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:
