Bill McCulloch

While tending bar in a Chicago neighborhood tavern in the 1960s, Bill McCulloch encountered a range of character types who have now emerged, fifty years later, in "A Dandy Little Game," McCulloch's debut novel.

"It was a working-class bar," McCulloch recalls, "the kind of place where mailmen and short-order cooks rubbed elbows with hustlers, clerks, and a few low-level hoods. Most of my customers gambled, even if they couldn’t afford to. Their wives would come around to the bar every payday, hoping to get some money before it was all gone. As a naïve kid, I felt like I had nothing in common with those people, nothing I could learn from them. It wasn't until years later that I realized I'd seen things and heard things that would make one hell of a good story"

McCulloch began laying groundwork for the story after he closed his solo freelance practice in 1999, but didn’t get serious about finishing the book until a brush with cancer in 2012.

“They say you can’t know what’s truly important in your life until you catch a glimpse of your own death,” he says. “After going through the treatments for a head and neck cancer, I knew I didn’t want to die with an unfinished novel in my laptop.”

In the fifty years between tending bar and finishing “A Dandy Little Game,” McCulloch had a 25-year career in print journalism, built a freelance writing and editing business, co-authored a non-fiction book, and pursued a secondary career as a musician. All without the benefit of a college degree.

“In 1967 I took a writing test at United Press International in Chicago,” McCulloch says, “and they offered me a job writing copy for their broadcast service. Back then, the wire services and small weekly newspapers weren’t so picky about academic credentials. They just wanted to know if you could report accurately and write. Degree or no degree, I knew how to write.”

As a journalist, McCulloch worked for weekly and daily newspapers in Illinois and Michigan, where his writing and reporting earned awards from state press associations. For almost three years, he owned a weekly paper in Michigan’s smallest county. “A huge mistake,” McCulloch says now. “But as painful as that experience was, maybe it’ll provide material for another novel someday.”

Later, after a stint as city editor for a medium-sized daily paper in northwest Lower Michigan, McCulloch spent five years as the editor of an award-winning daily in coastal New England.

As a freelancer in North Carolina, where he has lived since 1989, McCulloch worked on marketing newsletters and other projects for a major pharmaceutical corporation. He contributed articles to American National Biography, a multi-volume reference work published by Oxford University Press. And he collaborated with folklorist Barry Lee Pearson on “Robert Johnson: Lost and Found” (University of Illinois Press, 2003), a critically praised debunking of the stories and legends surrounding one of America’s best-known blues artists.

Before, during, and after his years in print journalism, McCulloch moonlighted as Windy City Slim, an interpreter of American roots music. Although he announced his retirement from music in early 2013, the year he turned 71, he still performs occasionally, and gives lecture programs on the history and origins of blues, which he describes as “America’s musical gift to the world.”