David Cooper Wall
"I carry these books around with me through my daily life like nagging children who are constantly at my sleeve."
Dotted along my life line are three books. And though I have tried my best to neglect them, they don't seem to ever go away completely. They bubble up in unexpected and startling fashion: somebody will download a copy off of Amazon, I'll come across a box of paperbacks under the workbench, a lady at the Post Office will ask if I'm still writing. They're like the family dog that noses your hand for attention when you're trying to nap.
My dear friend, Frances Phillips, who referred to herself as the Founding Mother of Morrow Publishing--'anyone could have been Managing Editor,' she said--told me once that her good writers were never a bother, plenty of ideas, lots of manuscripts. It was the spotty ones who had trouble. They were the ones you had to worry with.
I fear Frances would have jotted me down as one of the spotties.
When I left the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in journalism and mass communications, it was the time of Watergate and the Vietnam War. The Washington Post and the New York Times were two of the most revered institutions in America. Reporters were kings of the known universe! It never entered my mind that I would ever need to go back to school for another degree and I certainly never thought I would have to find a second career.
Today, following a five-year recession of epic proportions, the advent of the Internet, personal digital devices and smart phones, information and opinions are available at the touch of a finger. The NYT is essentially insolvent and The Washington Post recently sold for a fraction of its former value.
Talk about a sudden change of perspective.
I did have to go back to school in search of a new career, and quickly. I entered the health care profession and began working in a psychiatric hospital.
There is little in my personal academic education, or work experience, that would relate to any aspect of mental health care—as I understood it—before I began working at Broughton Hospital. Prior to that time, volunteering at the soup kitchen and wondering why these people would choose to sleep under a bridge, wear donated clothing and drink away their afternoons was about as far as my thinking went on the subject. I feel certain that counseling was not on my list of what I thought they needed to be set on the path to recovery.
Now those people at the soup kitchen are the patients I care for every day. I see each of them individually as the person they are with a name, a history, a family and they deserve to be as independent as possible through proper care and the best treatment possible despite their reluctance to follow medical advice, maintain their medication schedules or make the slightest effort--devout promises notwithstanding--to improve themselves.
With this kind of background, you'd think I'd follow Hollywood's Rule #1 and write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 2. But what I'll probably do is just write a fourth crime novel. It's what spotty people do.
Before I began writing crime novels, I lived in New York and worked as an actor, appearing in many of the daytime serials produced there—I think there were 14 at the time. Most of them were half-hour shows: Love of Life, The Doctors, The Edge of Night. You went in at 7 am, finished at 2 or 3 in the afternoon and still had time to make some auditions. I also 'trod' the stage in a number of off-broadway and regional theater productions and worked on the films Manhattan, All That Jazz, Kramer vs Kramer and The Jazz Singer. I have written three crime novels: One Cried Murder, Exit Marks the Spot and Dead Last, I've worked for newspapers, written about the science and technological accomplishments of college professors, and co-founded a marketing and communications firm that served industry, banking and medical clients. Due to my time pursuing a life in the theater, I'm three times a Teamster as a member of SAG, AFTRA and Actor's Equity.
When I am not writing, I work as a Psych Tech at a local Medical Center. The work is challenging, the condition of the patients is often heartbreaking, but there is plenty of time off to recover and dink around the house. That's 'dink' around the house, not drink, though I do enjoy a cold beer and a shot of tequila from time to time.
