Mystery and History

Writing articles and books about historical topics has been one of my passions for years. I completed the MA and PhD in US History at Michigan State in 1970. First, I graduated from Eastern Michigan in 1964 and taught and coached in high school for three years. Until retiring in 2010, I taught on the college level, starting in 1970 at Clemson, then Ball State in 1975, and, in 1977, at Virginia Western Community College, in Roanoke. Before 1992, I concentrated on publishing articles in historical journals and magazines. Coaching youth baseball in the 1990s caused me to focus on sports history, and I began interviewing former pro athletes and writing profile stories about their careers. In 2012 I published my AAGPBL team history with Robert M. Gorman, The South Bend Blue Sox (McFarland, Inc.). Next I wrote We Were the All-American Girls (McFarland, 2013), featuring 42 interviews with former players.

 

Returning to my favorite team, the Detroit Tigers, I wrote Yesterday's Tiger Heroes (Wynwidyn Press, 2014), about Detroit's 1956 season and its players. Then I penned The Tigers and Yankees in '61 (McFarland, 2016), highlighting the two-team pennant race and the Mantle-Maris home run duel. While waiting to see it published, I wrote my first novel: Curve Ball (published by Wynwidyn Press, 2016). In late 2017 I published The Final Secret, a Mickey Mathews mystery which covers events leading to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 (Wynwidyn, 2017). In 2019 I followed up with The Long Pursuit, my second Mickey Mathews mystery, also by Wynwidyn. My next Mickey Mathews adventure was Shadow of the Hawk (Wynwidyn, 2020). Even more recently, I wrote Warm Springs Mystery (Doce Blant Publishing, 2020).​
 

Most of my historical writing, starting with my book, Roosevelt and the Hundred Days of 1933 (Garland, 1981), covers topics in American History from the 1930s to the 1970s.  I came of age in Flint, Michigan, in the 1950s, graduating from Kearsley High in 1958. I love using my historical knowledge of the twentieth century to make the characters and scenarios in books come alive. I'm retired as a history professor. Now I'm combining my enthusiasms for mystery and history into an enjoyable writing career.