.
In addition to writing detective fiction, Talty has written several nonfiction books on crime and American history. He co‑wrote the book that was the basis for Captain Phillips, and wrote The Black Hand, a novelization about the killing of Italian American cop Joe Petrosino in 1909.
In 2013, the movie Captain Phillips was released in the US, directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi. The screenplay by Billy Ray was based on the 2010 book A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty as co-writer.

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