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Robert W. Walker is a graduate of Chicago’s Wells High Academy, Northwestern University, and the NU’s Graduate Masters Program in English Education and the author of over 100 fictional works, and an untold number of how to write articles such as his Dead on Writing ‘class’ in a book. Rob has taught writing in all its permutations (“All writing is creative writing but not all writing sings,” he says.) from composition and developmental to a study of the literary masters to creative and advanced creative writing. His first novel was one only an arrogant youth could have conceived — a sequel to Huckleberry Finn (now published as Daniel & The Wrongway Railroad via Amazon Kindle Publishing/Instinct Ink Books. Rob’s first suspense-techno-thriller-sf-mystery came in 1979, after college, a novel that won no awards but filled Chicago book shelves for a month. His first ‘commercial’ title SUB-ZERO.
Just a southern boy.
While born in Corinth, Mississippi, I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, so I was witness to crime at an early age. I began a love affair with libraries and books as early as 4th grade, researching information on a footnote in our social studies book on the Salem Witch episode. At age 12-13, I began writing as most do, to gain some control on the chaos of life. I was drawn to stories and films having to do with the unusual, the arcane, the bizarre and curious; from Ripley’s Believe it or Not to Twilight Zone to Science Fiction Theatre (that dates me) and the highly entertaining ONE STEP BEYOND. A wide-eyed kid reacting to all strange and wonderful stories be via TV or books. I found myself struggling with an attempt to write a historical fiction of the coming-of-age variety, which I so loved — Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, the Prince and the Pauper, et al.
My greatest influences have been too many to list, but I’ll give you the top of the list:
Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Alexander Dumas, Martin Cruz Smith, Thomas Thompson, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and more recently Patricia Cornwell, the person who finally unmasked Jack the Ripper (kudos to her!). I have recently exchanged long novel form for the novella form, but like my novels that tend to become series titles like my long-running Instinct series (17 titles) and PSI Blue (3 titles), my novellas, to my surprise, have become novella series such as Chicaghosts and Blue Vegas. I attribute my prolific number of books (0ver 105) to perseverance, yes, but also to the nature of the series framework—working with a certain, familiar hemione or hero and their ensemble of sidekicks, since getting to know them so well as to foresee their steps, language, thoughts—what they say and do, thusly who they are and how they will react to all the heck I put them through. Since my first novel was a ‘sequel’ to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I’ve been doing sequential novels ever since, although I do have my standalones here and there.
