Category Archives: Uncategorized

A simple way to refute any allegation of AI use? Paper trail, baby

Not so long ago, as publishing companies were feeding manuscripts into AI programs to determine if AI was used to write the manuscripts – not surprisingly, in some cases, the AI came up with a “positive for AI” diagnosis, strangely enough often in the case of first-time POC authors – the discourse among writers was how to prepare to defend yourself in case of AI allegations.

“Save your drafts,” the simple response came. Each of the four or five or 10 times you wrote a new draft, each one was proof that it was your hand that crafted the writing.

But what if you don’t draft?

Maybe it’s because of my “this must be written now” practice of writing for newspapers, I don’t draft, at least in the sense of rewriting a stem to stern version of a work several times.

NOTE ADDED AFTER POSTING: I do go over and over everything I write, usually by rereading what I’ve written previously to put myself in the frame of mind to write anew. Does this count as drafting? Dunno.

I do have my outline for my first (and most recently published) novel SEVEN ANGELS, as seen above, dated from June 2019, saved in the SEVEN ANGELS folder on my MacBook Pro.

But is there a more certain, beyond subterfuge, way of proving that a book was written in increments, day by day, for months?

I didn’t realize at the time that I was building proof that I’d written SEVEN ANGELS – really, all my books and even many short stories and nonfiction articles – as I wrote it.

It’s long been my practice to email to myself the latest version of any book as I write another chapter or, on a less productive day, another set of paragraphs. Hell, even new sentences.

In my email, I’ve got the latest version of whatever I’m writing, every day, as I’ve written it.

There’s some added assuredness that could provide a time frame for my writing: social media.

Again, coming from the newspaper business, I’ve always been pretty transparent with my writing. So on Twitter, going as far back as 2009, and more recently Bluesky, I’ll often note on social media what I’ve working on. It’s an incremental timeline, not quite as explicit as the daily email to myself, but pretty close.

Not to mention notes to myself in physical notebooks, which I’ve been using since even before I began writing novels in 2019.

So if the thought of creating a “paper trail” of drafts is intimidating to any writer, I’d suggest emailing yourself your latest version. It’s a good indication that you’ve been working on a project.

It has the added bonus of backing up your work in case your computer decides to jump off a cliff.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

Requiem for Muncie Mall: America’s hometown’s second gathering place is fading fast

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If you considered our downtowns to once be the gathering places for our cities and towns, then you could consider your local mall to be America’s second gathering place. That’s appropriate, because malls largely killed off downtowns.

Downtowns across the country have staged and are staging something of a comeback. They entered a steep decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s as malls were built and first retailers and then customers moved away from downtowns to the new gathering places, the mall.

In my hometown of Muncie, the mall – Muncie Mall – opened, more or less, in 1970, years later than the first U.S. mall, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956. Big department stores left Muncie’s downtown, with Sears being the first anchor store to open at the mall. Downtown was, in a decade or less, pretty hollowed out and storefronts along Walnut Street were left empty or occupied by small businesses and, in one instance, an adult bookstore.

Like a lot of cities and a lot of malls, Muncie and Muncie Mall struggled mightily in the first decade of the 21st century. I was covering business at the time and retailers – some with problems nationally, like Sears – closed their doors.

I was back in Muncie over the weekend and we had to check out the mall, which has been the scene of a lot of demolition work in the past year. The three-screen movie theater, where I spent a lot of time as a young movie fan, was razed. More recently, the wings that had been occupied by Sears and J.C. Penney have been or are being demoed.

The photo above is one I took this weekend and it shows that one empty third of the mall is roped off.

There’s still a few tenants in the mall, most notably Books-A-Million, which supposedly has a five-year lease. Does that mean the rest of the structure will be pulled down around and behind it, or will BAM find a spot elsewhere or leave the city entirely? I don’t know.

If you’re interested in the lifetime of a Midwestern mall, you’ll be interested in the timeline by Robin Gibson in The Star Press newspaper that I’ll link to at the end.

I won’t wax on about what malls meant to us or Muncie Mall meant to me. You can probably find my writing about that elsewhere, including as a chapter of our third true crime book, THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS. Our book covers a still-unsolved double killing of two teenagers in 1985 and I included a chapter about Muncie Mall because the mall was a big place for us back then.

Here’s that Muncie Mall timeline:

https://www.thestarpress.com/story/news/local/2020/02/12/muncie-mall-50-years-timeline/4466975002

November 5, 1977, a date that will live in infamy, also known as my first published article, 49 years ago today

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I could lie and say that this date 49 years ago seems like only yesterday, but truthfully it seems like eons ago.

After I woke up this morning, I opened Instagram to see video footage of author Stephen King leaving some book promotion event somewhere and I thought that King, one of my favorite authors of all time and a master of the written word, looked every day of his 79 years. He seemed a little unsteady and walked with a cane.

Funny coincidence, so do I. And King is more than a decade older than me.

If that wasn’t humbling enough, I opened Facebook memories and saw posts from 2017 and 2007, I believe, in which I noted the anniversary of my first published newspaper article from 1977.

Despite the inclination to turn over and go back to sleep at all those reminders of the passage of time, I decided to get up and, among other things, write about the 49th anniversary of my first published article.

That’s a screenshot from newspapers dot com above, and you can tell the gist of the article: friends and fellow students from Cowan High School in Delaware County, Indiana, let me interview them about what they did on a “big night out.” The gist of it was go see a movie, go see a concert, have dinner as well as a few more nefarious activities, like illegally obtaining beer – all of us were three or four years too young to buy carry-out liquor – and drinking and sometimes riding around in the rural countryside, throwing beer bottles at signs.

(I can write about this now that my son is years past the age to be encouraged to do this by my example.)

The article was hugely controversial, and a good indicator of why the less-legal activities were not attributed to anyone on the record: My school system apologized in the school newsletter to the poor students scandalized by the implication that they would do this. Somewhere, in a box somewhere, I not only have a clipping of the article but also a snippet of the apology (not from me, but from school administrators) in the newsletter.

The article came about because I had volunteered to fill in for a friend also on the school newspaper and yearbook staff. She had a ton of studying to do and wouldn’t have time to write the article for the Muncie Evening Press newspaper. (The newspaper regularly published articles written by local high school students, although most were of the “Big school fundraiser next week” variety.) I said I would and that kicked off a newspaper career that didn’t end until I took a buyout in January 2019. It didn’t completely end even then: I wrote freelance for the newspaper for a year or two even after the buyout, covering stories like Covid.

After a newspaper editor called the school guidance office (heh heh) and offered me a regular gig as the paper’s “teen columnist,” I wrote for the Evening Press all through college and for a couple of years after before they offered me a full-time reporting job in 1984. I started on my dad’s birthday, which was appropriate because my parents had never been anything but supportive of me going into writing rather than my original plan, which was to become a lawyer. My tenure at the newspaper continued even after my beloved evening paper merged with the hated morning paper in 1996.

The moral of this is: Kids, stay in school.

No, the moral is that you should take a chance every once in a while, trying something new and daring that might have an unexpected outcome.

You, too, could become a lifelong writer and pass up your chance to practice law and make far, far, far, far, far more than you ever would as a newspaper reporter.

Yeah, that’s the moral of the story.

Vincent Price documentary on TCM captures the day he came to my hometown, Muncie

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Yesterday, I was watching the new documentary “Vincent Price: What Keeps Us Alive,” which I had DVRd from TCM’s premiere of the program Friday evening, and found it quite good. I’ve always liked Price and if you search for his name here on this site you’ll find posts about when I met him at an airport in the early 1980s and when I met his kind and generous daughter, Victoria Price, this summer here in Knoxville.

But as I was watching the documentary, I was startled to see some B-roll footage of Price talking to a large group of people and the caption read, “Vincent Price visits Ball State Teachers College 1963.”

If I’d ever known Price had visited my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, I’d forgotten that fact.

I was a pre-schooler at the time of his visit and was a few years away from becoming the huge fan of horror movies that I would become.

For his part, Price was in another of his career high points. He’d been acting on stage and screen since the 1930s and co-starred in “Laura” in 1944. He’d become, along with Boris Karloff, the king of American horror films in the mid-century, starring in a string of classic films like “The Tingler” and “House on Haunted Hill” in 1959.

His film roles in the 1960s brought him another kind of fame as he played the lead in a string of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for director/producer Roger Corman and American International Pictures. Right before his Muncie visit the latest of those films, “The Raven” had been released and more films now regarded as classics were to come.

Price was in the midst of something else in 1963. He was promoting the democratization of art as part of a promotion by huge retailer Sears to encourage people to buy prints of works of art by great artists. As part of that promotion, Price appeared in hundreds of cities and towns, showcasing the art prints available at Sears and giving talks at local colleges and universities.

Among those was Ball State Teachers College in Muncie, where the footage used in the documentary was captured. The school was renamed Ball State University in 1965.

I was curious how the local newspapers covered Price’s appearance. It wasn’t that long before the aging newspaper editors, out of touch with popular culture, would question the need to put the 1980 assassination of John Lennon, for example, on page one.

But Price had the right mixture of old Hollywood and art appreciation to convince the editors to cover his March 6, 1963 appearance.

Both the Muncie Star and the Muncie Evening Press ran announcements of his appearance in advance and covered him at receptions with the city’s leading industrialists and philanthropists like various Ball and Kitselman family members.

I’m most proud of coverage by Roy Bigger of the Muncie Evening Press, who wrote a page one story for March 7 about Price’s talk to an “overflow audience” at a Ball State convocation in which he talked about art and the public’s right to know, understand, appreciate and own art. That’s where Sears’ art collection offerings came in, of course. He talked about writers like Tennessee Williams and artists like James Whistler.

About 500 people had to be turned away from the convocation in Ball State’s Assembly Hall, Bigger reported.

So cool to discover, even 60 years after the fact, the meeting of my hometown and one of my favorite film actors.

Happy Halloween! To celebrate, watch a scary movie and the new SCTV documentary

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Around these parts, we love Halloween. It’s long been my favorite holiday, since I was a kid and – because we couldn’t afford to buy one of those awful plastic tunics – I made my own costume by painting a beard on my face with watercolor paint and completing my outfit with an old shirt or hoodie.

If you look to your right on this screen under the heading “what the what,” you’ll find a link to a lot of Halloween posts on this site, going back most of the way to the origin of this site in the early 2010s. You’ll find posts about vintage and recent Halloween costumes and decor as well as Halloween movies to watch.

I have to note, however, a subject that makes me feel equally childlike: SCTV, also known as Second City Television.

With the loss of Catherine O’Hara and Joe Flaherty, two SCTV mainstays, and the aging status of most of the rest of the cast, who appeared on stage for years before landing Second City and SCTV television shows beginning in 1976, I’m really glad we’re in the golden age of documentaries about “SCTV” and its stars. There are good reminiscences of John Candy available and the documentary of the still-very-much-with-us Martin Short’s life, “Marty: Life is Short,” debuted just a few months ago, although I guarantee you’ll get teary before the end credits roll.

Still to come to home video this fall is “You Had to Be There,” the 2025 documentary about the 1972 stage production of “Godspell” starring Victor Garber and many of the geniuses of SCTV.

The Martin Short and “Godspell” docs could serve as bookends for “SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of,” which debuted on Netflix last night, I believe. (That’s when I saw it, anyway, and I watched it the minute I could.)

With interviews with O’Hara and Short and Dave Thomas and Eugene Levy and many others, including SCTV fans like Conan O’Brien, the SCTV doc looks back fondly on the show and the cast but doesn’t avoid touching on controversies like the divide among cast members when Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis “took off” – pun intended – with their McKenzie Brothers characters from the Great White North and won not only a comedy album but a movie, “Strange Brew,” released in 1983 and starring Thomas and Moranis and Max von Sydow, if you can believe it.

The SCTV doc made me holler with delight several times as it presented clips from not only Count Floyd’s “Monster Chiller Horror Theater” – featuring Flaherty as the horror film host who also doubles as the station’s news anchor, Candy as horror movie mad scientist Doctor Tongue and Eugene Levy as Woody Tobias Jr., also known as the hunchback henchman – but lesser-remembered bits like “Play It Again, Bob,” with Woody Allen (Moranis) making a movie about Bob Hope (Thomas). The impersonations are the best I’ve ever seen.

The six seasons of “SCTV,” including the NBC late-night seasons, are available on streaming services and online and if you’re an SCTV fan you’ll enjoy a lot of it. The show could get lost in itself at times, but that was the fun of it: the conceit of SCTV being the programming of a basic cable channel called SCTV, the cast and writers could parody every type of TV show, movie and commercial. They built a show around these parodies but made us believe that this was the worst TV station in the world, run by lunatics and egomaniacs.

Definitely enjoy a good fun scary movie this Halloween – or anytime – but you should seek out “SCTV” episodes and the documentaries I cite here.

‘Nobody knows anything’ – and for writers, that’s both good and bad, as short stories are king and money talks

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That chart there? That’s the definitions that the writing and industry newsletter Publishers Marketplace uses to gauge its reporting on the latest sales of manuscripts to publishing houses. PM reminds us once a week the guidelines for when it refers to a “nice deal” or a significant or major one.

So to disprove writer William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” I quote in the headline – a simplification of Goldman’s sentiments in his 1983 memoir ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE – we know two things: Publishers Marketplace means it when they say a major deal is a major deal and if you ever see my name reported next to the phrase “major deal,” I can tell you that’s the last time you will hear from me other than occasional dispatches from my fortified writing tower.

The talk of the day in writing circles is a New York Times story titled, “Writers are making millions selling short stories to Hollywood,” and the story is, in effect, a trend story about how a few writers have had short stories optioned by producers for movies and TV adaptation – and in some cases, the stories haven’t even been published yet.

(I’m not going to link to the story, because my disgust with how the Times has sold its soul to the worst elements of our political life continues, but you can find a gift link to it, I’m sure, on social media. That’s what I did. Be aware that if you want to read the story, you’ll have to jump through a bunch of hoops, including giving the NYT your email address.)

This is the subhead of the NYT story and it really tells you everything you need to know: Publishers generally don’t race to acquire story collections these days, but studios appear eager to shell out for unpublished short works. They give a few examples.

It reminds me of this story I did a few weeks ago for CrimeReads: 7 crime writers talk about novels and short stories and what they love writing most

I’ll link to my CrimeReads piece at the end of this post.

The other piece that writers are talking about today is a GQ article, Will Books Survive? 34 Insiders, Experts, and Icons on the State of Literature in an Age of Uncertainty.

The article is strong from the start:

Something in the literary world isn’t adding up. On the surface, the numbers aren’t looking good. If you’re an American, there’s a roughly 38% chance you’ll read a novel or short story this year. If you’re an American man, that number slips to 28%. By most metrics, it’s a hard time for literature.

And yet.

There’s an undeniable energy bubbling up in New York, Los Angeles, London, and elsewhere. Readings are “sexy” now, supposedly, and a medley of exciting new publications have popped up, both online and in print. Ben Lerner and Emma Cline returned this year, and we’ve been graced with the strongest crop of debut novels in recent memory, from Caro Claire Burke’s culture-conquering Yesteryear to the jagged edges of Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs to the vibrant energy of Sufiyaan Salam’s Wimmy Road Boyz. People spent the summer reading The Odyssey and crashing The London Review of Books website to read discourse about The Odyssey. So it can’t be all bad, right?

It’s a lengthy State of Books 2026 and worth reading. Here’s a link.

Remember I said the other day that everybody is picking their best books of the year? Here’s the Publishers Weekly list.

My CrimeReads story talking to seven crime writers about what they prefer, novels or short stories:

7 crime writers talk about novels and short stories and what they love writing most

It’s a Friday free-for-all i.e. emptying out my inbox

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It’s Friday – it is Friday, right? – and let’s escape the ugly realities of the real world by sharing some quick-hit news reports about books and publishing, shall we?

As Carl Kolchak would say …

Item: To paraphrase the old joke, I don’t get Kindle Unlimited here. I see it, but I don’t get it. (Sad trombone sound.) Writer friends are on it and another writer friend explained to me that it works by offering some small amount of renumeration for each page of a book read. So in the oddest move since the then-executives of HBO renamed the streaming arm of HBO as Max before changing it back to HBO Max, Amazon in its very puzzling and unlikely decision has renamed Kindle Unlimited as KindlePlus, or Kindle+. No we don’t know why.

Item: Everybody is naming their best books of the year. Even though it’s still October. And yes, I know that all the major releases between now and December 31 are already in the hands of said tastemakers and arbiters of the best of the year. One reason might be that they want to get people prepared to buy books for the holiday season. Maybe the idea is to find ten books that have as much heat about them as Marlon James’ THE DISAPPEARERS.

Item: Eddie Muller, knowledge-laden host of the indispensable Noir Alley on the indispensable TCM, has scored a three-book deal, Publisher’s Marketplace reports. Muller, who has previously authored books, has a contract with Running Press (working with Turner Classic Movies) to publish three crime novels, THE DISTANCE, SHADOW BOXER and BIG LEFT HOOK. I have no qualms with Muller getting this contract, but it emphasizes that celebrity and a national platform are not drawbacks to getting books published.

Item: Here’s a link to an exhaustive survey about the business of indie writing and publishing by William Duryea and his site Beyond Heat Death. It’s long and I haven’t read it yet but I’ve already bookmarked it and I’m ready for some insights.

Item: Here’s another link, this one to a piece on literary scams and why writers are perfect targets. You might remember that I wrote recently about how I – like most writers online – was targeted by a scammer. Mine was pretending to be author Freida McFadden.

Item: Romantasy. Some writers and readers love it. Others loathe it. Here’s a Goodreads wrapup of the genre right now.

Finally, here’s a new little note that I’m going to include with each of these posts, noting who the hell I am. I’m including it because readership on this page is steadily increasing and I figure it doesn’t hurt to explain who you’re reading.

Universal Monsters Channel and other FAST channels lurk in your cable TV hinterlands, and they’re weird

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They’re out there. They’re lurking in your TV lineup.

And they’re weird.

I’m talking not just about the Universal Monsters Channel, but other odd and occasionally cool channels in the 1,000-something range on your cable television lineup. Maybe 10,000-something.

Somewhere up there in the channel range you can’t easily just stumble across, and also on services like Roku, apparently, are channel offerings like the Universal Monsters Channel, which true to its name offers 24/7 showings of classic Universal horror films of the 1930s-1950s like “Bride of Frankenstein” and the Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy as well as newer films from Universal.

But it’s not just Universal monsters that are hiding in there, waiting to be stumbled upon. There’s a channel that offers nothing but Universal mainstream movies, channels that are devoted to TV series like “Xena,” “Andromeda,” “The Virginian,” “Las Vegas” … there’s a lot and a lot of it is pretty obscure.

The oddest thing about these channels is how they’re set up. You can’t click a channel on at, say, 10 p.m. to watch “Frankenstein” or your favorite episode of “Xena.”

And you can’t set your DVR to record any of the movies or shows.

The FAST – which stands for Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television – channels don’t care about your schedule or your pathetic “time-shifting” goals. If you want to see “Revenge of the Creature” and it’s on at 2 in the morning, by god, you set your alarm and get up and watch it through bleary eyes.

The movies and shows are advertising supported but at least on my cable lineup they don’t seem to have many ads. So you might see a 30-second spot for a coffeemaker, for example, followed by 90 seconds of this:

Yes, a countdown until the movie or show resumes.

These channels are odd. They’re more like old-timey television, in the days before you could record and time-shift to watch a show later. Although you can’t count on anything starting on the hour or half hour, because the programming doesn’t have breaks full of commercials or previews. One movie ends and the next begins.

In other words, don’t count on starting your binge of any of these shows from the beginning on a FAST channel.

Variety reported a while back that nearly 2,000 of these FAST channels are available.

In March 2025, Deadline reported that Universal had launched 40 FAST channels dedicated to the SNL vault, “Little House on the Prairie,” “Murder She Wrote” and other programs. And yes, a lot of the programming is available elsewhere on streaming.

But only with FAST channels could you turn on your TV on a random Tuesday and still be seeing Frankenstein’s monster or Nellie Oleson a week later. (Yes, I had to look up the spelling.)

It’s all out there. In a chaotic but totally locked-in manner. And it’s probably hidden in the far reaches of your cable dial.

Bouchercon in Canada, eh? Have fun, be safe and take off, you hosers!

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Tomorrow, October 21, is the official start of this year’s Bouchercon, the longtime world convention of crime and mystery writers and readers, this year in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

(And I hope you recognize the “take off you hosers” reference in the headline to Bob and Doug McKenzie, the Canadian brothers that Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas created for SCTV a million years ago.)

I’m not at Bcon this year but quite a few friends are up there, pre-gaming for the festivities and seeing the sights, including some of the best scenery in the world.

As a veteran of the two most recent Bcons, in Nashville and New Orleans, I’d offer some helpful tips if you’re attending, but I’m sure anybody who’s there or soon will be won’t see this until after they’re home – if they ever see it at all.

So maybe just some observations, based on my own experiences:

The facility can have a huge impact on your enjoyment. The hotel and conference rooms in New Orleans in 2025 were just about ideal, and that was especially welcome after the awful venue at the Opryland resort and conference center in Nashville in 2024. The Nashville site was, at more than 3 million square feet, way too big. It was hard to run into other writers and readers in that behemoth, even around the hospitality area and book marketplace. If you were seeking coffee, you had a slightly better chance of finding your people.

Speaking of which – your people, not your coffee – you’ll find yourself staring at people’s name tags if you have face blindness or don’t recognize people easily from real life or social media. Everybody does this awkward scoping out of credentials. That fact doesn’t make it any less awkward, but at least people understand why you’re peering at their midsection before you look up at their face.

And please, by all means, find your people, even if they only become your people during the course of the hunt for coffee, bull sessions in the bar and quick conversations between panels.

After the first day of Bcon in Nashville, I was ready to go home. I wanted to leave first thing Thursday morning. I was miserable. I was unable to connect with anyone and I wanted to make like a tree and get out of there.

I couldn’t, though, because I was on a Friday afternoon panel.

Luckily, author and all-around great person Shelley Kubitz, who I kinda knew from Mystery Writers of America Midwest, invited me to hang out with people and through Shelley I met more people.

That’s my biggest piece of advice: Find your people.

Enjoy the panels. It’s so cool to hear people talk about writing and the industry and, in my standard once-a-year panel service, I’ve made connections that continued long after everyone went home.

Attend the annual membership meeting and vote! One of the best things about Bcon is that by virtue of attending, you’re part of the Bouchercon general membership and you can vote on issues to be decided by the general membership. For example: We voted to approve Indianapolis as a future Bouchercon site. Making your voice heard and your vote count is not only applicable in the real world.

And the books! Around the edges of meeting old and new friends, enjoying the panels, making connections and being a tourist in that year’s city, you get exposed to hundreds of books written by Bouchercon authors and the best crime, thriller and mystery writers in the world. Traditionally, Bcon attendees get tickets to pick out a handful of books to keep, but there are so many great books for sale in the Bcon bookstore.

And … if you have your own book, the thrill of seeing it in the Bcon bookstore is something I’ll never forget.

My first novel, THAT OCTOBER, had been out for a few months by the time of the 2025 Bcon and I’d made arrangements with that year’s bookseller to have if offered for sale in the Bcon bookstore. My novels have since been picked up by a few brick-and-mortar bookstores – and they’re available online, of course – but seeing it displayed alongside other authors, including the top talents in the business, is an unforgettable thrill for me

So I hope all you folks, writers and readers, enjoy Bouchercon 2026 in Calgary this week and get home safely. I’ll have FOMO big time for not being there. If the world is still turning, I hope to go to Bcon in Washington DC in 2027 and Indianapolis in 2028.

And if I see you staring at my front, I’ll probably assume I’m wearing part of my lunch on my shirt until I remember you’re just trying to figure out my name. Don’t worry, I’ll be doing the same.

Ten years of true crime books! It’s the anniversary of our book WICKED MUNCIE

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Ten years has flown by.

Ten years (and two days) ago, History Press published our first true crime book, WICKED MUNCIE.

My longtime writing collaborator Douglas Walker and I had, in 2015, finished working on long articles detailing the history of our town, Muncie, Indiana, for The Star Press newspaper to mark the city’s 150th anniversary. I’d written about 150 years of facets of the city like the local hospital and local industry and he’d written an article that touched on the city’s long history of crime and murder. (I say touched on because there’s too much crime to fit in one article.)

Walker got a cold call from an editor at History Press, based in South Carolina, who asked him to consider turning the article into a book. History Press was and still is a publisher of books detailing cities and regions’ histories, including colorful characters, businesses and industry and crime and they wanted a history of Muncie crime, which is as colorful as it is gruesome. He asked me to collaborate with him.

Because we’d been newspaper reporters for decades, we knew what kinds of stories we needed to tell, from infamous people to sensational murders to crimes that rocked the community.

We contracted with History Press and, in all of our spare time away from covering crime, corruption and government for the newspaper, wrote WICKED MUNCIE. The book was published on October 17, 2016.

The title, by the way, was mandated by History Press. They had a whole series of “WICKED” books, spotlighting cities all over the country.

We wrote three followups for History Press, MUNCIE MURDER AND MAYHEM in 2018, THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS in 2021 and COLD CASE MUNCIE in 2023. The later was named after a series of articles about unsolved murders we’d written for the newspaper.

The books are truly self-produced works; we did all our own research, often working from clipped and yellowed articles in files in the newspaper’s library. We begged and borrowed photos to illustrate the book and dropboxed the photos to our editors at History Press to meet their deadlines.

The books were considerable work, in no aspect more than in finding the illustrations. Muncie newspapers had not kept prints or negatives of photos over 150 years, so we had to make do with what we could find.

With the History Press books, it was not uncommon for me to dropbox 120 or more photos to find a third or half that number that would meet History Press’ technical requirements.

Producing four true crime books focusing on the same city and county was a natural – Muncie was and is a hotbed of crime and corruption; we counted about three dozen unsolved murders as we were writing a Cold Case series of articles – but a lot of work.

As I’ve noted here, the true crime books still sell and sell well for History Press and booksellers like Muncie stores including the Orchard Shop and Aw Yeah Comics and sell well online, everywhere from Amazon to Walmart.

I’m inclined to urge people to buy their copies from bookshop dot org because they contribute to indie booksellers like Ink Drinkers Anonymous in Muncie.

Here’s the link to my books on bookshop, including the four true crime books:

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Keith+Roysdon

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